pixelmech

If you look at the top of my robot head in my avatar, that's a basketball type closure. It works well IF you can get all the CPs in the right place, it can be tricky though so be as precise as you can. If you do it right it can look real nice.

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LOL that's good! You should work on it to tweak it to be really smooth, it would be good practice.

Holy cow what rock have you been hiding under! Wonderful stuff, look forward to seeing more.

itsjustme == David Simmons who I referenced in my post.

Welcome, let me know how it goes!

Ok, these are the exact questions I had when I started so I'm glad to answer them! Approach: I essentially animated in a "straight ahead" fashion - but with blocking. What do I mean by that? Well, I had some idea of what I wanted to happen (but no storyboards or anything). I set up the scene. Put the orange guy on the hill, posed him. Put the red guy off the hill - posed him in a "start walk" pose. At that point I roughed out the walk - just the basic keys - to get him to the top of the hill. Then I went back and tweaked it. Then I figured out the rest of what orange was going to do. Same thing, did the basic walk/moves then went back and tweaked. So it wasn't planned out where I did moving holds on keyframes at determined places corresponding to a storyboard - but I did block things out in a straight ahead manner. (I hope that was not confusing). I other words, I didn't try to put all the details of the walk in right away. I got down the basic action first. There were many obvious mistakes and problems in that action, but of course I went back and reworked all those things. This straight ahead manner is essentially thought to be more free flowing and less planned. You can take the different approach and use moving holds and put all the poses for the key parts in first, too. I didn't have enough planned out for that, and I didn't want to animate that scene that way anyway. These two methods are well discussed in Keith Lango's two excellent articles: http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/popThru.html http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/old/popThru/polish.html Both are definitely required reading! Ok that's the long explanation - the short of it is this: Yes, I placed him in a start position, and began animating. That's it. Now, as for the model bone - don't worry about it. I don't know what rig you are using but it should not matter. You are going to go into bones mode in order to animate him. It will look like you are in an action window - but in the chor instead - get it? You won't see the model bone then. Forget about a path - don't use one. You aren't contraining a walk cycle to a path - you are just animating him. Make him walk where you want to. Adjusting timing: The two ways you can adjust timing are in the dope sheet and in the curves/graph editor. I've not had a whole lot of luck using the dope sheet - but Jeff Lew makes it look simple. It helps to be organized (which I was not at the start!) BTW, Highly recommend Jeff Lew's DVD - it's a must have, and it got me going on my mini movie. http://www.jefflew.com/ Anyway, I did all my timing adjusting in the graph editor by moving keyframes forward and back. I tried not to do too much of this because I am not very good at it - but it works. You just have to make sure you get the right bones - or groups of bones. I suppose you can adjust walk cycle timing too. Again, I had a real hard time with it - maybe I just don't think that way. Also with a walk cycle, you have to carefully plan out where his last step would be, for example, if you want him to stop. If you are straight ahead animating - you just walk him up and stop him I didn't want to mess with that. Plus I want to become an animator not a tool user . When you watch Jeff Lew animate, he didn't use any cycles, he just put the thing together. And again, I think you get a stiffness/symmetry with a cycle you don't want. I think you can adjust that in the chor - but if you are doing that, why not take the extra few minutes and just outright build it? I could be wrong on a lot of this - I am still very new. But that was my thought process and how I did it. Please don't hesistate to ask more questions or challenge any of this - again, I'm new! Hope it helps and let us know how it goes! One last thing - there is NOTHING like just plunging in and doing it. The experience for me has been invaluable. So many things I could not grasp I was able to finally get by just working through them. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut for this! To be an animator you must animate. I know, it sounds crazy. Then when you get stuck, come and ask questions. You'll be amazed at how much you learn, and AM is very 'animator friendly' - once you start getting familair with it - it does not get in your way at all, which is great. Tom

Well, this went over like the proverbial 'led zeppelin'! Nobody has any thoughts on the mouth construction? At any rate, I'll try and continue it myself and see where I get with it. If anyone wants to help/critique, feel free.

WOW - the detail is awesome. Great scene and great model! I must now go look at my own robot and feel shame

That's a good start to a walk. Seems like you did a cycle and placed him on a path. He's got some foot slippage. I for one could NEVER solve that using the walk cycle! I'm not saying walk cycles are bad - but I'd encourage you to pop him direct in the chor window and just animate him walking. It will be harder, you will learn a LOT more and you will get a much less stiff/symmetrical look. Then you can tweak a lot more too - add follow through, a hitch in his giddy-up at one spot - whatever - to really sell the walk. Just my .02 - nice job and love the model. Tom

Here's a pic of the first mask. I'll be interested to see if this idea works!

So, I had this idea - it may crash and burn... but here it goes. I need to learn how to model and rig a mouth - and learn it well. I think I'm not the only one. I've been wowed by Victor's mouth rig, and David Simmons "Bertram's Face Rig". Trouble is there are no tuts out there to explain them. David has posted his files and some explanation but for a n00b like me - it's not enough - and I'm still not sure how to well design the MOUTH first (modeling wise) to get rigged well. So I figured I'd make kind of a generic 'mask' face. I'd post it here - we can all iterate the model until we feel it's well done enough. Then I'll start trying to implement one of these boned mouth rigs. All along you can follow along, download the projects/models and (hopefully) help the process along. The idea is when it's done, it's a fully operational mouth rig that anyone can use - and they can reference this very thread and see the process of how it has been built - almost like built in documentation/tutorial. It may not be as complex or intricate as Victor's/David's - but it will be something useful...hopefully. So here it goes - my first attempt at the model mask - attached. (NOTE: It's not meant to be a stunning model - obviously - but functional for a rig.) It needs some help My main question at this point is - is the mouth constructed right? I'm not sure. I've look at lots of models as a reference and I'm still not sure. Feel free to grab it, modify it and post back. mouth_man.mdl

I'm going to give this rig a shot on a basic sphere head with a mouth. I've totally been avoiding the mouth area and speech - so much that my mini movie characters have NO mouths! Might as well learn to do it right. Me wonders if Victor has updated this rig at all....

Great model The movements themselves seem very well thought out. The timing of them is very odd though - there are subtle speed changes and it as a whole seems slow. And yet as I said the movements themselves - what he does with his body - seam dead on. If you meant the speed the be that way then maybe I missed that

Nothing wrong with that Dan - some good modeling too. The tip of the airplane dips into the table. The lighting needs work, but that is literally the toughest thing to do. Read up on some stuff in the radiosity forum.

Hey Gregg - that is really excellent work on what sounds like a short timeframe. I can tell you it's a good teaching aid, without sound or medical knowledge I understand what you are trying to get across. Certainly you might want to do some UI testing and refining but it's a great start. Certainly a final product would be cleaner but you've done a great job. Keep us abreast of your progress!

I've learned so much in the past months, I think I'll try and put something simple together about modeling - it may be a week or so but I promise I will do it - Simple Modeling I or something...

If you aren't - you should be! See my sig

Great models! I love the plane and the bird.

Looks great! Wow you really tied this up quickly. I love the underwater shot. I don't personally see anything wrong with your materials. I will say the water on the top shot, you can see the hexagons pretty clearly as a pattern, but that isn't your material. Great job. I'm anxious too see what you are going to tackle next!

The numbers have actually changed slightly. To be honest there wasn't much substance behind them other than design elements Although they do have some semblance of rank. The red guy is obviously some kind of "sarge" to the orange guy, and treats him poorly. You might notice that Red has a kind of 'tally' on his side.... Tensile strength..good one!

Ok, that's darn right freaky! Looks good Ken!

Wow you guys, thanks a lot! I honestly can't tell you how much the compliments mean to me. Quite frankly, without all the help from everyone here, I could not have gotten it to where it is now - so kudos to a great community. Funny you mention about a series, the robot was built for something else, and I think I will be either tweaking it or remaking it (it is not modelled well for rigging), and then re-rigging it to maybe work for that future project. I feel like I have a long way to go - and I still see areas I'd like to wipe and redo But your comments make me feel a lot better about it. I've learned so much doing this, I'm anxious to get going on another project after this is done. I'm actually rendering out targa sequences for the final project right now. Only through about 5 seconds though!! Quick tip for anyone doing a movie no matter how long/short: QuickTime Pro will open up images sequences and make the movie for you (I've not been able to do it with A:M) - it's a good way to go. Render targa sequences as big as you can - then you can make and compress as many movies as you want from that sequence, in as many sizes and compressions and you never have to re-render!

Here's a little light test - single frame only. Much thanks to Dearmad who helped me switch to a 3 light setup instead of the skylight which was going to take too long to render. This may be my last post here - wanna save the rest for the final piece I think. (Assuming I can wait that long! )

I think the dance looks excellent.