Aminator

Nice experiment. If you want to take it further, here are some ideas: On the first step: - anticipate, at least a little, e.g. bending the knees a bit - the upper body shouldn't be frozen - e.g. the arms might swing to our left by momentum; the hips, torso, and head should lean to adjust balance On the one-leg balance: - tilt the neck/head to keep it balanced over the foot (heads are heavy!) For most of the second half, the body is doing a slow, steady droop. It's called "floating" - unrealistic, computery-perfect motion and something we have to constantly watch for and fix.

For the purposes of this simple script, you can use a small standalone DOS Perl interpreter. I have a copy here: http://www.digins.com/pfc/perl.zip

Mostly while rendering Some more time-saving tricks I used: - the coral pieces were just cookie-cut decals on very simple, mostly-flat models. - the sea grass was a hair material on a single patch under the sea floor (which is why their bases move around a bit instead of staying rooted in one place, oh well). A couple of width keys and color keys kept the appearance from being too boring. The waving was done by setting a few keys on the four corner hair guides. - depth-of-field effects were done during compositing in Premiere

I've gotten a request for my script to split muscle poses into left and right sub-poses, as suggested by Jason Osipa in his "Stop Staring" book. The script was previously mentioned in these threads: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7595 http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4436 You'll need a Perl interpreter to run this. Basic instructions are attached, let me know if you have any problems. I've tested it with versions 10.5 and 11.1, on a PC. In theory it should work with Mac Perl as well. [i could swear I attached the zip file the first time... anyway, here it is] splitp.zip

Awesome. Nice camera placement/composition as well. That's where the paintings were stolen from, right?

Thanks. I had a simple cartoon fish model (the one I used for the winning Q2 '03 Hash animation contest entry) and used Phil Leavens clever 3D rotoscope idea http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12790 to rework that over the 3ds polygon models I received. Then I found hi-res textures on the net, and made good use of the UV editing feature to line those up.

He said I had "full creative control", although he did vote for the realistic approach (if I had more time, I would have sold him on a second fish lip-syncing the narration). At one point I had them turning around swimming back to safe water, but it didn't fit the narration. Also thought about having an "angel" swim away from the lifeless body. In the end I just added a little fade away to soften the effect. I may try animating specularity on the eye as they die too. The project is for the Virginia Aquarium and Marine Science Center. Don't know when it opens, probably early April. I cheated. There are only 3 lights: a backlight sun, a seafloor bouncelight sun, and a primary klieg. The primary is the only one casting shadows. I rendered a grayscale noise material, applied it as a transparency decal on a square patch, and animated the patch moving around between the light and the scene. For the freshwater scene, there are two instances of this "caustic gobo" moving around to make the caustics more active and random. Another neat trick was to use "orient like" with lag to animate the flapping tails and fins - I only had to animate one bone to get a nice whip action on the fins. And I used a repeated action for the longer swimming sections, with the background rendered in a separate layer.

Stunning!

I just completed a job to produce two one-minute animations about water salinity, osmosis, and fish, for a museum kiosk. I was given the soundtrack, 3ds models of a fresh and saltwater fish, and 10 days to design, model, animate, render (at 1024x768), add close-caption text, and composite the animations. I'm satisfied with the results (the client is thrilled), considering the time limitation (with one person, one computer). I used just about everything in A:M's box of tricks to pull it off. Low-res renders can be seen here (4MB Sor3 QT): http://www.digins.com/jack/s2f_small.mov http://www.digins.com/jack/f2s_small.mov Here is one of the 2D animatics I threw together very quickly to plan out the animation (with some more amusing ideas that were discarded for more realism): http://www.digins.com/jack/salt2fresh_2d.mov

And his splines...

And now the chicken's friend:

Yeah, I'll probably change that. Anyone have tips on "feathery" textures? (I tried a few short-hair experiments, nothing looking very good yet...) I'll probably skip that for this guy, unless it gives me grief animating. Sure thing - I'll contact you privately. You're right. I copy/pasted them from a different model, and they don't quite fit in yet. I'm not sure if I want to try and integrate them into the head better or what. Thanks, folks.

Here's the "chicken-wire" spline mesh.

Hi, everyone. I'd really like critiques on this new model for my next short. I'm looking for a somewhat cartoony and simple look suitable for some loose, squashy-stretchy animation. Comments about improving appeal or style would be especially appreciated. I'll probably do some texturing and surface tweaking, but not a whole lot. Yeah, I know... wireframe. Comin' up next. Thanks!

Works great for me (a little grunge on the wall it wouldn't hurt). Something you might experiment with, if you're not already doing it, is to simulate a thick glossy clear-coat on the body. It's done as you might expect - copy the geometry, scale it up slightly, and set it nearly transparent with high specularity and maybe some reflectivity. Similar to adding a cornea to an eyeball.

Yup, that tightens the mood. Another idea, try rolling the camera off-level - gives even more of an "unsettled" feeling, perhaps the cameraman is in a hurry and worried about his own life as well

Dramatic and stylish as usual! Ideas: fog for more depth, motion blur?

Absolutely beautiful, thanks for posting! Hmm, did you lose a grommet on the machine head for the bottom string? (Yes, I studied it that closely

Excellent short! Good thing for me that you didn't have it done in time for the A:M contest ;-)

Super job! There's something slightly off in the timing/balance of the rider. I think the lean of the bike should happen at the same time as the body shift side to side, in the opposite direction. That's really nitpicking, though - it's pretty believable as is.

Nice job! A few suggestions: - her eyes often seem to be diverging. Consider using constraints to have them either orient the same, or both aim at the same point. - her right hand doesn't hold the pencil convincingly - too far up and hand too open. - it would be a lot harder to animate, but when I draw something like a horse I don't generally trace around a perfect outline. I tend to quickly sketch out shapes and then refine them...

Great job on the modeling! > 1. There's light shine-through into the mouth/head. Check that your light is set to cast shadows. If you're using Zbuffer shadows, it may still illuminate the inside; ray-traced shadows should be accurate. Experiment with simple internal geometry to work around Zbuffer shadow limitations (they render faster and often look nicer). > 2. If I hit the "render to file" and try to save a targa file it renders a totally black frame. Any chance you have "shadows only" set in render buffer options?

Groovy stuff! (or his feet...) Probably because of how it's hitting object like the floor and wall. You might try adding some volumetrics, or at least glow, to get him lighting up the empty space in the room.

As Justin the wise says, you want to break out the *sounds* and animate them. There's a spiffy shareware tool called Magpie that makes this easier. http://www.thirdwishsoftware.com/magpie.html

Cool! When we first see the character, his expression is kind of blank. Also his head rotation is somewhat linear, you might try arcing it more (e.g. tilting downward during the rotation). On the lip sync, be careful to match the *sound* rather than the *text*. In particular, he opens wide at "they" [say I'm mad] - but that word is almost inaudible, so the mouth should barely open. And it doesn't need to close fully between each word. Looking forward to seeing what happens next!