Geophizz

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This is a WIP that I'm doing for the 11 Second Club. It's far from finished, but I thought that I was pretty much done up to frame 120, but it's getting hammered over there and I'm not sure where to start fixing. http://www.vimeo.com/1152629 Any suggestions would be welcome.

As far as I can tell, the PWS and the Timeline are nearly identical, with the PWS being a bit more powerful because it can almost do all the functions of the property window too. Is there something unique about the timeline that I'm missing?

Are you saying that if I hide the project workspace from the view menu it won't turn off the channel editor? If so that would account for the lack of change in the fps. I never thought about hiding it, even though I knew that it caused slowdowns. Going into choreography mode instead of skeletal mode and deselecting all usually did the trick for me, but not in this case. I usually use the project workspace with the channel editor showing across the bottom of the screen. I usually have the timeline turned off altogether because with the channel editor I find it redundant. I think that Hash may have done some work on it because I loaded an old project in v15 that I had trouble with v13/14, and I can consistently get 20-30 fps (and at one point got 40!) from it now. In V13/14 I could only manage 10.

I'd done a similar thing, by going into choreography mode and deselecting all so there were no tracks in the timeline, it was the only way that I could even get the paltry fps that I got. I just tried to run it with the window closed completely, and there was no effect on the playback. The best results that I've gotten come from turning off all of the models in the chor except the one that I'm working with. That way I can get about 14fps on the PC and about 10 on the Mac. It also appears that there is no difference between using low detail shading or wireframe. Mark

Actually my P4 is significantly faster than my Core Duo at most things, because unless the software can take advantage of the multiple cores, you are essentially running them on a P3. Agreed about Sam and the patches. The extra control over the facial expressions are nice though. Mark

Thanks for the suggestions. I've tried them all, without much luck until I turned off the two models that I wasn't actively working on. I put the one that I was working on in wireframe bounding box mode at the lowest possible resolution, with back facing poly's off. With that I was able to consistently get 8-9 fps. Ken I looked to switch to OpenGL, but I was already there, so I switched to DirectX (Yuck). That gave me an extra 3-4 fps, so al in all, I'm up to 12-14fps. I even tried setting threads in the preferences, but thn all I got was a rig moving independently of the rest of the model at about 7 fps. Looking at the wireframes, I noticed that the Sam models have very high patch counts compared to the other models that I've used, plus, even if I have a camera view with only one model in the shot, it is still affected by the other models in the choreography. Here's the WIP, so that you can see the simplicity of the first shot and the complexity of the second: http://www.vimeo.com/1071050 Mark

I'm working on an entry for the 11 Second Club, which has three Squetchy Sam characters in it, plus a couple of stationary props. My problem is that the choreography is playing back so slowly that I can't get any sense of the motion or the timing without rendering out a quicktime every half hour or so. I've got relatively big iron hardware (3.0ghz P4 HT, 2GB RAM, 80gb HD running WinXP and AM14), and I usually I can get 30fps with an older rig, like the Knight or Shaggy. I know that the squetchy rig is more complex, but does it really slow things down that much? I've got version 15 on my dual core Mac, but I can't even run this choreography at all on that machine because its not even managing 1fps. More importantly, does anyone have any tricks to speed up the playback in the choreography window? I've tried turing down the details, going to wireframe, shringing the choreography window size, all to no avail. The best that I can get is about 2fps. Any help would be much appreciated. Mark

That's pretty much the same specs as my MacBook (10.4.9, 1.83ghz, 2GB RAM, 80Gb HD), so I'm not surprised that you're seeing the problem. My render speeds aren't bad either. I don't have access to a Core Duo PC, but I'd be interested to see what others are finding.

I think it's also dependent on the hardware that you're using. It seems to me to be directly related to the clock speed of the processor. I've run AM on a number of different platforms, and I've found that this problem does not exist on any Pentium 4 class computers 2.4ghz or faster. I see it on both my 1.8ghz P4 and my MacBook Pro 1.83 Core Duo, but not on my 2.6 and 3.0ghz P4 machines. Somewhere in the forum here I read a post from Martin that mentions that AM is currently only using one core on the MacBook, and that he's just starting to program multi core support for rendering.

Oh, I get it now. Thanks

The reference video thgat I'm using is at: http://www.urbanclimbermag.tv/videos/displ...mp;ObjMgrIC=699 The particular climb that I am using is about 2/3 of the way through. I'm posing a few screenshots here too. I think that the null idea is what I'm looking for, but none of the references that I have (TOAM, Tech Ref, both editions of Paries and Rogers books) show a good way to add a null to a model. Can anyone point me in the direction of a good tutorial, or post some instructions here? Thanks Mark swing.bmp

I have a choreography where the Knight character is hanging from a wall, and he needs to swing his body up over the top. I've studied videos of "urban" climbers, who climb walls, buiding etc, and what they do is swing their legs so that they can hook one leg over the top of the wall. To do that the pivot point is centered at about the neck and shoulders. No matter what I've tried, I can't get the knight to swing properly. I have the hands constrained to the wall so that they don't move during the swing. I've tried swinging the model bone in an arc, and moving the feet and hips in an arc, both to no avail. Most of the time, the hands get really screwed up, and at best, the swing doesn't look at all natural. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks Mark Stoughton

I'm working on a choreography, and I made a lot of mistakes moving the model around. Now the character is far away from the model bone, and I need to animate a long straight ahead walk (no walk cycles). I'm finding it difficult to get the character to walk smoothly. I'd like to replace the model with a new instance at the exact same point in the chor. I guess it would be like a stunt double. My current approach is to move the model bone of the original character out of the range of my camera with a hold interpolation, so the original model instantly dissapears, and replace it with the new model at the same location in the same pose with a hold interpolation. I'm planning a change is shot at the same time to try to hide the switch. I'm not sure if my method is the best. Has anyone tried this, and if so, what method did you use? Thanks Mark Stoughton

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