mouseman

Wikified.

Lots of cool stuff, but the camera movement was quite decent. Realistic (or at least believable) speed, and not too jerky.

Audi R8 head-to-head! *laugh* It's looking really good. I love watching great splineage in progress.

The music and sound go really well with the visuals! Quite interesting overall.

Fun stuff so far!

Looking fabulous, as always. Robcat mentioned the dark areas ... I was wondering what it would be like if the sun took a slightly different path. Now it goes from front right and sets behind left. What if it started front slightly left and ended up behind slightly right? Then some of the places that Robcat pointed out that are in dark would be brighter, you could get a little bit (but not too much) shadow from the building on the right for a good shadow effect. What do you think? (I'm not meaning to give you more work, just if you want to try something out.)

Great model! You'll be able to do a lot with him!

Great stuff. Better and better all the time.

I love this thread. I hope you are still working on it in stealth, Nancy. It's really good.

Improvements in the face. Beginnings of the ear. Animated GIF of progress below; click on it to see the animation. (Anyone know what the largest size is for an image attachment in the forums not to have to resize?)

I did something similar using the patch image feature (but should work similarly with decals). Not sure which part didn't work for you. I was using a .mov to test it out, and it was crashing while reading in the video after I selected it. I didn't have time at that moment to try out other options, such as an image sequence or other videos. I'll have to try again to see what was causing the problem.

Hi, Jadeye, It depends on how you want to add them. 1. Rotoscope method One way is to create a rotoscope on the (A:M) camera. This makes the image or image sequence a foreground or background. Making it a foreground only really works if you have an alpha channel (invisible areas) for your other animation to show through. I have done that with a title sequence. However, a video created with a video camera or photo camera that also takes video would not have that alpha channel. Using it as a background is neat if you want to have your own characters on top of the video action. This is what it's like on Windows in the latest version, it will be similar on Mac and I hope similar on v13. To do this, right-click on the "Shortcut to Camera1" in the choreography, choose New -> Rotoscope.... Change the "Files of Type" to be the type of movie you have (e.g. .AVI or .MOV), check "Import as an animation or a sequence of images" (I always forget that step and have to re-do it), and then choose your movie. Warning: the file types available to import are somewhat limited; hopefully they match up with what your camera exports. At that point, you should be able to see the video in the choreography screen, and the picture should change as you scrub through the animation (albeit possibly slowly). 2. Texture/Decal method Warning - I have not been able to get this to work. This would involve assigning the movie to a group on part of a model. For example, say you had a model of a TV, and you wanted a video playing on the screen portion of the TV. Maybe someone could chime in with how to do this. Hope this helps.

What were your multipass settings set to? I vaguely remember discussion about a light jittering feature, and they get averaged out with multiple passes but might be noticeable at multipass=1x1. (And for good measure, what were you using for AO?)

We are very glad to have you sharing your birthday with us. I really love your excitement and enthusiasm.

The changes look really good! His body movements look a lot more natural now and ... they have a "read", if you know what I mean. It looks meaningful. Some of the foot/leg movement you put in there really adds something to it, and the changes in the upper body show some ... passion? about the song's meaning. Only one small little suggestion/tweak ... each time he starts singing "Cicak", it looks like his head was still and he just starts singing. It might be neat to have him maybe look down (tilt his head down) at the end of the previous line, and if he's thinking, recouping, breathing in, etc., and then has a little bit of an attack on the beginning of the next line. This is a really challenging animation project. You can't rely on just the visual aspects and amusing action. It's one that forces you to explore to get the right emotional performance out of the characters. You seem to be achieving that. Your skills are really developing! You are moving beyond the level of just entertaining animation -- an important milestone in and of itself -- and getting to the magical level of believable animation, something for which I have a long ways to go to even come close. Keep it up!

Looking really good. Two things for consideration: 1. The hands move a little fast and jerky the first few times they move; after that it's pretty good. 2. His upper body/chest does not move, even though the rest of him is relatively fluid. It would be nice to see that move a bit, both in size (as if breathing) and location/curvature (as if dancing). Great work overall! You are going to be very proud of this project when it's all done!

I'm loving every update you post! Thanks for sharing them!

Yeah, that one shows a lot of the basics of modeling. I like how it discusses splines, peaking vs smooth, flipping, the duplicator wizard, bones, and assigning CPs. Yet it's still reasonably quick to do.

Yeah, there are often lots of little "oh, that's how you do it" moments you get from videos that you don't get from written tutorials. Also, you get a better idea of someone else's workflow.

Very entertaining, Dan! Good stuff!

I'm sorry for sounding like a total fanboy, but ... WOW! I'm in awe on every update. Top notch work! One thing about the night render ... the flowers are gone.

I'm not sure if I've seen that before! Thanks for posting the link! I feel silly for watching it 7 or 8 times. Lots of fun!

Yeah, shorts like this one, "Duel" and all of the other Anzovin shorts, Victor Navone's "I will survive", Jeff Lew's "Killer Bean", as well as ToreB's Kafka short and the Chickory (sp?) short all really inspire me.

Great find, Rodney! Thanks for posting this!

I'm mostly happy with the spline layout, except the eyebrows. I went through a number of iterations. I was somewhat particular about the line from the side of the nose to the side of the mouth, as well as the area between that line and under the eyes, hoping to get a layout that could be used for a variety of characters of multiple ages. The next step is shaping the head to get the dimensions I want for the character in question, then start on the body. Here's the incremental development: This time I used ImageMagick to create the animated GIF. The command-line is imply: convert -delay 100 -loop 0 Rick0*.png RickAnim2.gif