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robcat2075

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Posts posted by robcat2075

  6. Posted

    The action is a file on your hard drive somewhere, just like a .mdl or .prj  is.

    RMB on your Actions folder, choose import and navigate to where ever the Action  (.act) is saved and load it.

    Then you should be able to drag it from the Actions folder onto the model in the Choreography.

  10. Posted

    Do you just want the character larger? Proportionally larger in every dimension?

    After you drop it in the Chor you can scale it larger with the yellow bounding box that appears when you select the model in "Director" mode.

     

    If you want to make the character taller but not wider that is trickier.

  11. Posted

    I presume you don't just mean scaling the whole character larger.

    One way is to go into Bones mode where you can use the scale manipulator to scale bones. If you hold the CTRL key, the bone's CPS (and its child bones and their CPs) will scale with it.

    Since all the children scale too, it is often useful to un-child portions that you don't want to scale and re-parent them afterward. For example, you might un-child the neck and head if you only wanted the spine to be longer. The proportions of child segments can become very strange if their bone is not exactly parallel to the bone being scaled.

    This process can work well if you have a version of your character that is unrigged, with just geometry bones in it, that you can rig after you are done stretching.

    Because of the complex parenting in rigs, this is VERY unlikely to be simple or satisfactory if you try this on a rigged character.

    This would be a great problem to bring to Live Answer Time.

  15. Posted

    The rings seem like a very specific effect that I think would confuse most viewers for outer space shots.

     

    Quote

    I don't visit here much as it's so hard to log in. No matter what I try I always have to go through the recover password.

    I'm going to guess that your browser is set to not take cookies from this site.

    i never have to sign in when i come here unless i've intentionally logged out.

  16. Posted

    Here is a further inquiry into multipass rendering of displacement maps.

    I shot the same set of domes and pyramids to render displacement maps with 1, 16, 64 and 256 passes, then put each of those on a copy of the curved shape.

    These are all excerpts from the same rendered frame, the only difference is the displacement map on the model...

    The 1-pass map shows a slight banding in the displaced shape

    001passSample.jpg

     

    With the 16 pass map it is noticeable...

    016passSample.jpg

     

     

    With 64 passes, even more so....

    064passSample.jpg

     

     

    256... ouch!

    256passSample.jpg

     

    Somehow the data is being quantized into narrow bands when the displacement map is being rendered. Since it gets worse with more passes, something must be going wrong in the calculations that combine the data from the multiple passes.

  20. Posted

    Here is a surprise.

    Compare the peaks of the hemisphere shapes between these two renders. This first one shows noticeable stair-stepping...

    5passSample.jpg

    When I examine that stair-stepping VERY closely, it is like a plateau, then several short steps packed together, then another plateau, then several short steps packed together...

    In this version the stepping is not nearly as obvious...

    1passSample.jpg

     

     

    Both have the same resolution displacement map and both are OpenEXR format. However the displacement map for the top image was rendered with 5 passes while the map for the bottom used only one pass.

    I had long presumed that more passes was better when making displacement maps but that is not the case!

    D'oh!

  21. Posted

    42 minutes ago, rusty said:

    What I was looking for is more like this. I tried this in AE but it doesn't look that good.

    Do you mean that what the AE tutorial showed wasn't good enough or that you couldn't get what he showed in the tutorial?

  22. Posted

    This comparison uses the same displacement geometry rendered from the overhead camera at resolutions of 640, 320, 160 and 80 pixels wide, then applied to the same curved model.

    This frame was rendered at 640x480, 16 passes.

    Notice that the number of stair-steps on the tall X is the same on each model. This suggests that it is not a lack of resolution in the displacement map that causes it. If it were I would expect there to be 4x the number of steps from the 640 pixel map as from the 80 pixel map.

    BumpTurn_4v_044.jpg

     

     

    Below  is the same frame rendered at 4x4x the resolution (2560x1920) with just one pass, then shrunk down to 640x480 in Photoshop.

    For most anti-aliasing purposes I would expect this to appear the same as the 640x480 16-pass render since both are sampling the same number of points (4x4) for each final pixel.

    However, the stair-stepping on the "640" model is greatly reduced now. This indicates there is enough information in the 640 map to produce a better result but it was somehow not being all used. Notice that the "80" model has the same frequency of stair-stepping as in the original 640x480 render. This suggests that the original render was using ¼ x¼  of the information that was present. 

    Could this be as simple as a MIP-map problem?

    BumpTurn_4vHDShrunk_044.jpg
     

     

    Below is the same frame rendered at 640x480, with the displacement maps reset to BUMP. Here the diagonal lines render nearly flawless.

    BumpTurn_4vBUMP_044.jpg

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