robcat2075

I hope you mean "now" ?

My own feeling is that dialog animation is more about the acting performance than the mouth shapes. Compared to the time put into the acting, the time to do the mouth animation is a minor factor. I've never actually tried the dope-sheet method to automate lip synch, maybe it can be done great but, looking at other people's results, it seems to give an over-animated, choppy look that needs to be edited to bring it back to normal and it also has a repetitive look to it. At animation school they taught us to just keyframe motion manually rather than start from something that was automatically generated so that's how I've always done it. It's the last thing I do after all the other animation is figured out. If you can get a cheap copy of "Stop Staring" by Jason Osipa, he teaches that fundamentals approach to dialog. Some early editions even have coverage of Animation:Master but he was using an old version (which didn't have CP weighting) so the details of how he rigs a face in A:M are not necessarily current but the general concepts of sliders and mouthshapes and timing are still valid.

I've boiled this down to the bare details to show the essential concept. Here's the animation: CornersSpeak.mov Here's the explanation: clip3621ControllingPoseEnforcement.mov Here's the PRJ: PoseEnforcement07.zip When you first asked about this I didn't think it could be done!

Looks like a very viscous liquid.

I'll try and make a video of it tomorrow and then you can see what I'm looking at.

There is a Show More Than Drivers icon for every item in a Pose, Chor or action Turn it on for the On/Off pose that contains the pose you are trying to set enforcements for.

If i said to turn on "Show more than drivers" does that solve it for you? If not, ask some more here.

Hmmm.... can you show me a screen shot of where you are accessing the enforcement of one Pose when you are making the On/Off pose?

Mark is the very model of economical, well-placed splining. Men caught with their pants up...

Onward and upward! Or sideways! Whatever the next interesting project may be!

Mr. Silly String!

Interesting. You are setting it in the model or the material? I was setting it in the render settings. The limitation may be a bug that needs to be reported.

Yeah, character aniamtion is the black hole of time!

I was able to set it up to 1000. What version are you using?

I think that's a fine first expedition into animation you got put together there. There's a lot of complicated manuevers in the scene. If the text in the book was importabnt for us to read that probably could be substantially bigger on the page, but I think I get it even without that. Idealy, there would be something to make that first candle fall, like maybe she accidentally nicked it with her wand as she's looking at something else.

first... get a reference picture of what you want to make.

I general, I'd say you separate it down into the component shapes and then stick those together. What are you trying to make?

The flowers seem an unusual touch.

Here is a turn-around test of the compositing method. It's a modest taper effect, but it is a taper! ToorLineH.mov

Here is something I've been meaning to try for years. Higher Bias settings make the line end a bit sooner than lower bias settings. By rendering with three different Bias/Thickness combinations and then compositing the three versions in Photoshop with the "Darken" mode we can get something that resembles the hand tapered line of illustrations...

If you crank up the "bias" you can get a more elegant fade-out without the widening of the line.

Here is an overview of multi-touch gestures as the exist in Windows. A few of them should get a result even without new programming but thier meaning may not be the same as the mouse equivalent is in A:M. Windows Touch Gestures Overview

Those are beautiful!

Yeah, that was back when that was the only character they had! Although, technically, the assignments said "Using Bishop, or an equivalent character..." Maybe I coulda just put Shaggy or Rabbit in there.

He's lookin' fierce now.