robcat2075

hmmm... I think a benchmark should be fairly low-impact task for anyone to run. Associating it with some other goal seems a departure from its purpose. On Benchmarks... i was trying to come up with a way to judge video card performance. I haven't figured out how to do it without testing all the cards on the same machine.

Note that toon lines are all about edges that suggest form. A good toon character may need edges explicitly modeled that a regularly shaded character would not.

Yes, toon rendering is pretty much what that is. Maya probably has more toon options, but we've seen people do knock-out stuff in the past with A:M. I recall an anime thing about a "magic egg" that was totally convincing.

To me, that looks like you will have the same triangle problem at the top.

I think a week will work. That will be about how long I need to get ready. So we have three test subjects! Check back next Sunday, we'll start the first lesson.

We'll interact on the forum. I'll make a tutorial that explains the assignment and how to do it. You'll do that assignment and then we'll look at them to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. rinse and repeat. When will that be, Gene?

A_BiasAdjusted.mdl I can't make the 3-pointer perfect with bias adjustment but I can make it less bad so that I don't think it would be noticed in any typical situation where the model is textured. The original probably would not be noticed either if it had a texture on it. It would be nice to have the 3-pointed shade better than they do. Someone very familiar with how it works internally would have to look at it, although I suspect this hasn't gone unnoticed. I avoid using 3-pointers in conspicuous spots like in the middle of a character's cheek. Usually they can be used just to tie together loose ends in hidden corners. It's like the old joke: Patient: Doctor, my arm hurts when i do this. Doctor: Don't do that!

Here's a tweak of the same situation where the triangle is almost invisible. I fiddled with the biases so that the sides of the triangle bulge away from the center rather than being just straight lines between the CPs. TriangleSmoother.prj

Here, Rodney.... here's approximately the same situation, when a triangular patch is on the peak of a very convex shape is a worst-case situation for 3-pointers. Triangle.prj It doesn't look quite so severe in the modeling window but if you light it from the side in a chor it's more obvious.

And to explain a bit further, this will be like an ultra-mini-micro basic character body mechanics class. I need a few guinea-animators to test the idea on and see how much benefit they get out of it. I anticipate the first two lessons occupying about a week each and the third one maybe two.

How interesting! I have never seen that before. I presume most of that is A:M. Somewhere else on this forum is a post from the late Steve Anzovin venting the displeasure that project brought them. But the trailer looks good!

Geez, I'm sorry to hear that. I wish you well on that and a good recovery. Unless I'm misunderstanding, just give every door its own bone. animate it directly when it needs to open. ?

Well, it doesn't look any better in v17 that's certainly a bad case for three pointers. But I think that it looks bad because the patch math creates a bad shape and not because subdivision is adding a bad shape. Whatever subdivision is happening is trying to recreate the patch shape as accurately as possible. I think the math of the patch needs to be rethought or that a special exception needs to be made to handle 3-ponters better. I have no idea what that would involve.

We will need to limit this pilot class to, say... three people?

On the revised shot... One thing that is working against you by having him look into the camera is that his nose is almost completely covering up his mouth. What ever work you are putting into the lip sync is getting obstructed. But dialog shots are bad way to be learning character animation. At animation school, dialog is literally the last thing they let you do. Here's a mini curriculum I'd be interested in trying with you, that would also inform my current efforts to devise a NewTAoA:M 1 bouncing ball 2 broad jump 3 three emotions if we were to recruit a couple of other people wanting to do the same exercises that would make an interesting class.

I recall him saying "It's possible... like going to Mars is possible"

The subdivision you see in real time is a convenient approximation only. Final renders don't use that subdivision process. Final renders divide the surface into many small faces about the size of a pixel, because it is faster to calculate the image for something flat than something microscopically curved, apparently. These small faces are thrown out and redone for every frame to suit the needs of the image, they are not like a polygon model that is defined by a consistent set of flat faces. That is based on stuff Martin said and stuff I've read about CG rendering, none of which I understand completely. that said... -The purpose of Pixar's subdivision process is to create smooth surfaces with a fairly light mesh of control points. -The purpose of Hash's splines and patches is to create smooth surfaces with a fairly light mesh of control points. We pretty much have the same result already.

hmmm... the girl and thom don't seem to be casting any shadows on themselves even though the light appears to be from nearly overhead. That's what i notice.

That's probably the best way to think about it. For us it's all splines and patches.

I like that very much!

I have not seen that before! Do your previous versions of this chor do that now if you load them? Is this in the new v17a? If you scrub the timeline a frame and back does it change anything? If you fix the position of something, save(under a new name) and reload does it stay fixed? If you take this to v16 does it happen?

I agree that there isn't much of a performance there, although minimalism in dialog is not necessarily bad. We could spend a long time thinking of things to make for a better performance but it would take a long time because there are essential body mechanics principles that are not in play yet and we would be trying to solve many issues at once. A problem with dialog animation is that it is whole-body animation on an extremely subtle level. I dread doing it. For your first steps in character animation do something that can be done BIG. My suggestion is to table this dialog shot and step back to a full body acting test. A good early animation school assignment is to pick two contrasting emotions that can each be shown in a single pose (with no dialog) and animate from one to the other. If you want to do that I would be glad to look in and coach on that. First step, pick the two emotions and pose each one out in a hold with a bare transition between, like i showed in my "blocking" video. then we'll talk about what you have. But back to your present clip for a second... I'll note that there aren't many good occasions to have a character look into the camera. It's rare even in live action, but it' s really tough to make an animated character look good in that situation. If I were doing this I'd have him addressing imaginary listeners off-screen so he never looks at the camera. That pose he has is very symmetrical (another danger of facing into the camera), he almost looks like a tripod. If we were pursuing this shot we'd really want to rethink that. But again, I say table this for now. The way he moves from pose to pose, I realize this is only blocking now, but if we were to pursue this we'd talk about how to shift weight and overlapping action. But again, we could do that better working on a simpler two-pose test. I know why your movie is so big. The "animation" codec will always make large files and you have ti set to "millions +" so there's probably an unnecessary alpha channel hidden in there two. And the audio is uncompressed Stereo A better codec choice would be Sorenson or H.264. You can load a large render into the Images folder and "Save animation as" to a better codec. A neater solution is with Quicktime Pro that not only re-compresses video but also gives you audio compression options. A:M doesn't have any audio compression ability. I applaud you for not gesturing with two fingers and one finger for "two men enter, one man leaves..." That is what they call too "on the nose"

hmmm... this must be some use of the word "flat" that I am not familiar with. Are not all triangles flat?

In the northern hemisphere the sun will set from upper left to lower right. Something is reversed.

Looks good! That must be in the southern hemisphere. Will it do clouds too?