robcat2075

Definitely keep us posted on your progress and the solutions you find along the way.

I think the nose looks rather more pinched than the reference photo?

Are there any nominees for a better prime camera spot than the one in the set now? My feeling about some of the windows not being ideal is... use a window that is! Windows could be reused, no?

Can you make a screen cam of this happening? Resize A:m so it's not covering the entire screen and then capture Just A:M.

That is indeed my expectation of how it would work except for the camera physically flying over to the windows. Ideally every shot could edit right to the next one, but that's unlikely so the character can be brought back to establish some major change.

When i make the changes to the "Shortcut to Material" that appears under the Bones folder, the keyframes get made in a accompanying "Shortcut to material" that is in the Choreography Action and those survive a save. But I'm having trouble finding a parameter to change that makes an obvious visual difference so I'm not sure if this is working right or not. I'm wondering what causes those "Shortcut to Materials" that have a question mark behind the gear icon. Those have been a problem before.

I'm not trying to irritate anyone with my explanation of gravity and squetch on bouncing balls, but if I'm giving comments on gravity and squetch I'll likely do it in the framework that made it all make sense for me and gave me the most information to carry forward to other animation that is not bouncing balls. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

I'd rather have the camera in one spot. Is there a better spot to put it so the most windows are most visible? I figure that no matter where you put it some thing will be not ideal. But maybe there's a better spot?

Can you tell me exactly what to try to set in the Chor ? I could try it in v17

It's not possible to make these projects all things to all people. Strong boundaries make for stronger projects. I'm sorry that's a deal killer for you. Hope you'll change your mind. There are lots of other places to stage interesting things besides in a window. I'll also note that those were "my" rules.. part of my offer to figure out how to engineer the transitions between what will still be very non-matching segments. If you want to commit to that task instead, Bruce...? But if I'm going to do it I want to frame it so that there's a real good chance it's do-able.

Even better!

that's quite successful! i suppose one could soften it by using an edge gradient.

I think you should get a small crew of people who know their sh*t and do a two-minute trailer. Not a ten minute trailer, a two minute trailer. Start out with that very narrow focus.

Your point is that explaining the deformation in terms of real-world mass muddies the concept because it's really about stylization. I disagree. I think my way of explaining it terms of real world mass gives the student the best chance to take out of this exercise insight that can be carried forward to the more complicated cases of moving things around. Most character animation doesn't involve things bouncing. It always involves moving masses around. I want the new animator to start thinking about those masses as soon as possible. Once you understand how they move you will know where to exaggerate that motion for stylized effect. At AnimationMentor I saw a lot of fellow students NOT get body mechanics and I think it was because school was dealing in abstracted rules like "it looks better for objects to move in arcs" rather than real explanations like "objects move in arcs because the have mass and can't change direction instantly" or "a hand moves in arcs because it's swinging on the end of a bone and not moving by itself." (After two quarters the faculty knew they weren't getting body mechanics across, but they were people who intuitively understood motion and not quite able to explain how they understood it.)

I think I said "imagine" it as made of separate molecules. I'm pretty sure I didn't mention molecular energy. I could have said imagine it as separate pieces of pigskin sewn together, or imagine it as separate plastic pellets melted and vacuformed together in a ball shape or imagine it as separate spoonfuls of jello in a containing plastic bag... All of those parts, even the molecules, have inertia and momentum. When the bottom of the ball contacts the ground, the molecules or pigskin or pellets or jellos at the top of the ball do not instantly halt when bottom does because they are only remotely connected to the bottom. Their inertia makes them continue down. Neither do they instantly fling themselves down just because the bottom of the ball has contacted the ground. The inertia that makes them continues down after the bottom of the ball has stopped also prevents them from suddenly zooming down faster than they had before (and there's no force in this bouncing ball situation that is even trying to make them do this). Of course all these molecules or skins or pellets are connected to each other (not so much the jellos) and those connections get stretched until they can't stretch any more and the ball has to stop squashing and start returning to its original shape. If that return is fast enough, the molecules or pellets or skins at the top get enough momentum to not only carry themselves higher but also eventually yank their loosely connected fellow traveling molecules or pellets or skins at the bottom of the ball with them. All of this is to get the animator away from thinking of the model as a rigid shell that deforms itself when it is near the ground simply because we have a slider to do that or because there's a diagram in Preston Blair that says that and start thinking of it as an real object that he needs to show is shaped and moved by the forces of inertia and momentum (and obstruction from other objects like the ground).

All this talk of squash and stretch ans overlap has very little reality with actual balls. Real balls hardly ever squash and stretch and overlap to the point we see it like we do in cartoons. However, other things in real life DO squash and stretch and overlap very noticeably, but those objects are very complicated to maneuver for a beginner and present too many intersecting issues simultaneously. Take a look at this guy's rhumba. He doesn't get body mechanics and he can't move mass plausibly on the screen. There's no way to even usefully critique that because there's just too much going wrong from the very first frame to ever just tweak it in to rightness. It's painfully obvious from watching that and his other 11sec entries that he doesn't know how to move mass onscreen without it looking fake and awkward. I'll bet you a dollar he's never done a decent bouncing ball. He really needs to be starting out with a far simpler case and a develop a good eye for moving simple things around before he leaps to full human bodies. As is true of us all. So we start out with a rigid bouncing ball just to get "falling" right and then move to a ball given an exaggerated combination of floppiness and elasticity so we can practice with managing a deformable shape in a very simple case. Then we move on to a little bit more.

At the beginning, we're not doing "personality balls" we're learning to plausibly move mass on screen and the ball is our simplest case to practice with. Personality comes later. Poor body mechanics is the hallmark of poor character animation and good body mechanics starts with being able to plausibly move masses on the screen.

Happy Birthday to one of our finest character creators!

Those unneeded splines could be hooks as well.

Call the cat and tell him to read it to you over the phone.

Why do i see splines sticking out on the side?

Something else I meant to say... In this theory of squash and stretch, squash and stretch is a form of overlapping action. The ball squashes because the bottom of the ball has stopped at the ground while the top tries to keep moving down. The ball stretches because the top has been forced into the air while the bottom lags behind because of its inertia.

Happy Birthday! May you have another fine year of knocking 'em out with A:M. Someday I'll see the movie that forum name is from!

Consider the case of hipster tennis players who swat a ball laying dead on the ground and are able to get it bouncing up. They are squashing it down and releasing it suddenly. It's the un-squashing of the ball that gets its center of gravity moving upward, fast enough to carry it into the air. A trampoline would be an obvious case of "the ground" storing some energy and giving it back to the ball. But for most grounds, like concrete or a bowling alley, it's probably very tiny. As tiny as the bowling ball's was... so i have no idea where all that bounce is coming from!

I will note that if you think my theory of squetch through too much there's an apparent problem: If the ball leaps back up in the air because it is rapidly unsquashing itself... how does a rigid, non-squishy ball like a bowling ball bounce at all? Why doesn't it just stop dead when it hits the ground? One excuse might be that it does squetch a tiny bit and unsquetches so fast that it is able to fling its mass back off the ground. But I dont' know if that has any reality in physics.