robcat2075

Here's an idea that might help bind it all together... The character that enters the room is not the character we follow out of the room. Character A enters the room... something happens in the room... and then Character B (who was already in the room) leaves. If you want to use your own character you still can but he's part of that middle something and isn't the character entering or leaving. We set up a series of character pairs in advance like this Thom, Shaggy Shaggy, Rabbit Rabbit, Knight Knight, Lady Goodbody and so on... Everyone claims one pair at the outset and then we can edit the segments together by matching up the leaving-->entering characters. Maybe. I was thinking people might want to post their wips for help. We might make that optional.

Well, an attempt to make a simple screencam crit turns into an all-day ordeal trying to figure out why my screencam doesn't work and my Quicktime doesn't work and my FTP doesn't work. anyway... Body mechanics is the thing most people trying animation get wrong. It's very hard to teach. Even AnimatonMentor hasn't figured out a magic bullet for that. When I was there students either got it or they didn't and no amount of critting seemed to change that. I've made some comments here. I couldn't' get Quicktime to re compress it so it's absurdly large (but worth every hour you'll spend downloading it ) heavy push crit It also has some sound drop outs so not every sentence will make sense. Heavy push is a complex thing, and there are many overlapping issues that make it hard to point to one thing at a time to fix. If you really want to do body mechanics you should start with "bouncing ball". Body mechanics is all about showing force and mass and inertia and bouncing ball boils that down to the just that. That's why bouncing ball is the atom of character animation that every thing else is built on. Animators who don't get bouncing ball really never get it. If you're interested maybe we could make a small curriculum of a few exercises out of it and rope in a few other people who are looking for the same thing.

This will take some time...

My inclination is to have everyone render their own shot so it will be up to each person to decide how he wants to make it look in that regard.

Probably 24, but it's good you brought it up.

I'm not sure I've ever watched the video for that one. I'm mostly aware of the book version only. Incompletely.

Final?

Detailed proposal now in post #1

Hey, here's another possible linking theme: "Rear Window" Like the Hitchcock movie. The camera moves from one window to the next, to the next, to the next...

It's still in the larval stage, so there's no deadline or even startline yet. I'm sure Thom will be allowed whatever we come up with..

I will be curious to see the finished product!

Sorry, I was doing it all from memory. Choreography = Chor You're right , there is a property called "cycle length" that governs how long the action works in the chor. I was thinking of the actual length of teh action when it was created in the action window. The motion of a walk is about 1 second. I find that the action sets it's "Cycle length" to whatever the blue bar length is when you drop the action on the character. If I adjust the blue bar before I drop the action on the character, the action sets its "cycle length" to the length of the blue bar However, if I adjust the blue bar to be longer after I have dropped the action on the character, the duration of the action in the chor doesn't automatically adjust itself to fit the new time. You can however, set the "cycle length" to whatever that new time is and the action will fill out the new length of time. I prefer to use "ease" in these situations so I can set the duration of the action exactly myself rather than rely on the automatic mechanism of A:M.

Yes, we could make a chor that contains the camera motion so that the motion of the wall leading in matches the motion of the wall leading out and they would cut together exactly. Each animator could slide those keys to make room in the middle for the time they need.

Actions create constraints pretty well once you export the Action as a model. How did you solve the problem of fixing the offsets for the new model?

Welcome to the forum! Looks promising!

Thanks. I was hoping it created constraints in some fashion. If we had a plugin that would create constraints (based on a list given to it), that would pretty much do what TSM2 does.

The cycle length is 5 seconds? do you really mean the animation is 5 seconds? The TAoA:M exercise doesn't direct you to make the walk cycle 5 seconds long. That would be impossibly long for a character to take two steps. But it isn't the length of the walk cycle that needs to change here. It's the length of the choreography animation that needs to be longer so each cycle of the walk has more time. That's a very long path. The character will need to cycle very quickly to cover it all in 5 seconds Open up your Project Workspace Window (ALT 1) Stretch the blue bar of your Choreography out to a longer time and the character will take longer to walk the path. OR... Scroll down to the Chor, then down to the character. Expand that until you see the path constraint and select the path constraint . Then go to the properties window and see the property called "ease" Set your time counter to 0:00 and set ease to 0% Then set the time counter to some large number like 15 seconds and then set ease to 100%. Ease controls how far along the path a character is and you want him to go from 0% to 100% in some time longer than 5 seconds.

Exactly what operations does the riginstaller.hxt plugin do?

How long is the animation? There needs to be enough time in the animation for the character to cover the path at a reasonable speed. Show us a wire frame that shows the path in the scene.

I just made a simple test of a ball constrained to a bone in a character. When I imported that chor into another chor the constraint survived fine. Something else is going wrong in your situation. Why are you importing a chor into another chor?

There's a reason both Maya and XSI ran out of money.

More INs please! We should have at least 10 to make a go of this. options I was thinking of... - a bare room with doors on each side. they can furnish it any way they want. - just doors on each side. No walls! The doors are like portals to another dimension. -

Briefly, these things typically have to do with the "path" to the target being not quite right after the import. You can fix this in a text editor if you can ascertain the correct and replace it over the incorrect path. Compare that path in the file before the import and in the file after. Of course, you saved a new version and reloaded after that import. more detail would be needed about what is new "now".

That's a nice look! My suggestion would be to find a way to make it look faster. If you could build your set so it repeats you could move it faster and not run out.

btw, the "next room" premise isn't decided yet. If we come up with one more people love, that's OK too. But we do have to come up with one.