robcat2075

To make the elfin ear I thought I could lathe out a tall cup and push the splines down on one side... But after quite a bit of pushing and pulling of CPs I wasn't happy with the shading the stretched patches were making... So I deleted all but the front edge of the ear... ...and resplined between the edges with more conventional contours...

Before I surface the outside of the face I extrude and extend some splines from the inside edge of the mouth to make a simple oral cavity. Just in case he ever opens his mouth wide enough to see inside. The scalp is extruded up and over from the brow spline.

Over the transom... Each of those is a deep topic, but.... CP weighting allows you to apportion the influence of more than one bone to a CP, rather than having it rigidly attached to just one bone. This is useful for the stretches and shrinks that surfaces between bones do, such as at the elbow or knee. Fan bones are another way of creating that in-between behavior, but slightly different outcomes than CP weighting. At the Sept 26, 2020 Live Answer Time I showed several comparisons of fan-boning and CP weighting. We talked abut rigging and CP weighting quite a bit last year at LAT. Several of those might be worth watching. my tutorials page also has several entries about CP weighting and fan-boning Smart skin lets you relate any change of something with the rotation of a bone. Usually this is about CP motion, typically when the above two tactics can't produce a desired joint deformation. See this post A simple example of smart skin? In addition to the above, the rarely used Bone Falloffs allow yet another way to weight CPs. example Two bone spring A:M Poses let you collect any set of keyframed changes to almost any thing into one control slider or an ON/OFF switch. A slider that moves the CPs of a mouth from "eee" to "ooo" shapes would be a classic Pose slider case but there are infinite others. ON/OFF poses can be used as "drop on poses. Do a search on "Pose" on my tutorials page and you will find many entries in which a Pose has been the solution for many different problems. Polygon programs need "weight painting" because they have thousands x more vertices to manage than we have CPS. It is not humanly possible to manually weight all the vertices in a dense polygon model but a good A:M model has a light enough mesh that it is possible. For unhappily dense A:M models the Transfer_AW plugin can make it possible to weight a light mesh and approximate that result on a dense one. Rigged in 60 Seconds?

Like most animation blogs there hasn't been much activity on it lately, but Mark Kennedy's Temple of the Seven Golden Camels Everything I know about the art of storyboarding. ...contains many useful essays about storyboarding and layout and related concerns. He can often distill it all down to a simple aphorism like Flat is Funny, Depth is Dramatic

Also... Unless you've just emerged from underneath a rock which was underneath yet another rock you are already familiar with "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams. It is full of essential nuts and bolts character animation advice although I have noticed computer animators seem to have trouble transferring its lessons to 3D CG workflow. There are many cheap used copies out there but it is hard to know if they are selling the 1st edition or the expanded edition. "The Disney Villain" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston is not a landmark of animation literature like their "Illusion of Life" was but it gives their insider appraisal of just about every bad guy (turns out, they are not all women and cats) ever to appear in Disney animation, mostly with a "what went wrong" analysis. These are available cheaply used.

that is very odd!

That looks very timely! Ripped from today's headlines!

My workflow for faces is to model things that I know have to be in a certain place... the eyeballs, the eye openings, the nose, the mouth opening... then begin connecting those parts together with splines to fashion the in between surfaces. I model each part with as few splines as possible. Those are easier to stitch together than something with excess splines i have to find a home for. Clearly my front and side rotoscopes don't match up well but I'll make do.

This a demon in an old Dutch painting that I started modeling for "Planes Trains Automobiles"... but didn't finish! It's not much to go on. I did these drawings to visualize the head... After some more development I got to this concept... And here is as far as I got before pressing pause in 2018... to be continued...

I have "SfD" but haven't gotten to it yet. Likewise for "Save the Cat" There are a plethora of animation books available now but I'm not sure their studio world advice scales down well to the single animator. "Prepare to Board" by Nancy Beiman wasn't bad. I thought it would be about storyboarding but it's mostly about everything you have to do before that. The first edition can be had used inexpensively. "Directing the Story" by Francis Glebas I would rate lower but it is about story development (feature, not short). I'd wait for a used copy to come up for $10. The most fascinating animation-related book I've read is (famous Disney instructor) Don Graham's "Composing Pictures". It's not about story nor about animation really but about arranging elements within the frame. Just about every page is something I didn't know people though much about but it turned out there was lots to think about that thing. Better than any class I've taken. Unfortunately it is out of print again and very expensive, even used.

It's probably too late to warn you but don't bother with Robert McKee's "Story." He was quite the rage 15 years ago. He is spoken of as if he is one of the screenwriting gurus of Hollywood and yet the apex of his career seems to have been writing one episode of "Spencer for Hire." He taught screenwriting at USC? How did that happen?

It's great fun to watch the details develop. I like the water spots on the coffeepot. i have a library of textures like that but I'm too unimaginative to use them.

Treeez should already be included in your v15. Check your HXT folder

After ReNumber CPs and Refind Normals, the normals were all pointing outward but the smoothness of the shading got worse... This is also interesting. I wondered if detaching and re-attaching spline intersections might change things, but after the Renumber and Refind, Detach became unavailable for this intersection...

The real hoax is that even if you win the goat you don't get the goat.

The "Timeline" window only shows what is currently selected. You can use the "pin" at the upper left corner to make items in the timeline remain after you deselect them. The left pane of the Project Workspace (PWS) is an expandable/collapsible outline view of every asset in your project. You can select items in the PWS if they are hard to select in the Viewport. The reverse also works, if you select an item in the Viewport it will be found in the PWS. The right pane of the PWS is a timeline window of keyframes that parallels whatever you have expanded and visible in the left pane. Nothing has to be selected to show in the right pane, it only has to be visible in the left pane. The "Timeline" window existed first in A:M. A timeline in the PWS came much later, around v9... v10? The PWS/timeline combination has turned out to be far more useful for managing complex projects so I rarely use the "Timeline."

reply in other thread... https://forums.hash.com/topic/50228-ultra-quickstart-model-bone-animate-render/?do=findComment&comment=424218

Here it is, the complete CG animation workflow in just four small bites... and one Puppy Dog Tail! Part 1 Modeling Part 2 Bones Part 3 Animation Part 4 Rendering

Character animation is the most advanced kind of animation there is. He's breaking it down into small parts because there is too much to know to put it all in one tutorial. I agree it is hard to see the big picture at first. My first guess is that you are moving the sliders in the original instance of the model in the Objects folder. To make animation key frames with those sliders you will want to move them in the instance of the model that is in the Action or Choreography you are using it in. ... BTW, I'll note that your screen capture shows a red border around the viewport. That means "Animate mode" is OFF and you can't make new key frames. If you wanted that, and know why you wanted that... OK... but you probably don't want that. Read this thread... What does the red border mean?

I dunno, i typically always have to fix some patches manually. But for me it's smoother with the patch pointing in.

I'll also note that in the video Barry Zundel creates and demonstrates the constraints in an "Action". Creating constraints in an Action used to be the standard procedure, but you had to drop that Action on your character every time you wanted him to have those constraints. Today we create the constraints in a "Pose" which is always saved with the Character. However, if you want to test or demonstrate the constraints, you still want to open an Action or Chor to do that, to avoid creating weird motion keyframes in your constraint Pose.

That's an impressive improvement from what I guess is something like a Photoshop "curves" adjustment? Looking forward, for everyone doing mission-critical rendering, I'll note that rendering to OpenEXR will allow careful level adjustments in post, and rendering to OpenEXR with "buffers" will allow adjustments of individual light/shadow intensities and color and even surface qualities like specularity and reflection... all without re-rendering.

I'll note that when he speaks of "cosmetic" bones, maybe they say that at Pixar where he was working but in the A:M world we have almost always called them "fan" bones. A simple example of smartskin? There are none! That is because simple situations are usually well-handled by the fan ("Cosmetic") bone he shows you how to make. Smartskin is for when the intermediate motion you need is not a simple percentage relationship between two bones. A brief example I can think of is when you want a bicep to bulge when the forearm curls. In a model, the CPs of the bicep would be attached to the blue bone, but Smartskin lets you relate the bulging of the bicep to the motion of the green bone