robcat2075

I'm not sure I see the moving holds yet...

They're working here in FF

This is a little try at making an AO style render with just z-buffered kleig lights. I chose the "Biobot" character from the extras disk because he has lots of crevices and bumps to challenge the occlusion effect. AOBTurnTestH.mov The result isn't quite as satisfying as a real AO image but it takes only 5 seconds per frame to render. The quicktime compression is making the shadows on the ground look patchier than they really are. In the original render they're quite smooth.

Looks good! What's the gyroscope about?

That's pretty much it. "ease" is a property of the path constraint. It's a percentage of how far the object has traveled the path. If you set the ease to 50% at 3 secs and 50% at 4 secs the object on the path will stay at 50% for that time, then move on (if we presume you have keyed 100% at the end of your animation).

Short answer... yes, a shader could do that, i think, but someone would have to write it. I don't know that it would be any faster. A long time ago Marcel Bricman put for the this technique, but its also a muti-pass technique and requires his gradient plugin which may not be available now. My experiment is based on Jeremy Birn's suggestion of changing the IOR of the glass while the renderer did the R, G and B channels. A:M doesn't actually do the R G and B at separate times so you can't key IOR for them. Using multipass and keying the light to change color is about the same thing in practice.

Dispersion is how refraction bends the different colors of white light differently causing the color fringing you see in prisms, cheap camera lenses and other irregularly shaped transparent objects. This is an attempt to simulate it by changing the Index of refraction of the glass material as the color of the light is swept across the spectrum during a multipass render. I also moved the light to fringe the shadow a bit. This is not a fast process, but if you need dispersion, it can be done.

Are her feet really doing the same arc that the guy in the clip was doing? A side view is better for right now.

You don't have deleted file recovery software on your PC? Now you know an action doesn't contain any model. It's like a small chor that load models it needs. You can put one model in another by importing it into the current model window. But why delete a model? You might want to use it in something else later. Storage is cheap today. No reason not to save everything.

A:M's AO is about occlusion from the sky dome which isn't quite the same as occlusion from indoor surroundings. So here's a couple of attempts to do indoor ambient occlusion. The first is my omni directional light set to be almost as wide as the room and letting A:M jitter that with multipass That averages out to the light originating from the center of the room which isn't right since the ambient light is really from the walls This one has a box of splines crawling along the walls of the room. This is better but I need to find a way to make the light not shine on the wall it is closest to at any point. That is what's making the bright spots.

I hear the beats in the speech as "you STOLE from my KIN" but the motion of the chicken is doing "you STOLE from MY kin". I really sense he should be landing on KIN. Overlap on the head as it goes up and down will make it snappier.

The rim lighting you have that outlines the pharaoh character really helps separate him from the background. The frog would benefit from something like that too. So would the guy with the Don King hair.

I just tried a 4096x1742 (double the Panavision res) render of my lighting test scene and it survived fine. So it's not the res that's the problem but probably a combination of a complicated scene and the hi res. If you submit an A:M Report on it, include a PRJ with all objects embedded and all the necessary texture maps in a zip, so your specific case can be tested.

Jeremy Birn's Digital Lighting and Rendering I'm testing out ideas I get as I read it.

thanks! The appearance of light spill is simulated with lights behind the walls, animated to change intensity as the light in the room moves about. I'm sure a real radiosity render would be more nuanced. Ding, ding, ding ding! Yup, it's a shadow-mapped "bulb light" made out of an array of klieg lights. A square gel on each one keeps them from overlapping. It's only slightly faster than a 1-ray bulb light but much faster than a many-rayed bulb light that would be needed to do soft shadows. I think the unnaturally large hot spot from the light being so close to the wall does that. There's probably a way to not have the hot spot at all.

An object that is off camera is probably not a great render hit. But I think setting the Active property OFF is even easier than making a pose to make something transparent. If your >Constant on the property it wont create any key frames as you turn it on and off as you work.

As the light bounces off the walls it takes on the wall's color. OmniTestEH.mov A typical Cornell box image takes about an hour to render with radiosity, but this takes about 15 seconds per frame to render. This scene also has something in it that technically doesn't exist in A:M. Can anyone guess what it is? There are clues in the render.

I think that's definitely true on the chicken beak. If you enough head nods no one can see mouth shapes anyway. I think you need to add a few frames at the start so chicken's head can wind up into "you" as the anticipation to going down on "stole" You want B, not A

There's a guy who had a far out life. Maybe the major saw the naked men running around Muybridge's studio and figured the wife wasn't getting much. The trial delayed the invention of motion pictures by several months. The jury let him off. The Muybridge photos aren't great for this sort of thing because he's got a pretty low framerate going and some of the timing detail is lost. For example we don't really catch where the foot hits the ground, it's between two frames. But they're out there and convenient to swipe.

a few notes about running motion

Here's the classic Eadweard Muybridge run photos. From 1887! It's quite a smooth motion with big arcs, because smooth motion and big arcs take less energy. muybridgeRunNotes.mov Notice that the left and right feet are almost always moving in opposite directions... when one goes up the other goes down, when one goes forward the other goes back. This is not nearly as true in a walk where one foot has to stay on the ground until the other one is planted. The faster motion of the run requires that the body masses balance out more. The foot strikes the ground a bit in front of the body, but leaves the ground a greater distance behind. The foot reaches an extreme forward point and then starts to travel back before it hits the ground. The foot continues traveling back a bit after it leaves the ground. Of course, this is only from our perspective of a runner on a treadmill. In real world space, the foot is getting yanked forward by the body as soon as it is done pushing off. In real life there isn't much up and down of the body. In animation you might want to add a bit more to suggest weight.

You a better result with "stepped"?

Very lovely!

In Options>Choreography (and Modeling, too ) there are options to turn off the grid.

Has someone done this? Or is this yet-to-be-achieved? As far as I know, it is yet to be achieved. I didn't try very hard. But with all the UV tests you have done lately, you could probably get it working. My tests were all aimed at making it a simple as possible in A:M. Exporting something to polygons and figuring out how an external app maps it, and then figuring out how to get that remapped back onto A:M... my enthusiam flags a bit.