robcat2075

Has someone done this? Or is this yet-to-be-achieved? GA is a bit unconventional. 10 minutes... that's not bad. That's not going to kill you.

Just to make sure it's not the hugeness of your scene, try setting A:M up on a simple scene, like a few spheres and a raytraced sun light and see how render times compare. Usually multiple instances scale well, but if it's a case with massive textures or RAM hungry effects.... the bottle neck may not be the CPUs. Also you may want to turn off the multi-threading option, where ever that is, if you are trying to run several one-core A:Ms.

Have you read Jeremy Birn's book? I bet with careful conventional lighting you could cut that way down.

I wish there was a way to bake AO shading onto objects.

Try that. When I had a dual Windows NT machine I had to do that.

Great lookin' critters!

Back when we were doing TWO i did a tut on holds. But i have no idea where it is now. Your characters are moving from pose to pose then freezing. For some reason that kills 3D. The Flintstones can get away with it, but 3D characters don't survive it. It's very difficult to bring a 3D character to a full stop and not have it look bad. Moving holds are about doing most of your motion in the planned time, but saving the last 2 or 3% to spread out over the "hold". This is what the curve editing looks like: You don't need to do this on every bone, just the few that make up most of the pose change. Like the spine. It is possible to do this wrong an get a worse result. It's something you have to develop an eye for. For a motion like an arm waving in the air you might do differently. You might overshoot the pose, then creep back slightly. The other essential item missing is anticipations. There are some but there are many places where one would help alot. One example "who was fixin...: right now his head just moves down after "fixin" tilt the head up a bit (the anticipation) on "was" then slam it down for "FIX-in" (the major accent of that phrase.) There are other ways to do that anticipation, but that is one.

I like that! I like the expressions on the monster's face.

Good looking characters! In the first clip I wasn't sure what the sound belonged to. Is it a sound the guy on screen is making or is it something he is hearing? His lips are moving in and out like they are doing something but it's not really in synch with the sound. So I couldn't tell what was intended.

That looks cool. Why do the overhead struts move?

It's very basic. I'm sure you'd enjoy making you're own. but here you go: Room09c_AllEmbedded.prj Here's an actual radiosity render of the scene, lit by just the light hitting the floor. This takes 1 hour 27 minutes. I'm sure this could be improved if I added the light of the sky coming thru the window. I suppose I'd have to do a skydome for that. But I can look at this and see how close I came with my artificial lighting to what the simulation did and adjust my lighting to mimic it more closely if I like the simulation. But even the 256 pass render is quite a bit faster than the radiosity render for a similar effect. That's very interesting to me.

Here's a wip thread where I explained my steps as I built a head, starting about post #50

That looks good. Not nearly as painful-looking as that tooth drilling one you did. I have one suggestion for your interface... the movies could use a pause button and progress indicator in the play window. The playback is mostly stuttering for me and if I could pause it to let it load more I'd probably be ok.

BTW, Richard Williams covers runs in his "Animator's Survival Kit" book.

Ah... much better.

That's a fun looking test. Looks like you got the live and CG pretty much in synch. I'm wondering if the shadowless live footage is making the composite harder or easier to make convincing. Tricky. You might try some squares of stiff Simcloth and blow those around with "forces". that might get you a more realistic paper appearance, maybe.

It does look wierd because no one can run like that. A lot of the principles of walks apply to runs. For example, the rear leg should be pretty much fully extended when it pushes off. How could she get any speed if she were pulling up the back leg before it had finished pushing her forward? Likewise the front leg will be pretty much extended when it contacts the ground, so it can use its full length to cushion the shock, and raise the body back up. Right now the front leg is going forward and then starting back before it ever touches the ground. Each foot is only touching the ground for about 2 frames each which is probably impossible. Even in a run our feet are on the ground more than they are off. Tip: go outside, run to the end of the block and feel what your legs are doing.

Since it won't be, in the future, always do your stuff in a material.

It may be possible to splice group surface settings into a material in a text editor. save simple examples of both and look at them to see the file structure.

looks like trouble!

Hold on there. Those hooks you have coming out of the top of the head are not hooks. If you've done it right there won't be a red CP there. If you're trying to attach a hook where there's already a CP you wont' get a hook. Delete the CP where you think you're making a hook. There should not be a CP there, before or after.

Here's another tactic. This uses a light on a spline in the shape of the spot of sun on the ground for the bounce off the floor and another traversing a hemisphere spline outside the window for the sky light. Fewer lights but they are jittered over more angles. Still just Z-buffered Kleig Lights more passes gets smoother results 16 passes 1:27 49 passes 3:44 100 passes 7:25 256 passes 19:14 Those are not bad times for nuanced lighting effects. It's entirely possible that with more lighting skill those times could be cut down.

For confused Americans, on US Keyboards it's the "." key. Our keyboard layout is rather different than European ones it seems.

Here's the book. It's the world's foremost guide to CG lighting. He says so in the introduction. It's not a set of step-by-step tutorials but more of a discussion of concepts and how basic techniques are used for different purposes. It's mostly application non-specific, but after I finish it I may write a set of annotations to translate the few things that are different in A:M. For example, what he calls a "point light" is a "bulb light" in A:M. The good news is that A:M seems not to be lacking in CG lighting tools. I'm only on the second chapter but I'd recommend it to someone who is wondering about lighting. Make sure you get the second edition. Here are the lights in my shot

You can also use hooks to reduce some splines coming out of the eye sockets before they have to loop around the back of the head.