robcat2075

I think the notion got started with a post on The Spline Doctors Blog where one of them said he was tired of seeing generic characters on demo reels. Because the generic characters are so widely available there's lots of bad animation done with them and so he was biased against animations with them when they showed up on a demoreel. But that's really a jack-ass stupid thing to say. Follow that notion through to its consequences and it's apparent he wasn't really engaging his brain before he opened his mouth. At the studio level animation is all about using a character that someone besides the animator made, and if you aspire to that level you need to get animating sooner rather than wait until you have made your own character. This is especially true in other programs where modeling and rigging a character is 10x the difficulty that it is in A:M. I suspect the % of Maya owners who ever get a character successfully rigged is microscopic. That probably explains why there are those widely used generic characters circulating.

Of course, don't take me as the last word on jumping. There are as many ways to jump as there are things to jump over and places to jump to and people to do the jumping. This jumping in place is a bit of a rarity in animation. Richard Williams has several pages on jumps in his book (pg 212+) but they are all jumping forward. The concepts are still the same but you have to distill out the elements that are about getting the mass moving forward rather than just up. I imagine there are more story reasons to jump forward than to jump in place so that's probably why he covers it that way. I also meant to mention that videoing yourself dong this jump is a good bit of research. You can compare the way it looks with the way it felt doing it (which I always found most useful of all) and you can count frames to find the timing.

Possibly true, only because a detailed character will need more polishing. But what was her explanation? She isn't really using the word "rig" properly. She's really talking about overused characters. I think. But the overused characters are the minimal ones. "some people" Can she actually name an employer that does that? Probably more urban rumor than actual practice. I've heard "some people" do that , but no one who actually says they do it themselves. Students love to find reasons that they were rejected other than their weak portfolio. Squetchy Sam is minimally modeled but well-rigged.

Will he be performing the song? Or is he more of an interpretive dance?

Here are some things I notice. SteveNotesMP4.mov

I like the design of that. I like the bony plates. I presume they are bony.

yes. odd pivoting. the bone will wander from its original position and back as you go from 0 to 100% enforcement. Consider: - at 0% enforcement a constrained bone makes no attempt to get to the incorrect 0,0,0 offsets, and so stays in its original position -at 100% enforcement the constrained bone will be trying to get all the way to it's full offset position, and so stays in its original position -but at 50% enforcement the constrained bone will be trying to get half way to an offset location that is halfway between the target bone and the correct full offset position. try it and you will immediately see . enforcementoffsets.zip

"Radiosity" is probably the most accurate scheme, although it is very time-intensive to render. note the tutorials and examples in that archived forum. Image based lighting with a high-dynamic-range image with the light source in it might work also. you can get close to the effect of a flourescent light by making an array of point lights: http://www.brilliantisland.com/am/crawl.mov (they're in a single row in this example)

good question! change the "curve" for enforcement from "hold" interpolation to "linear" There's a way to copy and paste values form 100% to 0 but I dont' recall it. You can Edit offset curves manually by sliding the CPs at 0% to match the level at 100% (the red green blue icon at the bottom of the PWS switches it to curve view.)

Welcome back to A:M! Stitch: Hold down the Shift key when you are clicking in new spline CPs. This will make the old splines keep their shape.

It sounds like your hitting the (T)urn view key rather than ®otate key.

The essentials of A:M have been pretty constant since V5. The interface for dealing with the timeline and keyframes has changed somewhat, but for the better. The only reason I can think of for staying with V8 is if you are on Windows 95. No idea if current A:M would run on such an old OS.

oops, i guess rotoscopes do have the frame property. make sure your rotoscope is under the camera and not just in the chor.

Keyframing the Image>Frame property in a Layer seems to be the way to go. It works here in V13. If you had a video that was 10 frames long you'd keyframe 0 at frame 0, 9 at frame 9 and 0 at frame 10 , the set the post extrapolation to "repeat" make sure the keyframes are set to linear interpolation, not spline. Rotoscopes don't seem to have that property available. Last resort, edit as clip together that repeats the vid as many times as you need for your shot.

That character was made by Kevin Detwiler, one of my AnimationMentor classmates. He asked me to rig it for him and somewhere out there is his demo reel with a wonderful short he did with "Larry" for his final class project. Animated with Animation:Master, of course. I guess that would actually be the way the standard TSM2 fingers work with one bone for the whole finger. This example was the "advanced finger" option which divides the control between two bones.

demonstration: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=299043

The basic TSM2 rig controls, just in case you are confused by TSM2's non-use of nulls in the rig. TSM2ControlsH264.mov there are other nuances, but these are the basics.

Pixar made a lot of movies without any ambient occlusion, but they didn't do many shots like this either. Yeah, i think AO would help very much in a diffuse lighting situation like this. On the other hand, "morning" would have very strong, long shadows; this seems more of a midday shot.

Yup, you're missing something major since all those controls are in TSM2. It doesn't use nulls but bones are moved just like nulls. if you want a box around a bone just hit n to turn on the translate manipulator.

I might have a few notes but before I do, how about if you write a bit about what you feel is working well and what you feel is not? Now that you've had a moment to step back from it you probably have some observations.

TSM2 doesn't do the "face" rig so a symmetrical face isn't required. You brew your own face rig or adopt one from something someone else has developed. TSM2 supposes you have made you body symmetrical since it has that "Flipper" step that makes a symmetrical left hand copy of the bones. But if your left side is different you can just move the left bones into position like you did for the right ones initially. TSM Rigger ( the third step) usually doesn't care about symmetry.

If you need to temporarily turn on Pose A while making Pose B but don't want Pose B to actually key Pose A, then turn off the "Define Relationship" button while you turn on Pose A and the turn it back on while you are making your Pose B stuff. It's near the top and looks like two chain links.

Those look great. I'm surprised there's a big difference in rendering time since a hair with an image is basically a cookie cut image too.

And you can also find the models by looking on the CD in the models folder. top menu File>Open> browse to folder anything ending in .mdl is a model.

If it's genuinely inside the body it should not be a problem. Making it 100% transparent might be easier, however.