robcat2075

It's not a BAD bouncing ball. He's really close on a lot of it. I don't mark him off for not using squetch. The first assignment you get in animation school is to do a bouncing ball with no squetch and that may very well be the intention here. It's hard to make the contact with the ground look solid without squash but there are certain objects like bowling balls and coconuts that you'll need to drop on some one someday and they never squash even in the floppiest of universes. So we won't worry about squash. Several of you are on the right track with comments about the speed of the bounces or "hang time" or the gravity going away. Any one of those bounces from one contact to the next might be an OK motion for a ball to travel thru. We have no idea about the scale of the ball or the distance it's dropping. But if we count frames on these bounces we find some things that just can't be. To simplify, I counted the frames it took for the ball to drop from the peak of each arc to the ground and came up with these 6 6 5 5 5 5 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 1 (btw, the time going up should equal the time going down in each arc) So we have quite a few drops that are taking the exact same length of time to happen. For example drops 3, 4, 5, and 6 all take 5 frames to hit the ground. They are falling from progressively lower distances and yet take the same amount of time to reach the ground. In fact, drop 6 falls from 1/3 the height that drop 3 fell from. It's as if gravity is reducing for each bounce. That starts to look weird after a bounce or two even if you don't count frames. One solution would be to have the ball bounce height decay much less so the ball was rising to and falling from about the same height each time. But if he wants to decay the bounce as much as he does, the lower bounces will need to happen faster than they do. Which means he's going to run out of bounce much sooner. Which means he might want to start from a much higher height so he has more time on that first bounce to shave frames from on the later bounces. Somewhat related, there are several brief stretches where the balls speed is rather linear... it's moving the same distance from one frame to another, particularly as it nears or leaves the ground. That can't be. A ball falling will cover more and more vertical distance on succeeding frames and a ball rising after a bounce will always cover less and less distance on succeeding frames. On the plus side, he's got the horizontal motion of the pretty well down. It moves steadily forward regardless of how fast the ball is rising or falling. A lot of people will have the ball slowing in mid air at the top of the arc. And the arcs seem to be pretty good parabolas. The beginnings and ends might be a little straightish but it's hard to tell when the distance covered in each bounce is so small. The spin of the ball is an issue. It looks OK initially but in the last few bounces it doesn't seem related to the ground contacts. But you'd really want to get the basic bouncing motion of the ball right before you tried to fix the spin. (Real balls can spin in an unintuitive manner. A superball can actually reverse spin on a bounce if you toss it right) Now these may seem like very small points, but small points are all that "bouncing ball" has. There's no story, or dialog or posing, or staging issues. You just need to get the basic physics right, and if you can't do it on a bouncing ball you probably won't get it on all the bounce-like things a character has to do like walking or running or falling down or tossing something or just dropping their hands to their side. Mastering the basic physics of falling or bouncing objects goes a long way to making your characters seem to have real weight when they move. Thanks for all your participation and comments!

That looks like you've go the spline continuity thing figured out! One item... most rigs presume you model the "palms" down rather than forward like you have. That may or may not be a major issue, but something to keep an eye out for.

Since your character has human legs you may find these vids on walks helpful post #180 Also the general strategy on quadruped walks is that the rear foot contacts the ground right after the front foot lifts off in front of it.

Ok, I'll make that next weeks target. If you can render a clip that includes a side view that will help people analyze it.

I don't know that there are any dancing actions made, but there may quite a bit of motion capture files out there on that. It is possible to attach an A:M character to Mocap data. Somewhere on this forum is some info on using mocap and some links to free mocap sites.

It seems to be another occurence of this problem that Steffen has described try this... momia_George_ok_v_15X.zip

Adam's apple control... we've been forgetting that one too.

I seem to recall that Flash comes with example FLV players that include volume control. Alternatively: Flashkit.com search on "volume control"

Now, don't get all riled up guys , it's just a bouncing ball.

Wunderbar!

Welcome to A:M! A:M really works best with models made in A:M. As Gerry noted, the difference between A:M patches and the polygons that other programs use is pretty significant. It is possible to import a .3DS file but they are rarely built in the same way that A:M models are so they usually aren't very useful. Models of characters tend to be overly complex. The .3DS import option was mainly intended for simpler objects that don't need to be animated like characters are. The usual way to import a .3DS file is to do File>plugins>import>3D Studio then choose the file. If it works it may take a long time to finish. Some 3DS files may not work. But i'll note again that character models are usually bad candidates for importing. They are almost impossible to rig and animate. If you're new to 3D you don't want to make this your first project. It would be too frustrating. Another way to import 3DS files is to right-click on the Objects folder in the ProjectWorkSpace and choose Import>Prop This tends to look better than the first method but this "prop" version can't be rigged or edited. it's intended for simple objects like furniture of something a character might hold in his hand. Have you tried the introductory exercises in "The Art of A:M" yet? It really is more fun making your own models in A:M than using someone else's.

You really ought to have several vultures in that tree singing for that shot.

See if you can figure out what has gone wrong here: bouncingBallX.mov Hint: it's about gravity. Don't worry, it's not by anyone from this forum.

Show a shaded render with "Show bones" ON and make sure the character is selected so his bones are visible. What bone (exact name) did you constrain the sword to? It looks like you've constrained the sword to the IK hand target and are pulling that target away from the body.

Did you get this one working?

look at the chor. See how the color and ambience of each group is keyframed. That's all there is to it.

10 minute version of warpcore warpcore.mov warpcore.zip

You mean the pulsating rings? make a set of rings and you can keyframe the color and ambient intensity for each one individually, to make them pulse in sequence.

Welcome to A:M! Ideal? faster and more is always better. I had 1 G Ram and an Athlon 3200XP and was pleased, but that was with Win2000. I understand WinXP and Vista use more RAM so I think 2Gigs might be a better minimum today. Expensive video cards do not greatly affect performance in A:M. If you buy the CD version ($299) you can take that CD to as many computers as you want to install and run. A:M needs the CD to be in the drive every time you start it. After it is started you can take the CD out. The download version ($79) is locked to one computer. Also, it expires in one year; the CD doesn't. Sounds like you'd be more comfortable with the CD version which doesn't involve online registration. The online download version does use online registration.

I like Thom's guitar playing. Don't know how he does that without fingers!

I watched all three, those are wonderful spots. Too bad about the snail, bosses are lame.

in your render options choose a render format that supports alpha channels (targa sequence, or "Animation" codec in Quicktime) and turn Alpha ON under Buffers

Earthquake! You could also render her with an alpha channel for a cleaner composite (than greenscreen) if your editing software supports such things.

try this... Tools>Options>Rendering tab> Quality Shaded Show back facing polys ON Every patch has a direction ("normal") and if it's facing away from the camera it won't show up in shaded mode if "Show back facing polys" is OFF. You can also flip a patch(es) by selecting it, right clicking and choosing "Flip normals" normal direction is important for particle effects, porcelain material and five-pointers, which must match the patches around them.

I noticed that the character pauses at each step but the object is moving continuously. You can still translate constrain the object to the character's hips (or torso) even if you have IK hands constrained to the object. Then the object will move like the character is moving.