robcat2075

yeah, sorry. pic [attachmentid=20952] the fewer splines you use, the smoother it will be.

My first impression is that you don't need nearly that many splines running up and down to define the shape of that windshield. A broad curve like that needs only a few. Very quick example, based on your rotoscope. With adjustment it could be made perfect and the black parts deleted. The windshield doesn't need to have rounded corners since the roof and side pillars will overlap its edges windshield.zip

Just slow that down about 100 x and I think you'll have some genyoowine experimental animation.

When rigging characters, ON/OFF is usually the way to go. Usually when you add an "orient like" or "translate to" you should press the "compensate Mode" button (at the top) before you click onthe target. remember to turn that rigging pose ON (in the pose slider window) when you are in the action or chor.

A four-headed dragon... just another day in Russia! Great looking stuff!

That's a good question. I don't have a good answer. I think some of it is in overlapping motion; never letting a set of bones move as a rigid unit. And I think some of it is never letting any or all of the character become frozen in space; keeping it moving, even if it's just a few pixels over a stretch of frames. Those are things I spent a lot of time on, trying to keep moving and yet still holding some clear poses without floating thru them. The assignment ran nine weeks. Six weeks doing the body motion and then three more adding facial animation. I found myself putting in from 20-60 hours each week. That and rigging the character at the same time pretty much wore me out. I'm still putting my enthusiasm back together. For the process curious, I've added a file in the first post that shows the animation's state at each week over that stretch.

Maybe trying to do it all-at-once the first time out is too much. Actually, no one tries to do it all at once. people do that. I really prefer animating inthe Chor instead of using actions. "The Show some backbone tut" shows you how to put a rig in your character. If you want to mess around with animation before you get your character done, load up one of the characters on the CD. "Thom" is a good one to start with. Put him in the chor. move some bones. make some key frames. See what happens.

That looks good. Is the light at the top an array or is it an opening to a skydome? sounds like a job for a diffuse map.

That's a fun looking face! It reminds me of a classic cartoon "sun" that looks down upon cartoon landscapes. It just needs some "rays" emanating from it. I think the teeth may be a bit too anatomical... have you considered maybe a simpler white band?

Great tut. Victor did a 2 1/2 hour lecture on this stuff for AnimationMentor. And that was just the first half.

Hey that looks cool! A bit of rumpling on the top fender near the head light. how can we get rid of that?

Thanks for all your kind comments! Yes, I'll try to put a post together explaining it. My version was designed around TSM2 but I'm sure it could be adapted to other rigs. But in a word... fanbones. Fanbones upon fanbones. Yes. I'm probably the only person who thinks these things are funnier with the strobing. The animationMentor character had many controls that we typically don't implement on our A:M characters. For example, the inside, middle, and outside each eyelid can be raised/lowered separately to shape the contour. It's all aimed at being able to give a fleshy appearance to the face instead of a rigid one. I estimate there were about 70+ controls for the face which I understand is low compared to a modern studio character. I came pretty close to emulating all of them on my version although this was my first time out trying to rig a face and not all of it worked as well as I had hoped. I made a better implementation of this scheme on a character I recently rigged for a classmate of mine. When he's ready to uncloak his project I'll see if I can show the face works here. Maybe Pixar just thought they were first. I had read an interview with a Pixar person who said they had something called "bend bow" to alter the lines of their characters. But they didn't explain it or give any pictures so it may have had nothing to do with limb bending. If you want to appear as one of the cognoscenti you really have to say something like "well, that was pretty good... but I think you need to..." Thanks again, everyone, for looking at my animation!

wonderful images. Very cinematic.

hmmm... I'm on a PC and the clips barely play. Very stuttery. Wonder why that is.

Yes, I had to remake them to do my assignments in A:M. not to worry. Unless you completely failed that California Intelligence Test, you're in. I took a look a Lady G. She definitely needs some reboning. In her hands I mean. you can see a long ago discussion of the same problem on Woot : http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...amp;hl=knuckles That's not your fault. That's a rigging issue.

Well, I can't complain for just few hours work! I think you have some good body-language poses going there. "nervous" is hard to do. This is not the fault of your animation, but something seems off about Lady Goodbody's fingers. They seem to be making some odd shapes. Maybe they are not jointed in the right spot? Or maybe it is the pose. Hard to tell from here.

holes for the grill? there's a darksim texture that makes holes just like that. called metalholes.dsts oddly enough. or you could make a transparency map in a paint program so the holes would be in any arrangement you like. If you tiled the map you'd only need to make a few holes.

The first time I tried to download it I didn't see that there was a 30 second counter that had to expire before the download began. (it's in tiny type). And then when it does begin it will be in the browser window instead of a "save as" file, so that's easy to miss also. So... if anyone is trying to download it, that page does work, it just doesn't look like it will when you first get there. Leave the page open for a while.

Cute animation! I wish that was in Quicktime so I could step through it and make some suggestions. But I can make one general one... I think the reason it looks stiff to you is that there's almost no overlapping action. When he moves forward, all of him moves forward as a unit. everypart is reaching their keys at the same time. And when he moves back same thing, every part is reaching the new pose at the same time. When you can break that up, it helps to make things look less mechanical. Animators spend alot of time breaking things up.

There are free 3rd party plugins for OBJ and 3DS i know. Some other formats may be possible by intermediate programs. Some of the game makers here could tell you better than I. However, good looking polygonal models in such formats tend to have very dense meshes and much editing would be needed after you import them to turn them into good spline models. It is not a direct 1:1 conversion as say, OBJ to 3DS might be. Also very large polygonal models may not import at all. Modeling in A:M is not hard once you understand the strategy. wav for sure. midi no you can set the project fps to any whole number. one second will always play in one second, but you can set how many frames make up one second. 24 is typical.

may be a Mac/PC thing. On a PC it's CTRL-drag

project. May not open correctly in versions before 10.5 ease.zip

Post a wire frame of your sack and someone will jump in to tell you how to fix it. If you want your character to get to the end of his path at a certain time (say, 04:00). use the "ease" property of the path constraint. Set it to 0% when he's supposed to start moving and set it to 100% when he's supposed to get to the end. You could have him stop in the middle by useing ease too. Set it to 50% at 02:15 and at 03:00 and he will stop half-way from 02:15 to 03:00. [attachmentid=20713] BTW, I did this in V10.5. AM 2002 may look different but the path constraint should still have an ease property you can set like this.

Hey, that was wonderful! You should finish that. The great thing about democracy is that the politicians never get any better so you can probably bring this out for the next election and it will still work. Whatever it's saying...

I'm presuming it doesn't do that in V11. Does it? Good looking scene otherwise. I think the buildings out side the window look like they are too close, though.