robcat2075

Can you explain more about how what you want differs from what you got so far?

That's a great looking Yoda! I actually studied for a quarter under a guy who animated some Yoda in the Episodes 2 and 3, although he only mentioned it in passing. Charles Alleneck. Look for his name in ILM movies. I like the fact that you avoided a lot of arbitrary arm waving. That would have been very un-yoda like. Dhar has identified the big issue, sometimes called "isolated movement". In real life it's just about impossible to move one part of the body and not affect the ones connected to it (and the ones connected to those, and the ones connected to those...) just moving a hand or head will cause the spine to slightly shift, to maintain balance and/or in reaction to the force of moving that body part. I'd also suggest staging this from a 3/4 view rather than head on. As if he's talking to someone off to the side of the frame. It will be easier to do small hand gestures and small spine movements and make them look good.

Welcome to A:M! -do all the exercises in the booklet so you have a basic framework to understand the program. -the forum is a good place to ask specific questions. -think small for your project

I think a big part of it is that small-scale, local advertisers don't have the budgets to support animation. Even if an ad is seen only locally it wil still be viewed with and compared with national ads and that suggests a certain minimum level of production value that has to be met.

The tail does help make him more dog-like. Would a shorter torso help him? Although I recall the lion in "Madagascar" having very blockish fingers and paws, so it can work.

That's looking good Dhar. The semi-realistic head is going to make his body seem more naked than "Bishop" who has a quite unrealistic head. Rigging the face to get the control you're seeking will be your biggest challenge I think.

A lot of A:M modeling is about thinking a little ahead about what you really need: thinkaheadMP4.mov

If you had a straight side view and front view, those would be helpful to you. But once you get A:M you'll definitely want to do all the exercises in the booklet that comes with it. Those will answer many questions that are probably occurring to you now. Welcome to A:M!

Wonderful scene. Put it over at CGtalk if no one has suggested it yet.

And posting a wire frame of the spot you're having trouble with will usually bring someone in with a specific suggestion.

I don't get how they help you see the volume of your model. Either you've put modeled a shape or you haven't. These edge loops reside on the surface of the model, right? Where the polygons already are, right?

That looks like you know what you are doing. I don't see any obvious outrages. That long, skinny five point patch above the corner of the mouth might end up being a crease problem. Five-pointers like to be fat and flat.

based on that article, would I be wrong to say that splines already do what edge-loops do? It looks like the strategy for placing edge loops is the similar to placing splines?

It has to do with the "bias" of your animation channels. quick primer on Channel Bias channelbiasmp4.mov

Online updates don't include them. get it in ftp://ftp.hashmirror.com/pub/updates/windows/Am2007/ master.chm is the file you put in the same directory as your master.exe file

under Tools>Customize>Commands>Tools you can actually drag the icon from the tab to any tool panel in A:M

That's quite effective. I presume you're not going to go the toon-render route?

There is the complete stuff under "Help". If one studiously read thru all of that, one would at least get a mention of everything.

The channel filters are the buttons near the bottom left of A:M. The first three are blue boxes with arrows around them. Hover your cursor over them and they have labels like "Key Skeletal Translations"... "Key Skeletal Scale"... The first eight control what aspects get keyed if you force a keyframe. If you have none of them set, no keys will be made at all. Click on the red-green-blue icon at the bottom of the PWS timeline window to actually see these channels. You can reshape them there like splines. the last three (Bone, Branch, Model) control how much of the model gets keyed when you force a keyframe. A single bone, the bone and all of its children, or the whole model. One is always "on". Each of those is modified by choosing the "only pre-existing.." or the "all filtered channels..." options discussed above. you move a bone "manually" by selecting it and moving it with your mouse, like when you pose a character.

Edsels?

If you put everything in the book that could be in the book you'd have a book that was about five feet thick.

in the properties panel of the path constraint you can set the "ease" percentage to any value on any frame. You could set it to stay the same while you want him to idle. You can also edit the ease visually in the channels.

Those are wonderful looking drawings. Translating those to 3D will be an ambitious project. I'll look forward to seeing the results.

After a quick look, the problem seems to be your knee targets. they are down by the ground when they should be in front of the character. the knees are doing the best they can to point at them but that's going to be backwards sometimes where the targets are now. Go to the modeling bones window and move them waaaayyyy in front of the feet. Just that made the walk cycle 100% better when I tried it.

This won't do ANYTHING unless there is a pre-existing keyframe on that bone ("Pre-existing" means there is one already), which you haven't mentioned doing before this. (forcing a keyframe "only in channels that pre-exist" really means that no new channels will be created where none existed before. If a bone wasn't keyframed before this (which is what gives it channels) it won't get keyframes now with the "Pre-exist " option. There are only two ways to create a keyframe on a bone that hasn't been keyframed yet 1-select it and physically move it in the animation window. This is easy. The drawback is that you will only get channels for the kind of moving you did. If you only translated it you will only get translation channels. If you only rotated it you will only get rotation channels. YOu 'd have to do both to get both. Easy on one bone, but a hassle if you want to key several bones at once, which is why we do.... 2-turn on the single bone filter ("Key Bone", not "Key Branch", not "Key Model"). Turn on the channel filters you want; for most animation that will be just translate, rotate and maybe scale. CTRL-select the several bones you want to force a key on. SHIFT-forcekeyframe, and choose the "all filtered" option. All those selected bones will get keyframed on all the channels you wanted. IF you want to use the "key branch" or or "key model" options later, choose "only pre-exist" when you force a keyframe or you'll get keys on bones you had never intended to get keys on. moving a bone will create a keyframe automatically, which is why you don't have to use the force keyframe button very often. Forcing a keyframe is useful when you want to keyframe a bone in the same place that a previous keyframe had left it and make the bone remain stationary from the first keyframe to the new time you're at now before moving to a new position. Like when you want a foot to stay in place before it moves. "key branch" and "key model" are useful when you want to do that to many bones at once rather than having to do each bone separately.