robcat2075

Today Germany... tomorrow Hollywood!

ok, you've got me curious. But don't give away the surprise ending.

for superimposed logos you could make an image with an alpha channel and use it as a rotoscope in A:M. Free. Create credit text in a paint program as well and import them into A:M. Not what you're trying to do?

I've been to Las Vegas; those fountains were a highlight. Yes, there are many things that one might tweak, but it's a charming piece you've shared with us. Thanks!

Welcome back! Nice looking stuff. make sure you have the right key filter enabled and the "Animate" button ON.

Hey I enjoyed watching that. I got a little lost in the middle, but it was clear again in the end.

It is so cool that you can take the same tools we're all using and come up with something so different. Such great characters! Keep going!

I feel kinda bad about Shaggy getting shot in the back by a helicopter.

It's going to look like a doberman with horns until you put the "goatee" on him

Nice shovels. I sense an "American Gothic" parody coming.

charming character!

And the IK Spine makes posing much esier. AFAIK AM2001 spine is just a simple FK spine. It's great that A:M is powerful enough that most novices can put a rig of some sort in by following a tutorial, and if someone has great new ideas for rigging A:M is a perfect laboratory for them. But TSM is about getting you past simple rigging and into real animating ASAP. All the things you learn about rigging while rigging really shed no light on how to animate well, so for me, the less time spent rigging, the better. And just to elaborate on why this is handy... suppose you've made a character and rigged him. then you decide you want to make a variation of the character with longer legs and a shorter torso. Stretching the mesh... not too hard, but adjusting the completed rig into that stretched mesh... huge hassle. Much easier to adjust the basic skeleton bones and run TSM on them to properly put in all the invisible control bones that you'd have to srot through and rescale in a fully rigged model. And suppose you decide to change the smartskin on a joint. It's easy to go back to your basic skeleton model (where you were supposed to do the smartskin anyway) then rerun TSM on it. You can adjust smartskin on a fully rigged model, but most people get confused and mess it up.

One other thing... I'm wondering if using expressions for Squetch is too limiting, too specific. Would rigging a character with distortion boxes maybe give a more generalized solution that could be squetched in any direction as needed?

Uh lets see... I'm not expecting that if i animate in FK that if I later switch to IK the pose of the arm will not change, that would be tough (although...) But when I switch to IK I'd like the hand to go to wherever the IK controller is, not be offset by what ever distance the FK bone was from the IK bone. Does that sound like what you thought I said? When I'm animating in IK if I want to position the hand I need to drag the wrist null to the location and then switch to the hand bone to set the orientiation. Why divide the translation and rotation between two different controllers? They are not conflicting properties so it makes sense to combine them in one bone since they are both about posing that hand.

no moat?

Hey Zach, cool shot. I think we need to be clued in on the helicopter/bomb thing sooner though. Any chance of having the helicopter approach more from behind rather than from the left so it can be seen earlier?

It's cute! There's a doubled frame every 5 frames. Why is that?

That's cute. Are you going to rotoscope his head back in over Shaggy?

I like #1. what's causing the grit on the side of the sphere? I suppose you could work up animated maps for the layers to make some cool cloud movement.

I'm not understanding something in this question.... for example there's a bone that moves the wrist in XYZ space and therefore takes the hand orienting bone with it. Why not combine the positioning and orienting into one bone? HAve the hand orienting bone be draggable and take the wrist along with it. Every extra bone means a longer and longer list of bones to keep track of in the PWS, which is tedious to sort thru and also dimishes the possibility of having all the keyed bones visible in the PWS at once. If we had folders for bones, that might be less important, but we got no folders. Once you key a bone it starts taking up space in the timeline. Anyway, that's one reason for combining functions. The other is that it does take time to switch between bones and it's non-intutitve to have to use two bones to control one thing. Another new thing I notice is that if I animate an arm in FK for a bit and then switch to IK, the hand is offset from the IK controller bones. That's weird.

Hey David, this look's like real interesting stuff. I've been curious about what you were cooking up here but haven't had time until now to load Squetchy Tom up. I dont understand it all yet, but a couple of Q's: - is it really necessary to have the bone that positions the wrist be different from the one that orients the hand? In TSM I like the fact that they are the same bone and in AM2001 I hate the fact that they are different. Likewise notions for the feet. - I made a squetchy ball that allowed the orientation of the squetch to be in any arbtrary direction. Could Tom's head be rigged in such a manner? The vertical squetch is useful for vertical motions, but if he was rapidly swinging his head from side to side we might want to elongate his head sideways. -How long would it take to put this in a new character? (Ok, that's three questions) -When I stretch his chest target up his waist line actually goes down. That seems off. (Yeah, that wasn't a question) But really interesting work. My AnimationMentor mentor for the last quarter was Jason Ryan who's been doing all sorts of squetchy stuff on Chicken Little. This looks like it has similar possibilities.

Reminds me of the Fanny Brice song "Second Hand Rose". She looks wonderful. Can't wait to see the movie.

Much of this is working well, but perhaps I can add a few comments -Move the camera closer. Don't leave so much unused space in a test like this. It makes it hard to examine. - I plotted the motion of the hips with dots on the pic attached. The vertical motion of the figure is generally well motivated by the action of the legs and the force of gravity. - However, the red dots are parts where the horizontal motion slows down without any application of force to explain it. Likewise, the green dots are places where it speeds up; again without a visible reason. You might perhaps explain this as a result of the center of gravity not really being in the hips, but still, it's an awkward visible result. - This makes for somewhat unnatural looking motion thru the peaks his hops, pointed at by (C ). - you also have a tendency to come to a halt at the bottom of your anticipations which seems to negate the action(B ). - related to that is the rather odd path for the first anticipation (A). A simple U-shaped motion probably would have served better. But overall, it's a promising test and I'm sure you have gained much from it.

Hey, it is immediately recognizable as an ape! So far, so good! Better splining, as mentioned above, will help greatly in furthering it.

Hi Zach, Interesting experiment. And a worthwhile one to not use a "cycle". It is exceedingly difficult to assess the motion from the camera angle we have. I've only done one run cycle. You've seen it. So I'm just brainstorming here: - Unless he's fifty feet tall (or on a low gravity planet) I think his gait is to slow. - His feet are very stiff. overlapping motion on the toes would add much here. - In fact ,I'm not sure his toes are even bending to avoid penetrating the ground on the push off. - The side to side distance between the feet is probably larger than a real runner might do. - My general feeling is that the faster we move, the smoother our repetitive motions become. It's an inertia thing. So I think the z-rotation on the hips is happening too suddenly, and lingering too long before it reverses. Likewise the torso. If those bone's channels resembled sine waves they would probably be closer to what they should be. - in some runs and many walks the hips can shift over the weight bearing foot, but I think it's happening too late in this case. (The "shift" may be an illusion caused by the sudden z rotation, now that I examine it closely. Hard to tell) - there is something weird going on with the hands. They seem to be turned a very unlikely angles.