robcat2075

No, I think feathering the transparency is a brilliant trick! That does alot to make the backing geometry appear to match the cutout. Hard edge cutouts always look weird. Will remember that one! thanks!

You can set the number of divisions for distort boxes in the Options>modeling tab. The number of divisions you choose will depend on when you need to distort your model. Once you go into distort box mode it puts what looks like a box of splines around whatever you had "selected". You can drag the CPs of that box around individually or select and group them or use any other tool just like CPs in a model. As you distort the proportions of the box the original modle mesh enclosed by the box will follow that distortion. Q:Why is this different from moving the original model's CPs? A:The box has far fewer CPs than your model so it is easier to make broad curves over a complex mesh than if you had to adjust the complex mesh directly. While distort boxes do a good job of moving the CPS they aren't smart enough to adjust the biases between distant CPS to match the new broad curvatures. That's why distort works best on meshes with fairly regular splinage.

Your treatment of the curved corners has several awkward spline intersections. Here's a take on your shape created with the mesh flat first, the using a 3x3x3 distortion box to bend it on X and Y. It still has a few lumps in it but Porcelain.mat would make it very smooth. A Vern noted above, the splinage should be very regular for good distortion box results. Mine should have been more regular.

It's so smooth now that I think you're losing "weight". Anyway, I think ANY walk cycle is going to look weird after it's repeated exactly several times. But I agree with the several above about the toe needing to push off more into the next step. And the shoulders would benefit from a different treatment and... I know you're wanting to do realistic and not cartoon, but Richard Williams "Animator's Survival Kit" has a great big huge section on walks and he addresses just about everything that's probably bothering you about what you have so far. Geez, only $20 used on Amazon... that's a steal considering he used to charge people $1000 to listen to him say the same stuff in person. Are black socks in now?

Hey filipmun, That's a pretty good mashing machine model or whatever they call it. The fact that you rounded all the edges does alot for it. I think the one thing that's probably bothering you is the crease at the edges near the ends of the the box shapes. Technically, the four point patches you have on the tops of the boxes are legal but a four sided patch made out of only two splines is always going to be a problem Take a look at this post http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...indpost&p=53091 for another way of doing boxes with rounded edges. Once you resplined the boxes, I don't think you'd need to add much more geometry. I think you could add the tiny details (like rivets and metal plate seams) with bump maps.

I'd love to see this but all I get is a white screen. Does anyone know where I can get the VP3 codec for Quicktime 6.5? The VP3 site only has it for v5 and the link they have for "theora.org" to get VP3 for v6 doesn't really have anything about VP# at all. ?

Great head model! And it looks like you've got all the face controls well implemented. I think with a voice track like that you could go WAAAAYYYY bigger and still not be over doing it.

Well, I'm not an expert on this but...you'll notice the AM Rig has a pose to set "IK Arms Setup" to ON or OFF. IK ON is great because you can drag the hand around and the arm bones will pretty much follow without you needing to set them. But imagine a move like this: your hand starts down at your side, then moves up to your forehead to do a "salute". In real life you swing your arm to bring your hand up; your hand will travel in an arc made by your arm bones rotating from their joints. An IK hand, however, doesn't really know much about the bones connecting it to the body. It just wants to move straight from start to finish. The hand would slide up the leg, drag up the chest and scrape the face getting to the forehead. If you had four people in a phone booth trying to salute each other they might have to do it that way, but in general, no. With IK OFF, (aka FK, forward kinematics) you create the motion by rotating the bones at their joints, much like real life. Click on the bone, Hit R, and use the rotate manipulator rings to position the bone. I always start with the shoulder, then the elbow, then the hand. I act the pose out with my own arm to understand what each rotation needs to be. Because A:M is inbetweening rotations of bones instead of XYZ positions in space, the motion will usually be a nice natural arc. You could add intermediate keys to an IK move to simulate that arc. In my little "Mount" clip, the left hand had to be IK to stay fixed on the horse, so I added several keyframes to the hand motion to try to round it out. It's still pretty squarish though. And more keyframes=more hassle when you need to retime things. Some people, like ZachBG, have had success setting their arms to FK and dragging the hand as if it were IK . I have never gotten the hang of that. It's also possible to monkey with the bias of those IK keyframes to force better arcs. All that said, this isn't a glaring problem in JohnL3D's clip, but as he adds to the performance he might find that the FK approach would simplify things overall.

One thought: it looks like you're using IK arms, but in a situation like this where his hands never need to land on any external object, FK would be the choice. It does take longer to crane FK arms into any particular pose, but the inbetweens from pose to pose almost always looks more natural. But keep working on this one! It would be fun to see your performance for a whole line or verse even. I wish A:M gave access to the audio compression in Quicktime. I wonder why it doesn't?

Hey guys, thanks for the positive comments! These are my movies! No, I don't have a "big idea" that I'm burning to do yet. So, until that shows up, I'm chipping away at my basic animation skills which I think will need to get much better before I make anything that someone has to watch for more than 4 seconds. You don't even need your own character. Most of the entries just use the default skeleton their app has. You could use Thom or Shaggy (something that doesn't drag your real-time display down) and that would be more than enough. I should note that I've rerendered all of these for better lighting or anti-aliasing to show here. For the contest I'll usually just enter a hardware render or a 1-pass multi-pass since the motion is the issue and not the rendering.

Five more proud last-place finishes from the four-hour Animation Showdown! All in Quicktime Sor3: Faint (83Kb) An experiment in frame rate. Jaws of Life (164Kb) Opening something difficult to open. Mount (103Kb) I've retouched this one substantially since my original entry, mostly to adjust arcs. My Favorite Toy (183Kb) Don't Let It Out (123Kb) You can see my past entries on my Showdown Page. The Animation Showdown is a weekly challenge to put together a bit of character animation in a short span of time. It happens every Sunday/Monday at DigitalRendering.com>forum>showdowns where you can read all about it and join the fray.

Nice Canes! Since canes are extruded from a form, they probably have a little grain in the direction of the stripes. A bump map might get you that. And the red would always bleed a bit into the white. Something like this?

I think you've identified the key hassle, but I suppose all good modeling requires precision shaping. The only insight I might offer is to not do any bias tweaking until you've finalized your mesh. Live with the lumps until you're confident you have all the splines you'll need. Otherwise you end up redoing some biases several times. Also have good reference material (rotoscopes, diagrams, measurements...) to base your work on. like a gallery? I think one of the image contests was "mechanical" a while back. There are some tutorials on ARM under "inorganic". Some seem to be AWOL. Thanks! I was wondering if I had overstepped the bounds of good taste with all the speculars; most don't seem to be motivated by the one light in the scene.

Thank you, all, for the comments! Yeah, I gave up trying to stitch in the ribs on the top with splines. Too many smoothing problems for the surrounding patches. Same with the holes for the red buttons. Those ended up being booleans. Next stop, jiggly boobs and hair?

Sorry, no v11 hair or jiggly boobs here... just some plastic. I made this object several months ago for a Modeling Showdown but had to experiment with lighting quite a bit after that to make a nice render of it. Lots of specular-only lights. It's not an original design, it's modeled after one I have. Any ideas on a better way to do it?

That's quite good! Nice set too. And the off camera explosion works well also. He does have a bit of Harryhausen in him, maybe cause there's no motion blur? Looks cool!

Photoshop>Filter>Distort>Polar Coordinates is what I think you are referring to. It wraps and unwraps images around a center pont; one use of this is to paint out the "pinch" at the poles. This tut explains it: http://www.maxoncomputer.com/tutorial_deta...rialID=54&site= It can also convert 180° fisheye lens images into rectangular panoramas.

Hey... I recognize a Showdown entry in there! I concur with Rodney that the dino clip is the strongest. In fact I'd put it first. Every "insider" I've heard talk about demo reels says to put your best stuff first. "Steal Something" works well too, and the yellow guy with gun. Yeah 2nd and 3rd there. The fight scene has alot of complex interaction going on but it takes a bit too long to get going and has enough little weight/timing flaws to maybe lose an impatient viewer. (Apparently they are always impatient) The lip synch clips look stiffer than your non-talking stuff. They seem to be speaking without breathing. You might reverse the drawing samples too to put the most attractive ones first. Good stuff, I hope you get some interest!

aha! Now we can see. -The slight anticipation before the first sag is good. How about doing it also for the second one? -just for your own experimentation you might dabble with different timings on the sags. Fast, slow. Slow, fast. Fast, faster... None is "right" but each could give a different meaning. What's the most extreme timing you can give it and still have it work? -Generally when a character leans forward, he has to shift his hips back to keep his center of gravity balanced over his feet. By the end here he looks like he's out past his toes which would make him fall forward. -I'm not sure about the meaning of the side to side motion "Sad" is a complex thing, I'm sure the real animators could give you better pointers, but these are the things I notice when I look at this one. Also, check your compression. 6MB is huge for a clip this short.

Great looking creature! possible theories on the walk cycle: - as I frame through it, there is almost no change between frame 25 (end of loop) to frame 1, just the foot and a finger move a little. At the same part of the opposite side of the walk cycle (12-13-14) the whole body is in motion at least a little bit. The apparent freeze from 25-1 is awkward. I tried clipping out frame 25 and the result was detectably smoother. - the right hand (claw?) doesn't seem to be easing into and out of it's extremes. The left side has a more natural motion to it(although I can only see one extreme in this view). -the shoulders seem to be synched with the arms rather than leading them. - a slower gate overall with less arm swing might help the impression of weight, but I don't know how big he is. He may very well be a Happy Troll! Again, a very impressive character.

No, your characters look quite promising! However... collaborative projects (especially large ones) are exceedingly difficult to recruit for, hold together, and bring to completion unless the leader has an established record of accomplishment in such projects. Since forever. I've been part of several collaborative projects; only one* has yielded a finished piece. I imagine other people on this list have been thru the same? So, do a good job on your project here, and next time around you may attract more interest. *plug: see Duck Sauce on AM Films

I know you're looking for "animation" comments, but I'm lazy, and I look at things in terms of "what's the least I can do to make this better?" One really easy mod would be to pick a different camera angle: 3/4 or side view, rather than head on. This would show off the change in pose better. Yes, we can tell he's slouching, but a side view would make it more obvious. Obvious is good in most cases. It's almost always better to have your motion happening across the plane of the screen rather than into it or out of it. This goes to the Frank & Ollie concept of "Staging": "presenting an idea so it is instantly and unmistakeably clear." A side view would give us a better "silhouette". And then, once the pose is presented clearly it gets easier to troubleshoot everything else like timing or arcs, or things we aren't catching right now because we can't quite see them. that's my amateur .01 Good start! Don't stop!

Wow! I can practically hear her peeling out! One little thing... the effortless opening of the door seems out of place compared the weight you've established for everything else in this shot. I suppose you could claim it's an automatic door. But it could be more cartoony if she raised her hand on the approach, paused slightly, then slapped it open. Just a thought. And great models too.

cool stuff guys! Really. "Match Move Artist" used to be a very complicated job in effects houses. I remember going to a panel on special effects for some movie and they showed shots they had to give up on because no one could get the match move right. This looks like it obsoletes a big chapter in Doug Kelly's "Compositing in Depth." Does Cinepaint do things that After Effects doesn't?

Wunderbar! Eine sehr schöne Fernsehenwerbung! Warum gibt es englisch... "No Bisc, No Fun!"... es ist ein Witz?