robcat2075

I think i got V4 in 1997 maybe, but just fiddled with it. I used V5 quite a bit, but then Flash happened so I somewhat sat out v6,7,8,and 9. Last year, looking at a long Christmas break with nothing to do, I decided to give it one more try and have been dabbling with it since then.

I'll put away my train wreck helmet and say I'm proud to have been a small part of it. It was very flattering to be asked to join in, particularly since I had not demonstrated the ability to do more than four or five seconds of animation in a week. Perhaps Zach was just desperate. None-the-less it fulfilled a long-time goal of mine that I might some day good enough to be asked to work on someone else's project. I can't help but think that if we had roped in even just one more animator we would have made the 48 hour mark. It was exciting trying. Fence-sitters: you missed out. I'm sure some people will sniff at this because it's not ultra detailed and textured 3D. Screw them. I'm very impressed by the script Zach et al. produced in no time at all. I know people who are actually employed as writers who couldn't crank out a genre parody with all the elements in two months, never mind two hours. And I am most envious that Zach has such a creative entourage of friends that can contribute to his projects. My friends think they're being creative if they replace their avocado refrigerator with a stainless steel one.

That looks like a lot of good detail work and will probably really come to life with some aged textures on it. I'm not sure what is holding the barrel up, though, is there some part still to be modeled or am i just not interpreting the picture right?

This weeks four-hour animation topic was "Swim." Any old swim. I was still frazzled from ZachBG's animation fire drill last weekend, so I made this as relaxing as possible. See it on my Showdown Page.

Thanks, all, for the positive feedback! Actually four hours is a good time frame for me, I have a hard time staying focused after that. But the thing that is killing me on these is getting the overlapping motions to look right. Shamed confession: it's really a dynamic constraint simulation. But it's free animation and I'll take it! It does help glide through the awkward pauses. Many thanks to the Hash programmer who devised that doodad! If there were any real work ... I'm think it's just going to be a hobby. But i would encourage anyone interested in character animation to do the animation showdown at digitalrendering.com. They're really the same sort of exercises you'd get in an animation class and much of the same feedback, usually blistering. I imagined it, then practiced it on a milk crate to test out where everything would have to be flung for it to work. (That one took an extra three hours to completely animate the boxes falling and bouncing on the ground.) One of the criticisms on the Showdown forum was that it looked too much like a circus performer.

Actually the Showdown topic was "Injured Walk" but my 3D thesaurus says that's lame. See it on my Showdown Page.

I believe ( I don't have A:M up to check) this has something to do with "ease" Add your first action, then set the "ease" in the properties for the path constraint to 0% at the beginning and 100% at the end Then when you add your second action, the first one's duration on the path won't get changed. I think...

thanks, guys! It was a stuntfish. Yeah, this is a case where reference footage would be really helpful to study. Couldn't get the dog to balance the fishbowl for me, though. The cat said he'd try but I think he had another agenda. I hear there's a pill for that now, but the ads say animation lasting more than four hours requires prompt medical attention.

I think the thing you most need to improve is... the compression! Seriously, 4 megs for a 4 second clip is way, way huge. Do this next time -render to targas -right click their icon in the PWS -choose Save Animation As... -choose to save it as a Quicktime movie -click "compression" -choose Sorenson 3 -set quality to high -Keyframe every 120 frames -limit data rate to 80KB/second (that's a very high setting) Those settings got your clip down to a tenth of it's original size; it could be slimmed much more. lightclap.mov

I've not tried really good eyes yet; there seem to be many different tactics. But the A:M matrix has some things that might get you started http://www.lowrestv.com/arm/search3.asp?So...esc&keyword=eye You should also do a search in some other 3D software's forums, since the techniques will probably be applicable. http://www.cgtalk.com/

This weeks opus for the four-hour animation showdown. The topic was "juggling." I've re-rendered it here for motion blur and an extra bounce at the end. And mood music. See it on my showdown page - QT Sorenson3 181KB

The big sweep seems much improved from the last version i saw. So how many hours on this clip so far?

I think that's a cool "graphic" title sequence spider. I hope the thespians love it. The quick drop doesn't bother me at all. Don't change it.

No, don't confuse Zach with me... his was much better!

Walking a "Tightrope" was the topic this week. But my guy ended up looking more like he's waiting for some clown on a trapeze to take him out. See it on my showdown page (QT 95K Sorenson3) My "plan" was to break up the walking action with these "unbalanced" poses, but I never got them to work together and in hindsight, that was too much of a "make animation" solution and not enough of a "character animation" solution.

I really admire that piece. Quite Snappy! -What part of the production process is "imposing"? -I think you might have saved on rendering time by not doing fields. (I always felt field rendering detracted from a film-like look.) -Here in the USA the client would probably come back and say "less bottle... more phone number!" Or they'd be afraid someone might sue them after trying to use a bottle of water to make an emergency phone call. Great work!

thanks for the positive comments, guys! He pulled through, but there may be a lawsuit against the rec league. I confess, that was a late addition.

Yes, it's official... a new record... the least amount of screen time I've completed in any of my Showdown entries! Yesterday's topic was Running Catch. I ran out of time before I finished the running part. But the good news is it won't take long to download. See it at my Showdown Page. (QT Sorenson 70K) For this render I've added a background prop.

I think "balance" is going to be an issue for any martial arts topic. Tony Lower-Basch started a great set of martial arts related motion tuts at his Dojo Project. Rigs have advanced some since he wrote them but the things he says about motion still apply today. Give them a look!

Thanks. That's because they are IK. Because I was lazy. Because I only had a little time left to do this shot and because I knew I wanted it to start and end with the hands in exact locations and because I always find it maddeningly slow craning FK arms into exact locations. In hindsight, there are spots in between where I could have switched to FK and done the waving motion better. I'll keep that notion in mind for future outings. Dynamic Constraint. I'd like to find a way to make it move more slowly, as if it were more damped by air resistance. Changing the "stiffness" doesn't get me that. But for "free animation" it's working pretty well.

Well, not because it's the best example, and not because it's the clearest example, but just because it's mine and you get what you pay for around here... First go to my Showdown page and download "Save me!". Ok, get it up in your quicktime player. We're gonna use the cursor keys to go thru it one frame at a time. In Frame 1 Mr. Alien is stranded on a desert island looking down at the sand. He's gonna glance up to see a boat in the distance. But wait! Step forward and you'll see his head actually goes down in frames 25-27 before it goes up in frames 28-32. That was an anticipation. That little contrary move (a) got the audiences attention and (b ) made the whole thing seem snappier. He does another anticipation in frames 55-57 before standing all the way up in frame 61. Look at his hands. They don't finish moving until frame 63. That's overlapping motion. It (a) shows his hands aren't just sticks glued to the end of his arm and (b ) helps avoid that robotic everything-arriving-at-the-same-time look. In real life your hands are moved by your arms, so when your arms move, your hands follow and have to catch up. (And when I say "real life" I mean real life that's been exaggerated ) Next skip over all that crappy waving motion. Go to when the camera angle changes to a "long shot". He's jumping to get the boat's attention. See how he crouches way down before he jumps? That's my excuse for squash. And once he leaves the ground... the way his arms are pointing way up and his legs are pointing way down? Yup, that's stretch. But don't spend too much time looking at my animation. What you really need to do now is try some thing yourself. First, do exercise #3 in "The Art of A:M" to learn what the A:M rig is about. Then use Thom off the CD (because he's already rigged too) and do something simple with him, like a broad jump. Post it in this WIP forum and ask people what they'd do to improve it. Save the walk cycle stuff for later. It's great demo of A:M features but walk cycles involve alot of complicated animation issues. Start simple. OK, no excuses not to be animating now...

Save me! was the topic at the animation showdown on wednesday. Or character was stranded on a desert island and had to get the attention of passing ship or plane. Since then I've reworked some of the animation, and added gratuitous lighting and materials. In other words, this looks nothing like what i had going at the four hour deadline. See it on my showdownpage

How about this? Those basic principles haven't really changed in 70 years. These FREE 2D tutorials here have alot of great, useful stuff in them. All the things they're saying about their silly pencil-drawn bouncing balls and floppy cartoon characters also apply to our very serious 3D bouncing balls and we-wish-they-were-half-as-floppy CG characters... http://cartoonster.com/ and even better http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/index.htm and there's a zillion more like those out there if you search on the web.

Sorry! Completely missed that you were on a Mac. Quicktime is really a great cross-platform thing, but it's gotten so huge lately that it's getting tough to convince PC users to download and install it. MPEG-1 is a "safe" choice, but its almost as old as Cinepak and will never be as small as QT Sorenson. I've seen a few MPEG-4 clips floating around here, but they've looked bad or were excessively large. Real and Flash are Mac possibilities, but they're not free. I guess that's like how women don't think the Three Stooges are funny either.

"ah... codec trouble!" I DL'd the MOVs and AVIs of your "deck" and "patent" anims to see why you got such different results. Here's what I got... Deck.AVI is compressed with Cinepak while Deck.MOV is compressed with Sorenson. Sorenson (not available in MS Video for Windows) can compress far better than cinepak (written long ago for very slow CPUs with slow CD-ROMS) So why are the "Patent" anims so similar in size? While patent.AVI is also in Cinepak, the patent.MOV is "compressed" with the "Animation" codec. "Animation" codec is a mostly lossless thing. It's usually set to "no compression" and used in situations where the footage that comes out of your 3D app needs to be taken into some other compositing app like Adobe After Effects for use with other visual elements. It is good for this purpose because it's the only codec I know of that preserves the "alpha" channel. But once the project is finished it is compressed with some other codec to reduce the distribution size. "Animation" codec does not produce small file sizes. It's really badly named because it leads many to think that's what they should use for their animation. So, you're patent.mov could be much smaller if you redid it in Sorenson. MS Video for Window (AVI) really doesn't have any good codecs built in. Divx (an add-on codec) compresses very well, but: - most people don't have it installed - many are confused into thinking they have to buy it when they go to the DivX site to get it. - Some people never get it to work. If you need to publish a PC-flavored file, how about downloading the FREE "Microsoft Windows Media Encoder" from the MS site and use it to create WMVs? Microsoft Windows Media Encoder has great audio and video compression, really about the best there is right now. And every PC owner already has what they need to play WMVs.