robcat2075

Thanks for all your comments! Zach pretty well explained the focus of the Showdown, but I understand what Rodney is getting at. There should be more to animation than just a character moving well, there should be a reason for the movement. A non-animator audience will demand that. 5-10 seconds screen time is enough time to tell a story, but getting all the acting done in four work hours to tell it ... hoooeee...I'm not that fast. I try approach every showdown like this: #1 - accomplish the stated goal. Climb a pole? Ok, if nothing else, my character is going climb that pole with the best animation I can do. Just getting that action to work took most of my time. #2 - Find some way to do it that no one else will. So I didn't do a "sneak" when we had to "steal something." Not much wiggle room on "climb a pole" though. #3 fit a gag/story in. With more time I might have had him skid in, look around in a panic, then climb up the pole just in time to elude the police running in. That's the plan, anyway I'm lucky to just get the guy up the pole in four hours. Fortunately, there are no prizes in this thing except bragging rights for a day or two. Voting irregularities? Doesn't matter. No one appreciated the originality of what i did? Doesn't matter. I'm not deluding myself that somehow I'll get "discovered" if I win. I'm free to try anything I want and fail. And hearing other animators explain why they didn't like mine has been useful.

well, that's not bad for no smartskin. I think fat characters are hard to do because they have so many potentially overlapping masses around their joints. That must be why there are so many thin, bony characters walking around. PS. Tell the bear I said "Rubenesque", not "fat"

That is just too charming and adorable! I'm impressed by the wide scope of the mouth.

Pole Climber was the topic in wednesday's four hour Animation Showdown. An' it were a tough one! This is my entry re-rendered for better lighting and with a few animation tweaks suggested by other contestants, including ZachBG. Download it from my Showdown page

hmmm. I downloaded it but it only showed white, which is odd since it's in "animation" codec and that's a standard quicktime codec. But actually "Animation" codec is usually not a good choice for animations you might post on the internet. It doesn't compress very much. If you redid it in Sorenson 3 you would almost certainly get a larger image size with a smaller file.

It was like a real Star Wars movie, but without the bad haircuts A few rough (compositing) edges but quite spiffy none-the-less and a substantial production since it seemed like every shot was an effects shot of some sort. You could probably submit a clip of one of the all-A:M sequences to the "Space" contest this month. And win.

Nice cat movements! If it weren't forbidden, I'd be interested in hearing about animating in A:M vs. animating in Maya. But it is forbidden, so don't do it!

My entry in last night's Animation Showdown. The topic was "Choke!" I didn't do as well on this one as last week's but it does have a few more poses. I've re-rendered it as toon here to get better compression. Choke! (QT Sorenson3 165KB) Never had time to show how that thing got in there!

Charming head! I didn't know a txt could hold a pic.

Although my monitor is adjusted such that I can pretty much see the whole range of the ramps, I couldn't find any gamma setting that would hide the center squares in the center column. This article, Why a new Gamma Chart?, asserts that checkerboard patterns shouldn't be used in gammas charts. Are they off base? Talking of some entirely different issue?

When you say your monitor is gamma corrected, is that an actual hardware setting on the monitor or a control panel processing the signal sent to the monitor? My Dell trinitron really doesn't have a hardware gamma setting and the only software gamma manipulation I've found is in Photoshop's gamma setup utility. Monitor setup is something that has always puzzled me. For example, if I follow PS's gamma setup utility I end up with a gamma result of around 2.8 according to the chart above. Which is neither the 1.8 we seem to be basing the discussion above on or 2.2 which PS says to be the "Windows standard" Is there a really good article anywhere on setting up a monitor properly for both gamma and color temp? I feel like I'm often applying corrections to negate corrections made somewhere else in the pipeline.

Looks great! I'm wondering... since this seems to get so much better results and doesn't seem to incur a major time penalty, is there any reason not to make this the default when multi-pass rendering is selected? Or are there drawbacks to this method in common situations? I realize it's a simple "post effect" now, but next time some reviewer does an out-of-the-box comparison of 3D apps, wouldn't we want him to get the best the best possible results?

That is the very definition of a customized low-rider chop! You should have it drive up and then the characters who get out have extremely wide, extremely flat heads

i had something like that happen once after I substituted a larger bitmap for a smaller one in an "environmental" material. It looked like a pointy spike sticking out of my model. But only in shaded mode... wire frame looked ok! I'm not saying that was the cause of it, but i could only fix the problem by manually deleting all the materials from the project file in a text editor.

As one bad attitude person to another ... these first attempts don't seem all that awful. Hey, what do people expect from first attempts? I'd say there's more going right than wrong from what i've seen in your first two pics. My advice is not to stress out trying to perfect each new project. They just ain't gonna be perfect the first time out. Try a lot of different small stuff. try a hand, try a nose, try a foot, try a duck, try whatever.... do each one until you reach the wall then table it and try the next one. eventually you'll come full circle back to topics you've tried before, but you'll you'll look at it fresh and say "ah, now i know what I shoulda done with that" If you're clever, that is. The A:M 2002 book is good though.

Thank you for all your comments! You can do just about anything you want but the main item on the table is always the character animation. These clips are so short that if you pick a good one, more camera angles shouldn't be necessary. It's that good staging thing that Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston talk about and that I attempt to use in practice. And you can use pre-built anything, but the topics are always such that props or sets aren't major factors. I like it that way since the character motion is what I'm most into right now. He blinks in frame 71. According to my calculator that means that even if you get 1000 times better than you are now, I'd still be 10,000 times better. Ouch! You better get animating right quick, Zack! Ok, I'll admit it... he has no eyelids! I made this character in 1998 to be a "help angel" in a CD_ROM project. He only had to do three things and blinking wasn't on the list. I tried a few more things with him but rigs were so primitive back then I gave up. He's really supposed to be a toon rendered character so i never planned any texturing for him: But I may upgrade him with eyelids and a mouth when I finish Jason Osipa's book. Result of my experiments on a crate in the living room. It is an action. In the contest forum, several people criticized it for being too repetitive. (Geez, I managed to bore them in only five seconds! ) I added one block as an "action object" to animate the feet around and to figure out the intial movement of the block. The block in the action helped me to align the character with the real blocks in the choreography (which were individually animated). I match-moved the choreography blocks to the action block, then deleted the block from the action. Hmmm...I bet I could have saved myself some time if I had just constrained the chor blocks to the action block. Thanks again for all your comments! I'll keep them in mind on my next attempt.

Camel or not, I'd say you're not nearly as 3D impaired as you were saying you were.

I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that's a camel. Joe Camel perhaps?

forearms? How about the thighs? I wish I had thighs like that!

It's like watching japanese anime: strangely interesting and yet... I have no idea what's going on! Funny stuff!

Last night's Animation Showdown topic was "Get down from there!" Our characters had to carefully get down from a high spot. I had the character animation going at four hours but the version you see here adds three hours of work to animate the boxes all the way to the ground. QT Sorenson 3 204KB GetDown30.mov

That's nice motion. It's a shame it's your "last."

Strange, yet charming. Troubling, yet amusing.

When I was little I met Neil Armstrong and shook his hand, but he was just wearing a suit and tie at the time.

Ain't it shockin'? But I was trying to put that "lead the body motion with the hips" principle into practice. The first thing I did was stretch the sound loop out in Sound Forge so that it was EXACTLY (not "almost", not "nearly", not "pretty close to") 2 beats per second, aka 12 frames per beat. Then I tried to animate the bounces to land on every 12th frame. Sounds obvious, but I've failed enough times before at that scheme that I was quite surprised when it slapped together just right with no time to spare. Yup. The arm movement was a desperate last second addition. And the head's not doing anything.