robcat2075

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.

Hey, I like that new version of "No One". How come that didn't make it into the "Space" contest? Can i do a write-in vote?

Thanks! This was almost "too easy." The jumping jack is, I'm sure you guessed, an "action." After i had dropped it on everyone and set it to repeat several times I just had to pick a few guys at random and slide their action out of synch a frame or two. I probably could have done more with that, but I thought I'd just try it a little for starters. Yes. Usually I submit a hardware rendering to save time and then do a render later with better lighting to put on my page. But in this case you're seeing the same render I submitted. I got the action done quick enough to experiment with the crowd idea, the camera and the lighting. He's a low-patch character, with no procedural materials and only one small decal for his eyes, and the shadows are just klieg-light shadow mapped. Also it's just a three-pass multi-pass render. Once these things get compressed to DivX it's not always apparent whether they've been anti-aliased or not. All told about 20 minutes for the "final" quality render vs. maybe 4 for a "shaded" render.

Please tell me this won't trigger the Apocalyspe. But if it would, then don't tell me, because that would be the 1000th post and... I downloaded the project but it seems to be looking for an external model which is not part of the file.

It looks quite successful. I'd be interested in hearing more about this mouth rig vs. your previous method and in what ways the old system wasn't getting you what you needed. By chance is there a test of the old way we could see?

My entry in yesterday's four-hour Animation Showdown. Our character had to do some sort of exercise. Which is kind of awkward for animation since most exercises tend to be very symmetrical with lots of "twins." i considered doing a guy hitting a punching bag but decided against it because I thought doing the fast moving bag would be time consuming to get right. So here's plan B, twins and all! See it on my Showdown page. (Note to Rodney: It's got a camera move this time! ) BTW, there's lots of room for A:M animators at Digitalrendering.com's Animation Showdown. Why spend three months on a contest entry when you can do one in four hours?

And he came in 1st! Congratulations. This topic was so tough i think it scared off polygon crowd.

one sixth The problem you're going to have is that the real motion they did will look like cheap animation. The suits were very stiff (because of the internal air pressure vs. external vacuum) so for the most part their "walks" consisted of small hops launched by pushing off with their toes/ankles. Fully articulated leg bends were more effort than they were worth. NA is pretty much doing a hop from step to step when he's coming down the ladder, not that the video from that was terribly clear. And if you want to be really accurate add the camera that took that video on a panel flipped down from the facet of the descent module to NA's right. Even more awkward for animation, the LEM wasn't facing into the sun. But the landscape and astronaut look great, much like actual pictures I've seen.

Impressive detail! How's the gravel under the railroad ties made? When did they get rid of the thing the hobos rode on? And what was it really for?

Nice Jug! That's what they want you to think, but the round thing is really to make it easier for the robots to hold the jug while they put human-mind-control nano-chips in the milk.

I took a look at your page... what's that 2nd item? (above the toaster and below the helmet)

I just realized... he's diving into a plastic wading pool!

The bigger, more emphatic gesture (to space) may be too big and too emphatic for such an old man. I'm worried he's going to knock over the floor lamp. Tell the kids that beverage should be milk, so they don't get a hunched over spine like he's got.

Like most of these things I spent so much time figuring out the mechanics of how this action happens that I just barely get it working and never get around to adding the "exaggeration" part of it. I really wanted to do more with the springboard. I should have started him farther back so the first hop could more plausibly land with more force on the board, deflecting it more, giving more opportunity for squash&stretch. Also, I should have had his first anticipation movement go down instead of back. I'd have to experiment much more with this to find the right union of "cartoon hangtime" and "real physics hangtime" It is fun. Harrowing, but fun. And I've learned much by trying this each week and comparing my results with the others'.

Back when A:M came with a full technical manual, I found it very helpful to actually read the thing from beginning to end. I didn't understand it all, I didn't use it all immediately, but it planted a lot of seeds in my mind about the tools that were there. Actually trying all the things in the manual came much later, but reading gave me a global sense of the program that a quickstart tutorial couldn't do. Although you can still page through the electronic docs in "Help", I hope the print-on-demand scheme proposed for the future will get the manual back in the hands of new users. (And I hope they will read it )

Yeah, i think moving the hands out of the body uses your screen space better too. This is coming together. Maybe his focus ought to go out towards the "gulf of space" instead of waiting so long after the hand has pointed to it. i think the gulf of space would seem more important if he were compelled to look at it (even though he's seen it all before), and then his attention should creep back to the camera (us) again during "minds immensely superior to ours"

Last night's topic for the four-hour Animation Showdown was "Dive!" Our character had to dive into a pool. I found this one quite grueling. It's not much but at least he got off! See it on my Showdown page (QT Sorenson 3 - 148K)

I think I remember you working on that. So you finally got it rendered! Looks cool.

Does that glass bottle have thickness or is it just the outer skin?

I'm thinking he's doing the unclenching of the hand too many times. The second one works great. I used to work with an old Disney animator who would have looked at the last pose and said "get those hands away from the body!" After about the tenth time he said that to me and threw away my drawing I realized he was talking about silhouette and making easy to read poses. The initial poses are much stronger because outline of the hand is separate from the outline of the body. I'm also thinking you shouldn't leave that other hand out of the action. Using the other hand could relieve some of the repetition of right hand. Things other hands can do without twinning: -scratch chin -hand over collarbone (catching breath) -hand to forehead (thinking so hard it hurts )