robcat2075
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Posts posted by robcat2075
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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.
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TSM lets you do it either way. The number of backbones is user variable and whether the whole rib cage is assigned to one bone(making it rigid) or more (making it flexible) is a user choice.I really liked Jeff Lew's rig ... He's one of the few people to realize that rib cages don't bend, so he uses a single bone for the rib cage area. -
Who can solve this one?
I'm having a general problem with "Paste Mirrored" in an action, here's an example:
1 I take plain old Thom and make a curvy pose with him in frame 0 (left pic)
2 I copy the pose and "Paste Mirrored" it at frame 10(right pic)
As seen in the screen capture below,
- the hand and foot targets have been correctly mirrored,
- the hips have been rotated correctly but not mirrored across X correctly
- the spine bones have not been mirrored or keyed at all except for the "neck" bone which has been keyframed but not really mirrored.
If "paste mirrored" works for some there should be a way to make it work for all, right?
Does anyone know a solution and/or a plausible work-around?
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I wrote
I like the Anzovin TSM rig because the hips can pivot independently of the spine.I just discovered that the AM2001 rig can do this also, however the bone to do it is hidden by default in Thom, which may explain why he walks so stiffly.
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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.Can you vary the camera angle...? or are there rules...I assume that pretty much *everything* must be built within the 4 hour timespan.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.My suggestion ... is to make a quick action which makes his eyes blink...
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!...10,000,000 times better than anything I could ever make...
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.you're one of the only participants whose character actually has eyes. Why not use 'em?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.nice touch having the char gripe the block with his left foot
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!was that an action that you repeated in the choreagraphy? Or was it all animated just in the choreagraphy?
)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.
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Camel or not, I'd say you're not nearly as 3D impaired as you were saying you were.
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I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that's a camel. Joe Camel perhaps?
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Aw, come on, Rodney... just jump in there and start modeling! That's a great drawing; you obviously have a sense of the visual and what you want. Some of her construction isn't that far removed from the robots you're already doing.
And you'll be all the prouder when you can point to it and say "I did it myself!"
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One more candidate...
"Timing for Animation" by Harold Whitaker, John Halas
It has frame by frame dissections of all the ubiquitous cartoon events and conventions along with explanations of why it's done the way it's done.
I'd rate it as a good companion to the rather brief Preston Blair book.
It was written as a 2D primer but...
John Lasseter:"The principles of timing laid out in this book are more applicable (now) than ever before."
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forearms? How about the thighs? I wish I had thighs like that!
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maybe AM could fake bevels in the render like this plug-in for Lightwave: http://www.happy-digital.com/edgefx.asp
That's a clever plug-in and it probably wouldn't be too hard to implement. If it could be applied at the group level it would simplify alot of modeling problems. Someone should look in to that.
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If you use Stitch with Maintain Curvature you can usually add a longitudinal spline at any arbitrary angle on a lathed object. This was a 4-section lathed cyl with two new splines (in green) added to accomodate a new hole. Some bias correcting was still necessary.
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Is Action Paste Mirrored intended to affect only bones that are labeled "left" and "right" or is it intended to mirror the arrangement of all?
For example, in a walk cycle the spine may sway left and right, away from the exact center. A completely mirrored pose would need to take that into account, but I'm not sure if Action Paste Mirrored is built to do that or not. Is there a hidden option to make it do that?
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But seriously, I don't see the harm in helping some folks get into the programming thing. Certainly it would be good to foster activity in the SDK arena ...
No, there's no harm, and you might strike gold if someone really catches on fire with it.
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how many people are out there who would be interested in programming their own plugins and also have what it takes?
I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect the intersection of the set of A:M users and the set of very productive programmers is quite small. And trying to build a corps of plug-in writers from scratch... a very ambitious project.
I think recruiting existing programmers is more feasible. Consider that there are scads of excellent programmers in places like India who could be hired inexpensively for such projects. Just because they're in India doesn't mean they're not clever. There's probably even a "temp" agency in the US that handles the match-up between clients and non-US programmers.
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I'm guessing then, it doesn't work for anyone else either? (I get an immediate freeze.)
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It's like watching japanese anime: strangely interesting and yet... I have no idea what's going on!
Funny stuff!
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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
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What happens when you create a new "layer" in a choreography and try to set a surface property in the current beta?
(I'm not asking where to find the surface properties in the properties window, I wondering what happens when other people do this manuver)
I'm using Windows 2000.
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That's quite spiffy. The only awkward thing about it is that I keep reaching for the center of the boxes to drag them and you can't do that with that manipulator. But I'd get over that real quick, though.
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Uploading didn't seem to work for me either, but you can "link" to a swf on your own site. (what I did)
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The Animation Showdown still happens every wednesday at digitalrendering.com.
It's a "challenge" where you get four hours to animate something on a simple topic like "falling down" or "watch out for that car." Once all the entries are in everyone votes and comments on them. The more entries, the more interesting it is. (Thus this post.)
I've won a couple of times but usually I'm in last place. Either way, I had fun, and learned something about A:M, my rig and action in general by trying.
It's not about modeling, texturing, or lighting... it's about moving a character. Remember it's called Animation:Master, not Model-and-texture-for-three-years-then-just-do-a-walk-cycle-and-stop:Master. Thom or Shaggy would be fine. Simple hardware rendering is fine too.
You can get the whole scoop by going to http://www.digitalrendering.com/forum. You'll have to register a username, then go to Showcase>Showdown to find the rules. In "Archive" you can see past topics and entries.
Mac users: DivX (the submission format) is on the Mac now too.
modeling hang-up
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
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.