robcat2075
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Posts posted by robcat2075
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Remember that awful model search contest program Lorenzo Lamas was a judge on? He'd get his laser pointer out and harp about women who had too much space between their thighs. :o Third-tier celebrities are reknown for their expertise on the female form. :D
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AHA! I was wondering why that dialogue box wasn't showing up. thanks.
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I'm having trouble with the keyframe buttons in 10.5o. I just upgraded from 9.5. [b]In 9.5[/b] ( or any previous version) I could make a model, put four bones in it with bone1 the parent of bone2 and so on... then I'd make an action for this model; enable the skeletal translation, scaling and rotation filters; and enable "Key Model". Then I'd press the Force Keyframe button and keyframes would be created for all the bones. As I would expect. [b]If I do this same maneuver in 10.5[/b], no key frames are created, not even for the one bone I explicitly selected. :( The only way i can force a keyframe is to manually select and slightly jiggle the bone from its original position. And i need to do that for every bone i want to put a keyframe on. :o Is there something I haven't turned on to make these keyframe mode buttons work?
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Nothing much else is different from V10.5, but watch this space as Dan Tiedy adds his V11 “ease of use” features. --Martin
I think the above (from the top of the Alpha hair thread) is all they want to divulge for now, but it is tantalizing. "ease of use"...
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Back around v4, there actually was a feature like that, but without the bones. A spline could be made to directly bend/distort a mesh , like a tail or arm or anything really. It could make for very some amusing "rubber hose" style characters, but as you say, the effect can now be simulated with careful bone placement and rigging.Say you have a tail with 20 bones, you could atach a splineIK to these bones and the chain would be controlled by the spline, say a spline with 5 cp's. -
[b]a bit of 29.97 trivia[/b] I read in a video magazine once... the 29.97 frame rate was adopted to prevent "interference" when color information was added to the previously adopted B&W 30fps standard. However, there never really was any interference, it was all a mistake by an engineer working on the new standard and no one bothered to check his results until it was too late. Is it true? Are we are stuck with this crappy 29.97 hassle because some clueless executives never questioned some engineer's techno-babble? I believe this account largely because I've never seen a cogent explanation of why color could be broadcast at 29.97 and not at 30fps. I've seen many writers vaguely cite the "interference" but i've never read of anyone actually demonstrating it, witnessing it or describing how this interference would present itself.
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Unfortunately on Russian:
http://webtranslation.paralink.com/urlmode.asp did a fair job of russian-to-english translation (and offers many other translations as well)
whatever will we do if the russians surpass us in A:M?
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first likely suspect...Discreet Cleaner XL formerly known as media cleaner from another company.
Inputs almost anything and outputs almost anything.
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Very interesting book, I think it's almost all usable in AM. For example, his Maya morph targets and expressions and custom interfaces are things we can do with poses and relationships in A:M... no? and probably with less work. Reading this book, my impression was, "gee, Maya users sure have an awkward set of tools"
His ideas on facial modeling don't seem to be too different from what the better A:M users have been doing for years, and his minimalist approach to lip sync is a big step in the right direction.
BTW, i got a "used" but like new copy for half price almost on bn.com
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ya know, it wouldn't take much extend this idea to make it output positions for bones in an A:M action.
Of course, making walk cycles would then become one more important skill most people would never learn. 
This brings to mind the "parametric walk cycle" generator I saw being advertised for another 3d app (for $999)
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this is just a quick reply....
first, Check out the ARM for much info on the unique strategies involved in modeling in A:M.
next, Booleans such as polygon apps typically employ don't exist in A:M. A:M does have booleans of a sort that are set up in modeling and revealed by rendering, but the booleans that actually add or subtract from the mesh of a model and result in a new mesh... nope.
Clever modeling strategies will eliminate the need for most traditional boolean situations and make for better models. The body of cool work that others have done in A:M show it's true.
DXF or any other import into A:M... It's usually impractical except for small objects. A:M uses flexible, twisty splines and patches to create it's surfaces, other apps use stiff rigid polygons. The other apps have to use many more polygons to fake a curved surface than A:M needs patches to show a real curved surface. Other apps models then are huge in file size compared to A:M's. Since there's no way (presently) to reduce multiple polygons into a few patches, A:M converts each polygon into a patch. for small objects like an axe, maybe not a problem. If you're trying to import a dinosaur... it's probably too many polygons to deal with successfully.
I can imagine someone dreaming up some sort of 3D data reduction scheme that would intelligently substitute A:M patches for large areas of polygons, but I'm not the 13-year-old math whiz that's going to do it. Also, since the polygon apps are just approximating curves with their polygons, any sophisticated Poly-to-Patch converter would be creating a simulated reconstruction of an approximation. That 13-year-old math whiz will need to be very clever.
BTW, the absence of simple polygon structures in A:M has alot to do with why traditional boolean tools aren't feasible.
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Ok, Lion King WAS still a musical, true...
but it was an original story
Of course, the Lion King story wasripped off from an even more exalted source . . . Hamlet.
and what about "Bambi"... boy gets orphaned, has to grow up to become king of the whatever and finds love along the way.
Wacky sidekicks too. -
This looks very promising.
Has anyone tried this on a more erratically motioned clip?I'm wondering what the advanced-but-affordable price is going to be.
I'm also hoping this doesn't get bought up by a competitor and taken off the market like the last advanced and affordable match mover program was.
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I like the character. The proportions remind me somewhat of Gerry Anderson's "Supermarionation" characters (minus the strings, a 60's thing).
What would ultimately be necessary to eliminate the aliasing of the hair strands? Would scaling down a larger render do it?
Also, the geometry on the very top of the head looks unusual (lots of apparently three point patches). Are we really looking at two layers of geometry there; something to do with generating the hair?
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hard to get some hip rotation in him,,he has none! But perhaps a swing to
the shoulders will do...I'll try it oot...
I think some experimenting with hip "swagger" might help. (side to side motion) just a little maybe. But i think for the audience to "read" it at all, you might want to slow it down also.
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The first 3
star wars were great. They were talking to adults.
I enjoyed the first set when i saw them as a teenager and had good memories of them as an adult. When i saw the re-release in the 90's i couldn't help but notice how painfully corny they were. I think George Lucas hit on a "so old it's new" idea that immensely resonated with the audience mind set of 70's. But it wasn't exactly "A Room with a View."
Still, I'm glad he made it, and i don't regret the money i spent seeing the sequels. Until "Episode One", anyway.
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Just thinking out loud here...
I'm guessing that your poster will be more than just an image rendered from A:M. It would probably also include some text, a clever slogan, logos, fine print... that's the sort of stuff you need hi-res for, but the continuous-tone photographic part (the part you're making in A:M) could likely get away with far less resolution than than 200 dpi.
Render your A:M image at, say, 75dpi and bring it into a dedicated print layout app like Freehand or Illustrator to add the higher-res text elements.
Also, remember that dpi means "dots per inch" not "dots per centimeter."
1 inch = 2.54 cm so...
A 200 pixel per inch render for a 120cm x 110cm image would be about 9449 x 8661 pixels, not 24000 x 22000.
a 75 pixel per inch render for a 120cm x 110cm image would be about 3543 x 3248 pixels
those are still a big renders, but not quite so monstrous.
hope that helps.
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i love that grimace that sharks always seem to have. I hope you'll add some gills. I suppose they could be an image map but modeling them would look cooler. I realize splicing them in will invite more spline problems but it's a learning opportunity anyway, right?
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What a charming, charming idea!
Just to second and third previous comments, a cartoony thing like this would benefit from more snap. Longer holds at the main poses and fewer inbetweens getting from one pose to the next. Monkeys are pretty snappy creatures anyway right? 
But what I'm really curious about is why your video source was at 29fps? 29.97fps I could understand, but how did you obtain something running at 29?
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I have had this problem also, I even bought the full codec. My work-a-round is to download the image then play it, it works every time.
Not every time. Just how is that process any different from when I downloaded the file and tried to play it? I downloaded it to my PC. Twice. It doesn't play.
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I tried downloading the AVI twice but WMP always says it has "encountered an unknown error".
Is this in some non-standard codec? -
A friend of mine is studying in China right now - it's kind of sad, all they do is memorize textbooks and recite them in class.
Henry Kissinger once commented that we were fortunate the communist countries were so backwards and ineffiecient. If they were to actually get their act together perform at their true potential, and we had to compete with that...
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I think you would need to do 2 renders and them compose them. One with object and reflection and one with no object. Overlap the 2 images in PhotoShop and erase the object.
A variation on the above, to avoid situations where the original would overlap the reflection, is to set up the scene with a transparent mirror and place a camera behind the mirror in a 'mirror-image' location to capture what the reflection world would see. you'd take that output (and flip it maybe?) and composite it with your original scene which was minus the object in question. With some clever crafting of your 'transparent mirror' you could probably make the reflection pass create its own alpha channel to simplify your compositing labor.
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I too got an error... "filetype not recognized" which is odd since the file is obviously a WMV. But I was able to view the NASCAR thing after right-clicking and downloading it first. Posting video on the web still isn't fool-proof yet...
1st Animation
in (2003-2004)
Posted
Many good parts to it. Considering the "static camera" and all, I'm surprised it took up 15 megs though. Perhaps the sound could have been compressed more. How did GIF Construction Set figure into this one? Was the yellow galaxy mapped onto a flat plane or was there more geometry to it?