[Disney's Chicken Little trailer online]

That's an amusing clip and I don't think it looks like the mortifying embarrassment to western civilization that we feared non-Pixar Disney 3D might be.

 

Maybe if "The Incredibles" is a big success this fall it will give people "permission" to like projects such as this that are not intensely photo-realistic. I'm hoping, anyway.

[I've caught something...]

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.

[Animation]

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!

[my animation so far...]

This is a great project you've got going here because I suppose almost every action in this piece would make a classic topic for study in an animation class. Not that I'm enough of a grizzled animation veteran to lead that discussion.

 

any specific on how to adjust my throw action? Do I just speed up the toss?

faster yes. Greater velocity= greater distance. To do that she'll need to wind up farther back and follow thru farther forward. Aiming higher might be good too.

 

can you give me an example of a military walk?

Well, don't have one to pull out of my pocket. It seems to me that he's gliding more than walking right now. I envision him walking faster at the start (he's going somewhere to get an answer) and hitting the ground with more weight (he's not modeling capes for Perry Ellis) and then slowing down and lurching to a halt (as he sees Man#2 is drunk again.)

 

That would be quite a piece of character animation. i'm not up to it yet.

[Action to Pose]

Once you have the action the the way you want, click on the Action menu then hit "Create Pose". To test it, clear the action and open the pose sliders.

Ah, much simpler! Although when I tried it it didn't work until i had saved the project, closed it and re-loaded it. Why is that necessary?

[Action to Pose]

(Edit: ignore this method for the simpler one below )

 

First, is it that you want to take the state of your action at one frame and make that a pose that you can variably apply to a character as if it were a pose? If not, ignore the following untested theory...

 

Once you drop an action on a char it has some properties you can set. Among those are "crop range". It's possible to select a range of frames from the action that will be used instead of having to use them all. I think this is meant so that you could , for example, just get the first half of a walk cycle before a char comes to a stop.

 

You could set that crop range to just the instant you want from the action, and stretch the duration of the resulting instance to what ever was needed for your effect.

 

Then use action blending to vary the influence of that (now one-frame)action over the course of your animation.

 

Not truly a pose slider, but the same result.

 

It's possible you may need to force a key frame in the original action on all the pertinent channels at that one frame so that they will be in effect after the other frames are ignored. (Better to make a copy of your action for this scheme, inserting key frames in the middle of channels often causes the channel curves around them to become wildly distorted.)

[my animation so far...]

I like the way the first shot leads us from man#1 walking in the distance to Actionchick hiding in the foreground.

 

Somethings I notice....

 

-the overall render is very gray and lacking in contrast, to the point that the two male characters are almost lost in the background while they are talking. (Dark red uniforms against a dark background. Some rim lighting might help that particular spot.)

 

-15 megs is huge for a 1 minute clip. Consider using Quicktime Sorenson3 instead of AVI-Cinepak for a result that would probably be one third that size. It's free! Smaller file=more downloads=more feedback.

 

- The walk cycle of Man#1 doesn't seem to be in character for a military guy. And he looks to be two inches off the ground.

 

- Actionchick needs to throw that can a lot harder to get it to the other side of the hanger

[SAVE ME!]

Thanks.

For some reason the first waves of the hands look very IK-ish to me.

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.

the wobble of his antenna. Did you do that by hand or use the -- um --

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.

[Animation]

And I would like to look at somebody's animation(s), and I want to look that How does He/She apply the animation principles!?

And please He/She write me a description and in this you write me that what and when does He/She apply the animation principle?!

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!]

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

[Animation]

-Can somebody help me in the animation topic and its main parts?

-(For example:anticipation,follow through, easy in/out, etc.)

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.

[Smoothing the lines in a face]

I don't know that this is it but I've gotten unsmoothness like yours when trying to make a complex curved shape and have been pushing and pulling CPs around to get it.

 

For some reason, the default "gamma 0 alpha 0" setting of of the bias handles didn't always give the smoothest look. In looking closely at some of my splines i've noticed that at the "ridges" the bias handles were tilted more towards the spline on one side of the CP than on the other.

 

I'd turn the model until i got a cross-section view of the surface and adjust the "gamma" of each CP along one of the ridges until it looked to be more evenly "tangent" to the curve going thru the CP. It was a very small adjustment, like 2 or 3 degrees.

[Learning to Rig]

I'll donate a TSM action to the cause. I don't believe CP weighting should have any effect on the rig itself working.

 

A caveat...

 

Your character's proportions are very different from the one I animated the action on.

 

Because of that, even if your character is correctly set up, it may still get odd results like hands passing through the body, or who knows what...? that's one of the limitations of reusing actions.

 

get it here... JumpingJacks

 

See what it is supposed to look like here.

 

I'd really love to see a clip of the results when you get it working.

[Cloth with a lining?]

Here's a turnaround of an object using the "render backfacing polygons" feature turned off to draw out mattes for compositing an inside color with an outside color.

 

Note the color error at the bottom. I can imagine refining the technique to eliminate that. I can also imagine using other rendering methods to isolate parts of the mesh to facilitate rotoscoping out the color error.

 

Having a "combiner" material that handles this automatically would be easier in the long run, however.

 

 

twotone.mov

[A new portfolio piece]

just checked the MS website and that encoder is Windows-only.

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.

My wife thought the ending was too whimsical

I guess that's like how women don't think the Three Stooges are funny either.

[Rendering Problem]

Yes we have had several on Far Star and hash has confirmed them to be repeatable. They came up with a work around on one of our animations just last week. I suggest you send in your project.

If there's a solution it really ought to be published, not kept under wraps.

[A new portfolio piece]

I was astonished to see that the .mov version compressed to 680k with almost no loss of quality, however I couldn't get the .avi version any smaller than 4.5 megs. Any smaller and there was a total loss of quality.

 

"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.

[Coffee?]

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?

[Physical Culture...]

I like how you minutely varied the motions of the many exercisers. It's too easy to duplicate motion like that and make them look like mirror images.

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.

 

4 hours! Does that include render time?

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.

[Variable Line Drawing]

*Hope this isn't my 1000th post... It's not suppose to be this one! 

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...

 

Attached is a ... line test project.

I downloaded the project but it seems to be looking for an external model which is not part of the file.

[Facial rig test: Using Victor's ideas...]

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?

[Light]

One of the Hash people stated in this thread that light must hit two surfaces before a shadow is cast. If your blinds are only one patch thick that might be why they don't cast a shadow.

[Physical Culture...]

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?

[skull]

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

[Roll the bones]

As he swings his arm forward and it reaches shoulder level, the shoulder bone will have had to rotate 90 Deg on its roll handle to take advantage of the Smartskin I created when I rotated his arm forward from the neutral position

One solution might be to add another smartskin at the troublesome position. I believe smartskins can be made for any combination of x y z rotation.

 

how to set up a bone roll proportional to the level of the arm swing?

Sounds like a job for an expression although I've not toyed with them yet. something like...

 

rotation angle=(((hand's Y distance above lowest possible position)/(total Y distance hand is capable of))* (some factor to scale that quotient into a useful range))+ (some offset equal to the default angle when everything else in this equation results in zero)

 

But I think part of the problem is presuming that all of the rotation for the arm (primarily manifested in the orientation of the hand) occurs at the shoulder, whereas most of it really happens between the elbow and the wrist where the bones are specially built for twisting motions.