jmf3d3d
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Posts posted by jmf3d3d
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Name: Kenneth Wong
... he was supposed to step through the door.. however all the leg moves just kept blending from one frame to the next.... so I altered each frame by hand and made it look like he jumped through.... hope that's ok
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Also I LOVE THE TOON RENDER!!!! It's my favourite!!!
Hey Kenneth, you've got a good look there with the lighting and the toon render! Regarding the leg movements, you might want to try looking at the timeline to get a good sense for how the components of the motion change with time. You can see this by clicking "view" "timeline" and then clicking on the bone in question. The graph you see represents the motions for that bone over time (you can isolate the x y and z rotations/translations too). It may give you some insight into what's happening with the feet. I'm not the best person to explain these to you but i found this feature to be enormously helpful.
--jerry
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #20: Its getting a bit hairy
Date Completed: Feb 14, 2007
Remarks: Happy Valentine's day
.... and sad farewell day 
. For this exercise, I had the same trouble as Michael and others... I iterated through the properties list while looking at the emitter in the workspace to see when the property was added to each emitter. I was beginning to sense a pattern but can't articulate what it was. I'm sure there is something I'm not getting about how to do that. However, as I already know, the more you work trying to solve problems the more you actually learn. So, I know much more about hair now than if it had been a breeze. I'm looking forward to using hair in future projects but I'm even more motivated to upgrade my computer equipment. I think I've done 'em all including 11.5 (thanks to Michael Fortunato for starting the thread). TaoA:M was a great learning experience. The fact that Rodney (and others) encourages us to get goofy and have fun actually adds a lot to the learning experience. I'm sure, I could have finished this faster if i just stuck with the book versions... but that's kind of missing the point of doing animation in the first place. I guess I'm off to bootcamp and I may even offer some meager service to TWO although that's a little intimidating... I think it would be great to experience what needs to happen in that kind of production). Thanks to everyone who commented and helped make this worthwhile!
(So Rodney... now what?
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #16: Smoke, Wind and Fire
Date Completed: Feb 12, 2007
Remarks: Another useful feature from A:M! I only used the book on this one. I notice horizontal lines where the particles leave the emitter model at the ground. I tried repositioning and a few other things to get rid of them but with render times so high my experimentation was limited. This wasn't the best result but I swear I was seeing "smoke wind and fire" come out the back of my computer from all the particle computations on my old machine
So here is, for me, the penultimate ( I've already completed 17,18,and 19) TaoA:M exercise.See... Rabbit doesn't always cause trouble... he can be a real hero sometimes
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The scaling problem wasn't for any ONE rotoscope, it was the fact that all THREE weren't the same dimensions. So the side.tga wasn't the same height as front.tga and the wingspan wasn't the same in the front.tga and top.tga. That's what bugged me.
Ah, yes, that, in my very limited experience, seems like a general problem. Unless you take the photo for the rotoscopes EXACTLY centered and perpendicular with 0 degrees on x, y and z... you will have mismatches. Even a slight rotation (of the camera) in any axis will cause distortion and uneven foreshortening. I think this is one of the reasons we are advised to use as long a lens as possible when shooting rotoscopes... slight rotational distortion will be minimized with more distance. Something to keep in mind when we get around to shooting our own rotoscopes.
--jerry
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Congrats on the 100 posts! Your attention to extra details on the model paid off, it looks great!
i, too,was annoyed at the wing shadow on the side decal, but was too lazy to open up photoshop and diminish it. I'm not clear on your point about the rotoscope scaling problem... holding down the shift key maintains aspect ratio (but you probably knew that and are refering to something else).
It's nice to see the result when someone spends "too much time" on one of these projects
.--jerry
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #19: Flying Sou... er... West
Date Completed: Feb 11, 2007
Remarks: something whacked out on take one and I was getting horrendous render times. I deleted the elements in the cho one by one but that didn't seem to make a difference. I figured someone was trying to tell me I needed more practice so... you see take two. The geese and their friend decided to go to Oregon instead of flying south. They wanted to meet the guys responsible for all their fun and very existence - but they apologize for not following directions.
I hope they get there... -
Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #14: Playing Marble
Date Completed: Feb 11, 2007
Remarks: AniMATion
I'm not sure why the final render was such a large file... perhaps the brick wall? At any rate, I had to compress it to a lower quality to get the file to a reasonable size so it is a bit lossy... I'm a bit of a nut about lossy images which is why my files tend to be on the large side....sorry. -
Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #18: Waving the Flag
Date Completed: Feb 9, 2007
Remarks: I'm waving my country's flag in my google earth backyard
. Of course, you can't see me ... it's such a BIG flag and pole. Also, it's been VERY windy here lately so I added a stiff breeze from out of the north. The simcloth motion from the flagpole movement interacts kind of strangely with the simulated wind motion but I left it in. Without the breeze it settles nicely but it's a blowin' outside. -
Steve, great job on your model. One of the things I realized doing this exercise is how important it is to have good rotoscopes to work from. Angelina just doesn't sit still for the full face shot and left side view needed so you had an uphill battle... It's nice to have the inspiration anyway
You have a more sensible mesh density than I have AND it looks like you got A:M hair to work for you. I'm jealous!Michael, thanks for starting this thread. You'll be the inspiration for all who follow
Part of my problem with A:M Hair is that my machine is a few years old and it is frustratingly slow. It was taking to forever style the 'do so I gave up and raided lambrina. I'll be tackling Wookie in the next few days and see how that goes. Maybe I'll bring a book to read while my pc crawls along 
. And Colin, thanks very much for the tutorial! It came in handy when I was modeling the giraffe too (for the instructions on how to straighten the centre spline for copyflipattach... my giraffe just couldn't get it together until I read your tutorial!).
--jerry
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Do you mean the timeline? I make all my adjustments there and find it amazingly powerful.
- Michael
yep, that's what I mean. I have little confidence I'm using the correct term for them. If you isolate each channel (say for X rotation) you can reduce it (romove keyframes) by an adjustable factor. This is handy when modifying a baked action with a key on virtually every frame. I have recently been playing with the squetch rig and tried baking an action for that rig... not so straightforward to tweak... there are so many interdependent constraints. I usually like to delete channels for bones that weren't involved in the original action but ya can't do that so easily with squetch. hopefully I'll soon learn the FK IK stuff. The Squetch rig is a great addition to the A:M community but it is a leap up in complexity from the 2001. Well worth the effort to get to know it, I'm finding.
--jerry
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You mentioned "baking" an action. Do you know how that works? Ok, not quite the right forum to ask this in, but I'm just curious.
Thanks.
- Michael
Michael, it's ok that this isn't quite the right forum to discuss baking actions because I'm not quite the expert to give the best answer
I've only experimented with baked actions when I tried to constrain a character to a bvh (motion capture) file. As far as I can tell, baking removes the constraints and turns them into keyed actions (lots of keys if you set a low error tolerance). Once baked you can go to the channels and tweak and mess with the action to get what you want. In the context of this exercise (see it is the right place to discuss it ) I was thinking that once baked you could make the pins act out a bit and correct the floor damaging action of that bowling ball. If your question was more low level, the answer is simple: you click the action tab and then click bake. I leave the error tolerance at 1 and then maybe reduce the channels when I get to messin' with them.
One of the biggest benefits of TaoA:M for me was getting practice using the channels to fine tune the animations. That's the easiest way to smooth the motion, change up the timing, and even slow or speed up the entire sequence. It's a great graphical representation of time and very powerful once you get used to it. Do you use the channels much?
Thanks for looking back in on us TaoA:Mers even though you're a bigshot bootcamper now
--Jerry
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #17: Cosmic Bowling
Date Completed: Feb 08, 2007
Remarks: The physical dynamics are very impressive but slightly less fun than animating from scratch. You do get a lot for very little effort
I can see how useful this would be for telling a real story. The only thing I did outside book was to add some spin to the ball. I don't bowl so it is probably a ridiculous spin. I'm guessing too that you could bake the action and then go in and mess with the fine details of the simulation. I've been also playing around with BVH and I concluded that they might be good places to start to get broad motion for cheap but to really make it work you have to bake it and tweak. I'm guessing the same thing may apply here. oh, and I also tried motion blur to make it easier on the eyes but the effect didn't work too well... too many blurred streaks popping the scene. I'm sure there are parameters to reduce or change the blur but I just rendered it again without the blur -
Sorry to startle (I was startled after the first render and I kinda had a reason to know what would happen
). Ah, yes, forces. Didn't think of that. This exercise was a good task to learn more about constraints and to get more practice with channels but as others have opined earlier, it's just not dust (or 2-stroke smoke). I was thinking about relaxing the constraint after each puff so that the dust dissipated more naturally (rather than cling to the foot) but that began to be more trouble than it seemed worth. Anyway, thanks for watchin' my foolishness (as we say here in Bermy
) and for your comments.--jerry
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #15: Eat My Dust
Date Completed: Feb 2, 2007
Remarks: is it dust or 2 stroke smoke?
As Rodney sez, changing the shape of the dust cloud would improve this effect, but I couldn't figure out how to do that. I changed the slope of the fadeout for each puff of dust but that didn't add much to the effect. But hey, I completed the exercise... 6 more to go (I have to go back and finish 14) -
Sweet tires Ryan! (although it looks like you may have to mow them once a week)
What is that surface? A material?--jerry
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you do know there is no law against commenting on fellow TaoA:Mer's work?
Cool! we've been chided by Rodney...
. I guess i consider my level of expertize to be so low and I have a personal law against speaking from ignorance. . I'll accept that my law doesn't apply to TaoA:M. Also, most new TaoA:Mers don't often look back on a completed exercise (where we might have an ounce of expertize) because we're in a headlong rush to get through TaoA:M. But, Rodney is absolutely right. TaoA:M is fun ...and more fun with chatter. So, I'll accept your suggestion and blather.
so... Chris, adding your own voice track was a clever and creative idea and added to your skillset. I.E., that's a "wish i thought of that" feature. I'm sure it was disturbing to Rodney (a self-confessed keekat fan) to conjure up the whole pinata scenario.
Al, I like the arm-fold move that kinda looks like keekat's a rapper... that might be a wild direction to take this exercise... Also, i sympathize with your struggles rendering anything complicated on an older machine. i was unpleasantly surprised by how long it took on my machine to render sound in this exercise. I can't even imagine the geological time scale needed to do anything really complicated... i better look into a new machine too. Maybe I'll go see what the A:M MAC guys are saying about the new Mac pro.
make wacky suggestions that no one will ever listen to... ya know?ok, who told you what I do for a living?
--jerry
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #13: Show Some Backbone
Date Completed: Jan 30, 2007
Remarks: Thom is rigged with the 2001 rig. I smoothed most of the joint motion (and belly) with cp weights and just had to use a little smartskin on the calf motion. Thom wanted to try out his new bones on the golf course. As a child I was fascinated by flipbooks and I have an old instructional flipbook of Tony Jacklin swinging his club so I used that as a reference to teach Thom how to golf. He has no fingers so it had to be "air golf". I constrained his left hand, forearm, and bicep using translate and aim at constaints (to the right hand)... learned that from shaggy
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Hello folks, we've had some very wintery weather and my wife's been away for a week so with my free time I've tried my hand at making a face. Rather than try it on cooper I decided to try it on a couple of other people I know well (my wife and myself), BUT Colin Freeman's on-line tutorial for face making is excellent. His clear description of basic procedure and how to do the eye area and ears made it possible for me to model my first human faces. I've been playing around with A:M for a couple of years but I'm really glad I decided to go through TaoA:M... I've learned some really usefull stuff. I've got lots of tweaking and improving to do on these models but I think I should continue on and learn some more stuff about surfacing etc. and put these mdls on hold for now. I started these about 10 days ago and put many hours into them.
Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #11.5: Making a Face (or two)
Date Completed: Jan 28, 2007
Remarks: The hair is borrowed from Lambrina (I tried using A:M hair but couldn't get it to work so put that aside for now). The eyeballs are tweaked from a free model I picked up somewhere. Everything else is from scratch (thanks again to Colin's tutorial). For surfacing I just photoshoped on of the rotoscopes and took out all detail leaving just a big layer of skin color. The lips were a separate application (again from the rotoscope). She's wearing a little too much mascara but that's my fault... I was trying out transparancy decals for the first time... maybe there's a better way to do eyelashes?. There are tons of little things to tweak to increase the likenesses. I think I have too many patches. I'm not sure what all the downsides of too many patches are but I think one of them is render time. I was thinking about future rigging needs and hooks (needed to reduce splines) just don't seem to behave well when moved around. So I avoided hooks in places that would need to be moved for facial expressions. This didn't give much of a reduction unfortunately. If anyone has any advice on or pointers to where I may get it I'd appreciate it. I'll include a wireframe below.
And a movie of these figures rotating:
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #12: Lip Poses
Date Completed: Jan 24, 2007
Remarks: simple, but an introduction to important features for storytelling
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Sometimes its important to do things wrong (or not optimally) a few times.
That'll make the lessons sink in.
Yes, I strongly believe in the value of "messing up"... something I'm actually quite good at.
And I'd also like to express my gratitude to Rodney and the several other folks (Caroline, Leo, Dhar, mfortunato) who routinely take the time to download these attempts and provide feedback and encouragement to those of us plowing through these exercises. You all are doing a good thing!
--jerry
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #11: Giraffe
Date Completed: Jan 22, 2007
Remarks: Modeling is addictive. The book's instructions are very good, especially for the spatially complex task of attaching legs. Leaving us on our own to do the ears and horns was good pedagogy
. It was, more or less, a breeze except for two minor problems. First, copy-flip-attach failed because the spline wasn't perfectly aligned, but dabbling in 11.5 helped because it explained how to line up an entire spline. The other problem I had was applying the decals. I read somewhere about flattening an image so that the decal doesn't stretch as it rounds corners. I now see why. I didn't flatten the Giraffe, but I see that I should figure that out in the future. I had some trouble matching the top decal to the side, but the irregularity of the Giraffe' s spots help hide this. 
I also noticed that the 5-point patches appear to have newton rings in the choreography and model window but they render fine. Is this typical?
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #10: FW-190 Fighter
Date Completed: Jan 21, 2007
Remarks: the 3d3d in my tag refers to my love of stereo imagery (one 3d for each eye
) so I thought this would be a good one to render in stereo. You'll need RED-CYAN (RED on LEFT eye) glasses to see the stereo but the filters are subtle enough the image works without glasses too. For some reason A:M only renders in RED-BLUE or RED-GREEN both of which distort the colours too much. I rendered two images and then ran filters in photoshop to get the stereo. Hope its ok to post stereo images in these submissions (I'll post a mono too).
THIS FIRST IMAGE IS STEREO
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #9: Flower Power
Date Completed: Jan 20, 2007
Remarks: where a flower gets power. Personally, I think the ending is just a little too creepy. I would try to mess with the timing or the percentage of the pose, but this section is focused on modeling and not animation I want to move on to the other modeling exercises.
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Name: Jeremiah M. Faries
Exercise Completed: #8: Custom Car
Date Completed: Jan 19, 2007
Remarks: couldn't think of what else to do with a distorted car. The rabbit stole my old vespa and made mischief. (The vespa is an existing model tweaked to look like my vespa).
2_08 "Group" Directing
in TWO Animating
Posted
Greetings. I've just completed TaoA:M (I know that was a while ago for most of you), and have answered Martin's call for beginners to join in. If it isn't too late, i'd like to help out. If all the beginner tidbits have been assigned I'll be happy just to tag along and learn the ropes. I've followed the maze of the ever changing Wiki (doing this in the middle of the upgrade made it interesting
) and have requested Dot project access and have downloaded SVN. I think I still need to get a password for that and I imagine I'll get a better sense for how the project progresses once I can see more stuff... but I thought I'd introduce myself and check out what's been happening here at the forum.
Cheers,
--jerry