Gaijin
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Posts posted by Gaijin
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Very cute!
Under critiques, the main thing I noticed is that all of your sound effects are in the left channel only - there doesn't appear to be any right-channel soundtrack. Even if the sound effects are mono instead of stereo, I would expect both channels to be active.
To be fair, I've seen other A:M shorts which exhibit this problem. I can understand how it occurs - the author reviews their work using computer speakers instead of headphones, and with a computer speaker system's typical lack of stereo separation it sounds perfectly okay when played back. This would have been caught if headphones were used exclusively when laying down & reviewing the sound tracks.
Other than that, the short worked very well. Your sense of comic timing is spot on and the yoke is impossible to miss
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Daniel,
Having a sliding rate based on deadline urgency is a very workable concept. I've been commissioning artwork for one of my fanfics from a very talented young lady in Singapore, and that's exactly the sort of fee structure we've agreed on. If I ask for a "no deadline" job she charges considerably less than if I ask for "be done in XX weeks". The "no deadline" jobs allow her to fill any idle time between other paying commissions she's working on that *DO* have tight schedules and the low-pri jobs are subject to being bumped when something hot is dumped in her lap.
The only thing I have of concern in trying to address the hobbyist market for rendering is that you may find your minimum fee after setup charges is too high even at your lowest level. This is especially true when you consider that most folks seeking the personal/hobbyist prices won't have a good grasp on how long a render pass would take, and I serious doubt that anyone would be willing to sign what is basically a blank check for the services. Asking a hobbyist to commit for payment based on "finish until it's done, then charge for hours" is very much akin to taking you car into a shop for repair work and authorizing the shop to "fix it" without insisting on a firm estimate. Guaranteed to leave you with unhappy customers.
I would think that a more workable fee structure for the hobbyist market would be based on the number of minutes of animation output requested instead of the amount of computing time used. You'll end up averaging plus or minus on actual comp time spent versus what you charge, but it would be a fee structure the customer could easily understand and allow for in costing.
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Fellow AMers:
I'm looking into creating and Anime style character, but I'm having trouble finding a good source of Front / Side head shots of the same character and of the same scale. can any one point me to a good reference material? Thanks!
Pixmite
What I'm doing is taking screencaps of the character I want to model. If you own the DVDs of the anime series in question, there's usually something you can find that's usable. For instance, the front/side head shot I'm using for onnaRanma came from the opening sequence of one of the Ranma OAVs. As far as scale goes, lay down some guidelines based on one of the pics you're using and then scale the other pic to match.
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Looking good. You may have trouble around the corner of the mouth when animating.
Yup - I was thinking the same thing. I've also realized that the eyelids - not to mention the eye sockets - need more work in order to animate properly, as I'll need a minimum of three spline arcs to properly follow the stretched surface of the eyeball on a blink.
PS Right at the side of the head, you have some dead end splines making up a 4 point patch. I would continue them through to meet each other. Unless they're going to be covered by hair....maybe so.... and here I was trying to cut down the overall number of splines.
Ouside of the ear, a Takahashi-style head is rather full of hair, so I was going to use that to cover up some of the minor modeling sins. The main reason I posted this was just exaclty for the type of comments you made about the mouth. Thanks!
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Greetings!
Well, I finally stepped away from my mechanical modeling background and took a stab at the Katakata tutorial for making an anime head - this one is Takahashi's onnaRanma from Ranma 1/2. I'm posting it here for feedback - this is the first attempt at a non-mechanical mesh I've done in A:M, so feedback and useful pointers are more than welcome.
My initial thought is that I'm probably a little spline-heavy (typical Shurtleff-style overkill in action yet again). I had a bit of a problem with creasing to start, but I think I've managed to get rid of most of it.
One major compromise I've made in trying to implement Takahashi's style is with the eyes. I've pretty much given up trying to duplicate the vertical cylindrical shape Takahashi always employed - I figure a partially rounded vertical cross section won't detract that much from the overall look, and doing so allows me to use distorted spheres instead of open cylinders - which should hopefully make the eventual eye movement animating a bit easier to do.
Anywhos - here's a couple of screenshots of the WIP to date. Comments, please.
Front:
Side:
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Not sure what ARM you are trying to get but try this site http://www.sonofpat.com/Tutorials.html.
ARM is short for the A:M Resource Matrix - you should see the header and links to ARM down in the Resources section heading of the forum.
It is possible you have a firewall rejection also.Um, no. I run my own hardware firewalls at home and have worked as a network engineer long enough in my carer to know that isn't the problem. When a site drops off the web, it drops off the web. You can usually find old copies of pages if you search the wayback machine, but even then a lot of artists' sites have their robot.txt file set to reject web spider cataloging. I know I do that with my fiction pages as a matter of course.
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One other problem with web-based tutorials is that they're often hosted on authors' personal web sites - which tend to disappear with alarming frequency. A good quarter of the links to tutorials (and just about anything else for that matter) on the ARM return with a 404 not found.
Most frustrating at times ...
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Hey, thanks guys!
Although it doesn't seem to be as simple to accomplish as my initial idea, that fact that it is doable is good enough for now. Colin, thank you very much for a very interesting eyeball rig. Even though it doesn't quite work for this immediate need, I can foresee using it extensively once I get my primary project underway.
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Is there a FAQ somewhere that states what can and cannot be done dynamically with decaling? I'm looking to make an easily controllable set of Takahashi/Takeushi-style anime eyes, but since these are not spherical in nature the normal eyeball construction techniques really don't apply, and I'm still far too early in the "Figure Out How To Use A:M" learning curve.
Some examples of the style I'm emulating (these are from Ranma 1/2) is shown below. The eyes are basically cylindrical as opposed to spherical and it's the entire iris that changes size instead of the pupil. Also, the eyes in this style can also change geometry - they can go from the ovaloid to circular in the same character.
My first thought was to contruct a pair of cylinders connected to aiming bones that would control the verical & horizontal movement (basic stuff) then apply a simple color decal of a round iris+pupil each and control the size and shape of the decal itself by hooking the X-Y scaling parameters to a set of pose sliders. If I could also control the translation coordinates of the decal's stamping, I could dispense with cylinder movement entirely (desirable due to possible object collision with the mouth rig components) and tie all the decal stamping control sliders directly to the eyeball aiming rig.
Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to make this type of relationship work without nuking the actual stamping of the decal on the cylinder, and a search through the forum message base leads me to believe that it isn't possible to do it in this manner. If I have to dive into decal sequences to perform the iris scaling operation I will, but doing it that way doesn't leave me any easy way to also change the iris's geometery in the middle of a scaling operation.
Hopefully I'm wrong about it not being possible, and I could really use a few pointers about now. Thanks in advance.
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If you already own (just waiting on) 2005 then an upgrade isn't going to do you much good. You'll already own 2005 so it won't do much good to upgrade you to it.
Yes, well, some of us are just impatient puppies and couldn't wait.
(BTW, Hash's mail order service was certainly fast - especially considering this time of year
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Even if you were going to use this process for a garage kit, you would have to add fine detail by hand. I think for high detail, you might need a different method.
Thanks for the info. I'm more interested in one-off garage kit equivalents than the miniatures at the moment, but I will admit to being spoiled by silicon-mold resin cast finishes. Just getting the mold parting oils off the various resin parts in normal garage kits is bad enough - having to microsand a smooth finish as an alternative isn't really all that appealing.
I guess my (halfhearted) quest to find an affordable producer of custom figurines for characters from my anime fanfiction will have to continue anew ...
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William, since you've actually done this, what's the smoothness of the surface on the resulting part like? IOW, If I'm sending in a full body figurine (instead of a bust) for construction, should I be using garage kit scales (1:6, 1:7, 1:8) or can I send in small wargaming figures (28mm, roughly equvalent to 1:72) and still expect expect reasonable results without requiring a lot of post finishing?they are about as durable as something made of porcelain, perhaps a little tougher than that.Also, how much post finishing do you have to do?
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Someone here, but I can't remember whom, once created gems for a jeweler's poster. They looked great. If I run across that post, I'll let you know. Try searching the forums and the Animaster archives.
Found it - even had a sample project file. Thanks!
(Gaijin kicks himself and wanders off in search of more caffeine - should have thought of that first!)
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Greetings!
Does anyone know if there are any publically available material parameters for setting up various precious gemstones as A:M textures? I've looked through almost all of the valid links on the A:M Resource Matrix, and even the commercial texture sets such as Enhance:AM don't appear to address this directly.
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Just another hint here
I did a total clean reinstall of A:M to try and get rid of a few other v11.1 problems, and when I went back to reinstall TSM2 all of the TSM files ended up in C:\Program Files\The Setup Machine - and there was no option in the TSM installer to change this behavior.
My first thought was ... WTF??
The kicker is, when I reinstalled A:M, I only installed v10.5 and v11.1a - I didn't install v11.0 at all. Since I had gone into regedit and had manually killed all of the various Hash, Inc. registry keys as part of the clean sweep, there was no HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Hash, Inc.\V11.0\InstallationDir - which TSM2 evidently uses to find where the proper version of A:M is located.
I manually duplicated the HKLM\...\V11.1\InstallationDir key and tried installing TSM2 again. It worked. Hope this helps figuring things out.
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We are embarking on a project here in the New Users Forum to identify, resource, fully illustrate and thoroughly reveal areas of Animation:Master that users of Animation:Master want to see fully explained. The perspective we are seeking is that of the New User. From opening the box on the first day to adding detail to your animated film successful we want to document it all.
To me, the largest and most daunting task facing any prospective animator is learning how to model new items properly. I know that the product is Animation Master, and an emphasis on scripting, storyboarding, and animation mechanics is all well and good, but I doubt that anyone buys into the product with the expectation that it comes with all of the objects necessary to tell their particular story idea - and modeling requires its own particular set of skills.
I also rather suspect that the effort required just to learn how to model objects, let alone implementing all of the objects required for a particular story, is a major cause of New Animator Attrition. Goodness knows I virtually fall into this category - I first bought AM in 2002 and have barely touched the program since. One reason was that I was waiting for all of the work on hair to settle down (upgraded to the 2004 CD), but another is a simple lack of time to prioritize all my hobbies with work and home life demands.
The task of documenting how to model objects is almost more daunting than actually learning how to model because of the vast differences in requirements each different person brings with their story ideas. For instance, my interests are strictly in the anime field (Japanese style animation) which has a very distinctive style. While creating a base mannequin of an anime character uses most of the same techniques as a photo-realistic one does, implementing the finishing details (all the hard stuff!
) is quite different. Scenery and prop modeling is another thing entirely, and all of these major categories really need up-to-date tutorials with working project files (a large majority of the current modeling tutorials available are using old versions of AM).For character models, tutorials are needed for creating the base mannequin. Tutorials, plural, because not only do you need separate tutorials for each basic part of the mannequin (eyes, face, hair, torso, limbs, joints, rigging bones, etc), but you also need separate variations for each major style of animation (photo-realistic, cartoon, anime, fantasy, heroic comics, yada yada yada). Next are tutorials on how to modify the base mannequin to add clothes, shoes, equipment, etc.
Duplicate the above for the various major types of animals, plants, insects, etc., and don't forget the major stylistic differences while you're at it.
Next, indoor and outdoor scene modeling tutorials. For indoor scenes, making walls, doors, windows, glass, mirrors, tables, chairs, light fixtures, wheeeee the list is endless but can be pared down to several major category types. Outdoor scenes requires modeling terrain, plants, rocks, building exteriors, vehicles, all sorts of fun stuff. Again, these can be broken down into several major categories.
I'm sure you can see why a beginner can get extremely discouraged in a real hurry. Having a good library of stock objects can go quite a ways to alleviate this problem, but it doesn't cure it completely. Note that the Hash free object library - as nice as it is - is currently nowhere near the size to be considered a "good library of stock objects".
There are other ways around the modeling problem (and the need for so many tutorials), of course, but I have no idea if any are even feasable. For instance, a program that worked in a manner similar to Poser5 which could create basic rigged AM character models by modifying and morphing a set of base mannequins using a slider-control-like user interface would be a godsend. Similarly, being able to import/convert the output of architectural design programs like Punch!'s Home Design Architectural Series 3000/4000 would solve almost all interior set design modeling requirements.
I can always dream, right?
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[quote name=-MWS-
' date='Dec 19 2003, 01:28 PM] Materials/New/Material Material1/Attribute/Change Type To/Particle System/Hair
Use "shift + Hair" to get the old hair that works with splines.
For the new hair there's an icon on the toolbar that brings up the editing tools.
OK - that did it. Thanks - I *knew* it had to be something stupid/simple like that.
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Mark W Shurtleff
email: hauptman@sfcmd.com homepage: http://www.sfcmd.com
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New Demo Reel
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
Don't forget to make sure that you have sound recorded on *both* tracks when you lay down the audio tracks. The one snippet with sound in your post is left-channel only.