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williamgaylord

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Posts posted by williamgaylord

  1. Yeah, about that, since I basically know nothing about rigging, I find it very hard to model for rigging. The solution for those joints may be bad, I don't know, but it is to late to change it now

     

    I'd say you did a great job at modeling and rigging. Looks very natural...if you can say that about a disembodied hand.

     

    :D

  2. This is an interesting diversion from your usual brilliantly crafted mechanical modeling. Looking quite good.

     

    About thumbs:

    The thumb has the only metacarpal bone that moves freely.

    It only has two "phalanges" (finger) bones sitting on top of that metacarpal.

    The other fingers have three "phalanges" bones each sitting on a metacarpal that does not move freely.

    The thumb and its moveable metacarpal sit on a carpal bone that juts out from the plane of the palm--like a little shelf that sticks out at a right angle to the palm. If you feel where the metacarpal of the thumb joins this little shelf as you look at your palm, you can feel that the thumb is jointed almost exactly in front of the index finger metacarpal--not to the side of it. You can also see that the joint is right near the wrist joint just a little to the right of the biggest tendon there at the wrist.

     

    If you place the model's thumb bone accordingly, you should get a more realistic movement of the thumb, and the palm will fold more realistically.

     

    Pretty amazing work consider you had to duct tape the mouse to the stump where your hand used to be attached! What dedication to the craft! :P

  3. Added two more rings. I think with some tweaking this will look smooth. I'll add scaling of the rings later. I think walking and running will be pretty easy with this. I should be able to just vary the curl of the overall "s" shape with a simple pose slider; point the leg with one target bone (and rotate it with the roll handle of the parent bone that orients the leg); and direct the surface constraint pointer bone with another pointer. Very simple rig! Maybe even use only one target.

    JoeLeg03.jpg

    PotHeadLegs02.mov

  4. Used fewer spline rings, assigned "spline ring bones" to intermediate rings, and fan bones to the rings at the leg joints. Then adjusted the position and rotation of the intermediate spline ring bones with Smartskins on the Shin and Foot bones. This should also allow me to scale the size of each ring with a pose slider for each intermediate and fan bone associated with the ring. Easy to set up and does the trick!

     

    Thanks for the help so far, folks!

    PotLegSmartskinned01.jpg

  5. Actually, I think if I get close to the same silhouette it will work fine--doesn't have to be exact. There will be enough action to provide some sleight of hand if I time the transition to the 2D logo right. I'm thinking that Smartkinning it with a straighforward three bone leg structure would probably be best. If I can control child bone position and orientation in a Smartskin I'll use that to control individual spline ring bones. In separate pose sliders I'll scale each spline ring bone and hence the ring itself. Then I can match the silhouette to figure out what the scale of the rings need to be.

  6. This original position is likely to be one extreme. The other would be almost straight. I'm thinking I may not neen conventional leg bones even. Just a control to straighten/stretch the leg or bend it into a tighter "s" shape. I doubt I'll need to wiggle the "toe" separately.

     

    I do want to be able to scale the spline rings so I can match the silhouette of the logo in the "freeze frame".

  7. Heres what I'd like to accomplish with the most efficient setup I can manage to get the desired result. Any suggestions? In the animation I'll have to match the final profile of the logo itself in a "freeze frame"--running pot, snap shot, transition to actual logo. I figure I'll need to tweek the actual shape of the legs to match that profile. The 3D leg shapes will have to be tweaked to account for camera view settings, the angle of the leg relative to the camera view, etc. Looks simple, but I have a sneaking suspision that it will take a fair amount of planning and work.

     

    I think it might be wise to be able to scale the individual spline rings of the legs, handle and spout, even though the controls might be complicated. It would make tweaking the silhouette to match the log a lot easier to manage. Once that view is tweaked I can lock down the scaling and then animate normally.

     

    Interesting how an abstract character can complicate things!

     

    :D

     

    Sorry, the JPEG compression almost completely blended the text into the background. Expand it to full size and it should be readable.

    JoeLeg02.jpg

  8. Thanks for the diagram. I found it so helpful I printed it BEFORE adding a post to this thread!

     

    A lot of this stuff won't be obvious even after a few rounds of looking at it. It takes time to get enough of the pieces floating around inside your head to be able to start seeing how they relate to each other. Diagrams like this sure help, though.

     

    Sometimes it takes a few episodes of dreaming about this stuff after staying up waaaaaay too late working on it. "Thanks Shaggy! I never would have seen it that way on my own. And the way you used Vernon Zehr's Terminato to demonstrate dynamic constraints was truly amazing....and Eugene's lecture on bones and Smartskins using Ezekiel's vision of dry bones really helped me make all the right connections..." :P

  9. Now I need to sort out the legs themselves. I'll experiment a bit. You can see the basic shape of the "legs". I want to avoid an obvious joint. I think a simple stretch and compress type of action would work best, where the "S" shape straightens out or curves tighter, or each curve independently.

  10. Here is a very crude animation. It shows the gist of what I want to do. Need to add refinements to how the surface constrained bone is controlled. I need to learn better what determines the surface constrained bone's orientation and how I can better control it.

    PotHeadLegs01.mov

  11. I could have seen it at the Atlanta Film Festival! Sorry I missed it! In fact, this year I missed the whole thing. I have to say though, your film would have been plenty of motivation to make a special effort to attend the festival this year. I should have checked the schedule on your website earlier. I'll be kicking myself for quite a while. (Thump!...Ow!...Thump!...Ow!...)

     

    Congratulations on your success so far!

  12. Yes, that's what I'm after. I forgot to open the pose slider view to turn on the constraint pose. Obvious booboo.

     

    Now I need help making sure the bone is constrained to point either normal to the surface or at least some predictable direction. When I apply the constraint, the bone acts like a bit of iron stuck to a magnet, but doesn't necessarily point the way I want it to. I'd like it to keep the leg facing forward unless I deliberately want the knee to rotate outward, so I suppose I need to control the roll of the hip bone. Most of the time I'll just want the legs to follow arcs in vertical planes offset from the center plane. Other times I'll wan't to rotate that plane so the leg swings in a tilted arc toward the side, as he might do in a karate kick.

     

    Once I have this worked out, the next thing will be rigging the legs themselves. I want the joint action to be very rounded, the upper gradual curve being the knee and the lower one the ankle, where each curves or straightens rather then bending sharply at an obvious joint. I know cp weighting could do this, but I've noticed that the spline rings can tend to compress into elipses. I suppose cp weights could do most of the work, while some smartskinning could tweak out the distortion.

     

    Not sure why I wind up animating such unconventional characters...I should practice rigging and animating some more conventional characters for a while.

     

    Thanks!

    Bill Gaylord

  13. Actually I don't want the legs to be jointed to the body. The original logo should give you an idea of what I mean. It's a lot like the thigh bone of a hampster being almost completely hidden in the fat and skin around it--makes the knee look like the pivot point even though it isn't. In this abstract case I wan't the "leg" to float the same distance from the pot, yet I want it to swing along the radius of the pot, as though it were the knee joint of a hamster. The pot is not actually spherical, so a bone rotation won't keep the leg floating the same distance from the pots surface--hence the desire to use a surface constraint.

  14. Anybody out there have experience using a surface constraint? I thought I understood how to set it up, but apparently not. In this coffee pot character I wan't the "legs" to follow the surface of the bottom of the pot, though with a visible gap. Since the bottom is not exactly spherical I'm thinking the surface constraint will do the trick. I just can't seem to get it working. The picture bellow shows the gist of what I'd like to do, simplified a tad until I get the surface constraint figured out. The bone constrained to the surface will be the one used as the "hip joint" for the leg--sort of. This is a very abstract character after all.

    PotLegs01.jpg

  15. I'm animating a logo for a friend. The original logo consists of simple pen or brush strokes. The "arms" are the handle and spout and the "legs" are just two zig-zag strokes. This should be easy to rig and plenty of squash-and-stretch is spot on for this type of character. A picture of the logo is attached.

     

    I'd like to use the TSM2 rig, but the challenge here is that the "hips" and "shoulders" will be offset by 90 degrees (hips side to side like normal characters, but "arms" fore and aft like the coffee pot it is). Since the the various parts are abstract and not actually connected, I'm hoping I can set it up in a normal T pose, then rotate the arms and "body" of the pot (including the spine). Any thoughts?

     

    Actually I think the legs might be better rigged differently than normal legs. What I'd like to do is have them just follow the contour of the bottom of the pot rather that be hinged to it. The end closest to the pot should stay close to the surface (with a small gap). The rest of the zig-zag would stay more or less "normal" to the surface and would stretch or compress along that normal direction. This could be a classic use of the surface constraint. I could use an aiming bone to control the position of the leg and it's angle relative to the surface tangent. I could use a target bone to position the other end of the zig-zag and the aiming bone (by aiming the aiming bone at it, of course). Then just stretch to reach the target and at tweaks to keep the volume constant.

     

    Any suggestion, advice would be welcome.

     

    Bill Gaylord

    MightyJoeExpresso_small.jpg

  16. If we can ever fix the rendering glitches I might finish the film. There will be two children, a little girl and her older brother planting seeds along the row of brownstones. The trees will grow magically as they work their way down the street. The project has been stalled as we try to figure out why the rendering glitches up when the leaves start growing (and while I work overtime on my "real" job). Trees are made of simple parts, by there are an awful lot of them! ;)

  17. Looks familiar. ;)

     

    You can also use this technique to animate plants that branch. Set up a set of control path splines that provide the branch structure of the plant as it would be fully grown. Each branch will be set up essentially like Robert described above. Basically a tube with each spline ring assigned to a separate bone and constrained to the particular control path spline in a percentage pose. In addition, scale the spline ring bones very small at the zero percent end of the pose slider. At the other end scale them to 100%. That way the branch grows in thickness as it grows in length. Once you have all the branch poses set up, animate the whole set in a new overall percentage pose. Strart with the "trunk" which will define the duration of the growth animation. As the trunk passes the base of a branch, start the branch growing and complete its growth at the same time the "trunk" completes. Of course you can add layers of branching, timing each layer accordingly. Leaf clusters can be associated with their own bone. These bones do not need to be constrained to a path, but they do need to be placed where each leaf cluster will sprout. Use pose sliders to scale the leaf cluster bones. Animate the leaf clusters in the overall percentage pose as well, once each leaf cluster percentage pose is set up.

     

    The two movies attached demonstrate the idea.

     

    If you are a real masochist, you can build a whole tree like this:

     

    Tree Growth Animation

    BranchDemo15e.zip

    BranchDemo1.mov

    BranchDemo2.mov

  18. Brilliant! Is this based on personal experience with cats, or have you been watching a lot of re-runs of The Planet's Funniest Animals?

     

    I currently have two cats who I know would react quite differently in this situation: One would scrabble frantically while looking ever so embarrassed. The other would simple go over the edge without any struggle and with a very round-eyed look of surprise on her face.

  19. I have DiVX6.8 installed and Quicktime 7.5.5 and neither recognize the existence of the other, so I can't get the trailer to play. Quicktime will play the audio without displaying video. Windows Media player will display the video, but will not play the audio. DivX6.8 complains that Quicktime is missing and needs to be installed. Anybody out there have a clue what's wrong with the Quicktime/DiVX link?

     

    Correction: DivX6.8.2 plays only the audio just like Quicktime.

     

    So in Windows Media I could see the trailer and in Quicktime I could hear it. Beautiful work!

  20. Yves, you might want to draw a "workflow" diagram that shows where the nonlinearities come in.

     

    The diagrams I posted earlier are a start. If I can squeeze in some time I'll expand on these and Yves can then critique these and suggest any corrections, improvements. I work for AT&T at their Atlanta, Georgia labs, and video technology is my main specialty. I think diagrams like these can help clarify what happens where without having to get too technical. I won't make any promises for time frames, though, since AT&T's IPTV has me spread pretty thin these days. This will be a good exercise for me to learn more of the CG world, since most of my experience is in television technology.

     

    What Yves has done a marvelous job of already is showing how all this translates into the art of creating the image you are after.

     

    The last diagram I did I would certainly change to emphasize that the display industry has currently taken the approach of standardizing display response to the 2.2 gamma curve, whether or not the underlying display technology's native characteristic follows such a response curve. Look-up tables (LUT's) essentially make the display's natural response appear to fit the 2.2 gamma curve so that any gamma corrected image data matched to 2.2 will display correctly. In the future with digital interfaces and build-in display "intelligence" it would be more appropriate to move the gamma compensation into the display itself, opening up a completely linear work flow right up to the display input. Today, however, we conform the image signal to match the display instead of the other way 'round.

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