MiddleKid

Yeah, give us a bit more info, Xtaz. Patch counts, render times, number of passes, light rigs... etc. The DOF is pretty nice too.

Sweet... Major kudos to the guys building the rig, especially David. He's been working is @ss off on this thing for quite a while. The few times (the last was a few months ago, I believe) I've played with the rig I was really impressed. It's an incredibly advanced rig without being incredibly hard to use... Not an easy balance to strike. Can't wait to see the finished product!

Nice work Dagoos! Good, snappy animation and a pretty good sense of weight overall. You should post this on cg-char.

Keith Lango www.keithlango.com has some excellent free tutorials. They're done with more "toony" characters but all of the principles apply to realistic characters too. He's also got a subscription tutorial service but I'm not sure what's happening with them.

1) Personally, I have no idea, but I think it's been done before. 2) Ditto - 5x5 gives you smooth shadows and almost perfect anti-aliasing. Though the new "soften" option in v12 might get you the same results at less than 5x5. Of course, the regular A-Buffer renderer is fine for most things. In my experience, multipass gives you much nicer ray-traced shadows and motion blur, but takes much longer. If you haven't already, you might want to do some side-by-side comparisons and see if multipass is worth the extra time. 3) If you have enough space and CPU power, render and edit at the highest resolution you think will be used. You can always shrink it later. At work we experimented with "up-rezing" old footage to HD... Looked like crap next to actual HD footage. Presets for 1080i and 720p are already in the render panel. Also, to save time animate and render at 24 fps then use FinalCut or AfterEffects to do a 3:2 pulldown. It looks just as good and can save you tons of time and disk space on large projects.

I feel ya... If only we didn't have to deal with this "life" crap we could actually get some stuff done. Or maybe I should just invest in a day planner.

Hey Jamagica... Nothing worth posting lately, sorry to dissapoint. I've been insanely busy with paying gigs and the last thing I've wanted to do in my free time is to stare at a computer. I did some minor things a few weekends ago... Mostly experimenting with rigging Clay's face... I'll post some tests once I'm happy with it but that's probably a few months down the road. Thanks for your interest!

Very nice Victor! The timing and weight feel great now! If I were being nit-picky (and for some reason all of us animators are nit-picky) I'd say that your little dude could hit with just a tad more force when he falls back down on the planet. But I think that's more of a personal preference than a real issue. So, if you're happy with it... move on and show us the next shot. C'mon man... you know you want to.

This has probably been mentioned but I didn't bother going back through all 10 pages... Truly great modeling but those white, zombie eyes just ruin it for me. I know you've got a killer eyeball model laying around, Colin. Throw 'em in there and give the guy some soul.

Sigh. Yeah, I see this now that I've posted it for everyone to see. Funny how that works. I'll play with the timing and spacing on this, and I may end up reversing the direction of his flip. "Don't go chaaangin'.... just to try and please me." I'm with Ken on this one. I really like the reverse spin after he lets go of the planet. It's got a great 'toony' feel to it and it's a good contrast to the preceding action. Perhaps if the planet were spinning a bit faster and, after his butt and legs leave the surface, he held on just a frame or two longer to get the energy needed for that final flip. Perhaps, perhaps, perrrrr... haps. So many obscure song references. So little time.

Very nice Victor! The only thing that I notice is when he's flipped up & off of the planet... it doesn't feel right to me... hmmm. I'm not entirely sure of the reason but it doesn't look like there's enough energy at the end of the spin to throw the little guy up that high. Perhaps the planet slows it's spin a little too quickly after he lets go? (watches about 20 more times) Ahh... The little guy's butt leaves the planet appropriately but that big head of his feels a little sluggish. Perhaps that's what is making it seem a bit off. The facial expressions are great! That's no small feat with those black beady-eyes! And it's so cool to see your film coming together. I don't know how you find the time. Also, care to share any tips on your rigging? I'm rigging my lead character now and I'm having trouble coming up with a good squashy-stretchy solution.

Ahh... Thanks Wegg! I was planning on getting either a faster CPU or another render slave. I think I'll go for the new CPU since Colin has so graciously offered up his slaves. I have to admit, the more I play with materials, the more impressed I am. I still feel like I have more control over things in Maya's hypershade... but Maya sucks at everything else. It seems to me like materials involving bump or displacement are the real time-munchers. The textures I'm building now are a lot like your reptile skin.... A perlin, a few layers of CellTurb... good times, good times... Dear god! I just realized it's 2:30! No wonder I'm rambling. G'night!

Really? It's not paging out to the HD during rendering. You're right... no money right now. But, we were going to set aside money for an XBox. I suppose I really don't need to play Halo2 that bad. -- edit -- Oooh... Just visited Newegg... They've got two 512Mb sticks from Mushkin on sale for $136. Mighty, mighty tempting!

Kinda off topic, but... Wegg, what sort of render-time increases do your procedurals usually incur? I ask because I'm doing a ton of stuff with procedural textures right now and it seems like they just eat my CPU for lunch... and then spit it out 20 minutes later. I'm not doing anything uber-complex either. Mainly gradients with a CellTurb. (crap.. the right arm just fell off of my chair.) Anyway, just trying to figure out if there's a way to optimize these boogers or am I just going to have to do my best with texture maps? Thanks! Oh yeah, my specs: AthlonXP 1.8 GHz. 512Mb RAM. The "Toys" project renders at about 55 seconds per frame.