Gerry
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Posts posted by Gerry
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If you did the ornaments as Hair it would be easy to fill the space out and adjust the amount.
No, it's a little more involved than that. Each ornament will have a different inspiring word on it and the camera comes in and does a closeup flyaround, faster and faster, and ends in closeup of the star on top, with guess-who's logo.
And, scene.
I should probably do an animatic, I've got a piece of music already picked out. I can start timing some of these things out.
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I also found myself expecting kind of a hoola-hoop action where the speed of the growth almost bounces against the sides. Almost as if each loop were individual... a kind of loop-dee-loop-dee-loop-dee-loop-dee-loop-dee-loooooop-pah!
Mark, I was thinking the same thing; it sort of wants to happen. Once I get the design more simplified I'll be able to do these little tweaks. Thanks for the comments!
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Thanks for comments, peeps. Nan, the distortion box does seem to have a little quirk to it, i.e., you apparently have to reselect the cp's FOR EACH KEYFRAME. In other words, select the cp's in muscle mode (I did this in an action, but will prolly work fine in a chor; and have the Animate button on), click the distortion box icon, and tweak the d-box to move cp's.
Then go to where you want the next keyframe, and even though the d-box is still visible, you have to leave distortion mode, select the cp's again, then click the distortion mode button, tweak cp's, and repeat.
What maybe confused you was that intermediate step, where the d-box is still visible but when you move the playhead for a new keyframe, the d-box doesn't effect the cp's.
Try it, see if that helps.
Robert, that's a possibility. I discovered that the "tree" is too complex right now for the end result I'm after, so I'm simplifying it down to have maybe only 4 or 5 rings, closer to the doodle at the top of this thread. But I think before I proceed to rebuild from scratch I'll play around with the biases on my current model just to test. Currently the spiral rings are too close together for the ornaments that will *pop* out of the spiral as it grows, and I also would have needed a truckload of ornaments to fill the tree properly which I just know would have complicated my task later in the process.
And yes, there will definitely be some glitzy texture, either flocking or sparkles or something like that!
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Here's a wireframe test with bones showing. The jitter is smoothed out to a pretty good extent but not perfect. I'm not sure yet but the lower part of the tree may not be onscreen for the whole growth process in this shot.
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Hey Roger, do you have a sketch or something to indicate what you're going for?
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thanks Robert, I'll try to later today. I've had some luck by just retiming the starting keyframes of all the bones as they arise from the base and it's a pretty straightforward process. I'm tweaking today and should have more to show this afternoon.
EDIT: What I really like was being able to do the final bounce with an animated distortion box, the first time I've tried that!
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Well here's another quick test with some smoothing out and final bounce...
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thanks, Paul. I didn't like it much either so I've been playing around with the keyframes and it turns out smoothing out that jitter was easier than I thought. I'll post something more tomorrow.
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Here's a first test of the tree effect. I decided that I like it a little irregular and Dr. Seuss-y, so I'm not worrying about making it perfectly round and smooth. The one thing I'd like to fix is the way it "pulses" out of the ground, but I'm gonna keep moving forward because ultimately I don't think it will be a problem.
EDIT: I should say that uncompressed the movement is a little smoother. When I compressed it to post it got a little jumpier than it actually is.
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I wanna see character sketches.
So do I!
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Welcome to the forum, Phaedrus! Best place to get your AM questions answered.
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Mark, I'd buy it again if I hadn't already! Good luck with your new plans.
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That's some amazing work.
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Thanks everyone for your suggestions! I maybe didn't describe it clearly, Paul, "corkscrewing" isn't really what I meant. It needs to start as a shoot, then grow into the spiral, with maybe some glittery particle effect, then ornaments popping out of it along the length of the spiral. I still think I'm not describing it adequately. Both Nancy's and Robert's suggestions are good approaches.
Mark, you're not far wrong I'm afraid! My mind is a blank and what I'm doing is the boss's suggestion. It's not bad and I'm happy to do it, but after eight years it gets harder and harder to come up with something.
I'll post some tests when I have something to show.
EDIT: Robert, that effect is just what I'm looking for!
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Rodney, as things develop and I have work to show I'll start threads in the appropriate place.
And trust me, it's Sillyness Valley. I know, I've been there.
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There's a keyboard shortcut for hiding and showing normals, but can't find it at the moment. It's easy, like F or D or 8. I'll try to find it and let you know if someone doesn't beat me to it.
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In addition to the Christmas animation I have a couple of projects going on, however I'm not planning on any cg animation for them so here I am in "Off Topic"!
I've written a song inspired by my wife Vicki, called "Sexy Texie". I've been struggling to record it (not my area of expertise by any means) and once that's done I'm planningto animate it in a limited 2D animation style, that I *think* will be some sort of SquiggleVision (for those who are familiar with "Dr. Katz" of a few years back) because getting as low-tech as I possibly can really appeals to me right now. I'm talking pencil and paper, people! I'll then attempt to get it into some film festivals.
Second, I'm planning to pitch another show to the broadcasters I met last Feb. at the Kidscreen conference where I pitched "Nightcallers". I learned a ton, met a lot of people, and came home inspired to go through all my other projects to see what would be better suited for this market. The project is called "Sillyness Valley" and is about a nine year old girl and her cat Humphrey, who have a secret that must be kept from her nosy little brother at all costs. On this one I'm only doing a bible and character designs, no animation planned as of this writing.
So I'm managing to keep busy, but unfortunately less and less AM except for the Christmas animation.
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I've got an idea for the animation I'll be doing but right away I have a question. I want to have an extremely stylized Christmas tree shape (more of a triangular spiral) growing out of the ground. Here's a simple sketch. I don't want to just scale it, I want it to corkscrew out of the ground. What's the best way to "grow" a shape like this?
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Listened to the first two, Marcos. Really nice! Thanks for posting. I'll listen to more later but I'm not a fan of wearing headphones at the office.
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This just gets better and better!
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I haven't even opened AM since January so I'm sure I'll have questions!
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If you're in the NYC area, there will be a reading series presented by Red Shirt Productions which will include one of my wife Vicki's pieces. It's a three-evening event with readings of ten short (ten minute) plays, five on Friday night, five on Sat, then all ten reprised on Sunday. Info on their website is pretty thin unfortunately, but here's a link to Red Shirt's page: http://www.redshirtentertainment.com/event...dfasdfasdfsadf/
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Just announcing that I'll be doing the company Christmas animation (my eighth, yikes, this is the longest I've ever been at one job!) and as yet I have zero ideas, but I'm just starting, surely something will come up!
Christmas animation
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
Tricky question: can you reverse the direction of a path? I'm setting up this christmas tree with bones in the part that's growing, and a path constraint. I'm creating the constraints now, but it appears the guide path starts at 100% and goes to zero. So when I create the path constraints for the growing tubular parts, the bones and geometry flip 180 degrees when snapping to the path.
I don't know then if this means the geometry will flip inside out, normals and all? I don't mind calculating the ease from 100 to zero, but I can also imagine problems down the line because of this. Is there a way to invert the direction of the guide path?
EDIT: nevermind, I just recreated the path.