ernesttx
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Posts posted by ernesttx
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I've re-edited Episode 1 to fix the flickering issue and put it up on my site.
I'll carry a discussion about Episode 4 in a new thread. Also, I'll be discussing the issue of asset management for large projects such as this. -
Thanks to all the above comments. Sorry to get back with you so late. I just arrived back home from a trip to Las Vegas.
Case: It is a bit rough at the moment. All lot of that has to do with the amount of time I am able to dedicate to making it and the deadline I've committed myself to. Now that I have a few things out of the way, I will be able to soften up the rough spots.
Bugle and jzawacki: I was able to listen to the series on a friend's computer with really nice speakers. I was embarrassed by the sound quality in alot of the dialogue. I've only been using the speakers on my laptop for production. Truth be told, it's only my voice, no audio alterations.
I feel that alot of the bad quality has to do with the way I recorded some of the dialogue. I've learned more about recording by picking up pieces here and there. The clearer dialogue comes from using a better microphone and a software compressor. Before, I had a M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96 with a 1/8" stereo mic to record all the dialogue from the first series (i.e., the interrogator parts). For the detective interludes, I am now using a 1/4" pro mic, piped into Ableton Lite and using a basic compressor to record my audio files. In addition, I tried using a compressor effect on some of the older audio files, and I'm not sure it helped.
I also had to learn about Flash and how to create video files that I could import and compress in Flash and then export to .swf files and still have viewable files. The very first episode, I exported from my editing program in Sorenson 3. But, as you can see, the first episode has weird flashing dark and light frames. I've learned that exporting without any compression for VIDEO and audio helps dramatically. As an aside, a 1.6 GB uncompressed file imported into Flash and then exported as .swf, only weighs in at about 16 MB. I'm currently going back and should have a newer Episode 1 out that will correct that.
MMZ Timelord: Thanks for your comment. I spent a good deal of time on the story before heading into production. It's got a deep plot to it.
In conjunction with re-editing Episode 1, I've started etching out Episode 4.
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Thank you KenH, Rodney and you, Martin, who made it all possible.
Martin: I would love to have a "Special Topic", I'm not sure how to go about it. It'd be nice to have production notes, animation tips, and the like for people to talk about.
Rodney: Yes, I believe walk cycles are my achilles heel right now. I want to spend more time developing them; so, that each character has his/her own style.
KenH: Yes, it is all me. Story, animating, editing, compositing, music, dialogue, etc. Like Martin's dream, one man, one computer. Thank you, also, for noticing what I hoped would be individual character traits of each person. I tried to make sure that each one had at least some individuality. Hehe, actually, the ramen noodle scene was easier than some. Constraints can be your friends.
I'll be working on the pacing a bit more. I know that some scenes are a bit long in the tooth. I'll pay attention to that as I progress. Also, all of the facial animation is done manually. One of my next steps is to get Luuk's program and put it in the pipeline. A:M does a nice, quick job of lip-sync, but I feel I want my characters to emote more, and I feel that Luuk's program will help accomplish that. I rigged all of the characters to take advantage of it when I do purchase it. Also, if no one has noticed, in the new 3D World magazine, Luuk's program gets a good review. And thank you everyone else who has viewed the episodes, as well. As I progress in the story, as well as my own skills, I hope to bring more excitement with each episode.
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Good afternoon, Hashers.
I'd like to introduce you to a new webisode animation series that I am working on. It's made completely with Hash A:M. This series started out as a full movie that I was wanting to create. However, as I watched the market place, I felt that it would be a long time before I was able to bring the complete movie to market as a DVD. In rethinking the time I would have to work on it and the production value, I felt that short, web released episodes would be a better way to generate interest and foster a fan base. I also wanted to create a website, much like a televison station, where people could 'tune' into on a regular basis to watch the next show. I have completed 3 episodes so far of this series; and will be introducing a couple of other series in the coming months. I am also working on providing a forum for fans to socialize about the series.
My website is: http://www.animace.biz
So, please enjoy and I hope you will be entertained.
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i'll echo what others have said. in diving, it's a very fluid motion. lots of arcs to the arm movements and the important thing is center of gravity and the pivot point.
i used to do some diving in high school and weight gets transferred to the upper body and shoulders when you leave the end of the diving board. that's why the arms are swung out forcefully down and up. then, when you are just at the point where the momentum has left the upward thrust, that's where the turns, pikes, tucks or pivots come into play.
i thought this was a fun exercise, so i tried to execute the move myself. hope it helps.
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Very nice. I'll give your settings a go this weekend and post a pic for viewing. I'm not a big lighting guy, i do alot of toon rendering and wanted to venture into more realistic but still toonish type work.
thanks for sharing.
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This question is for Sebastian Pfeiffer, winner of image contest:
What lighting setup did you use for your image of the cartoon characters?
Or possibly, are the characters shading in a particular way? or was just diffuse, ambient and specular colors used?
I ask, because, I'm liking the way the characters come across in your image. I'm trying to achieve a look very similiar to what yours displays, but perhaps with a bit more specular or highlighted areas on my characters.
Thanks in advance for any information.
To admins: I wasn't sure where to post this sort of question, so if it needs to be moved, I'll understand. Thx
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it's spread the animation across 8 minutes instead of 8 seconds! So this is pretty bizzare,
-Ethan
Ethan,
yes I too have come across this. I'm not sure what is happening. When I import into AM, it's all spread out. Not sure of the setting, I've checked SynthEyes and the only setting I see is FPS; nothing else telling it about time factor. Might hit up the SynthEyes forum to see if anyone has found a fix.
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Nice work.
I'll second what others have mentioned about the animation - foot slipping, gun shooting, etc.
What I would comment on has to do with adding more camera angles and composition of shots. It would be nice to have a close up (CU) of maybe the frantic escapee behind the coffe mug, eyes shifting from side to side; that way, we get to see his angst and can feel what he is feeling. Another would be the ship coming in the window, maybe a medium shot (MS) of the window and the ship slowly coming up over the window sill and acting like it's scouting out the environment, maype a point of view (POV) from the ship inside the kitchen.
As it is, it's a static shot and all the action happens within the one shot. It's as if we are to observe what is happening only. Allow the audience to be a little bit more intimate with the characters, situation and actions happening.
Otherwise, great modeling, characters and compositing.
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After years of saying that one day I would create my own films, I finally sat down in front of my computer to make my dreams happen. There was only ONE tool in my toolbox that I knew that would help me accomplish that goal - Hash Animation:Master. I've used the program since version 6, and as an artist, it has only been the one program that feels natural. How better to design a model than by using Splines to draw out the design? It's like drawing in 3D. Thank you, Martin Hash and your team, for creating a program that allowed me to complete a life long dream.
Ernest Skocdopole
www.animace.biz
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Luuk, yes I'm going for the full version. I like that it will work with Poser as well. I'll keep checking for version 1.3. Thanks for the update.
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Ack...I did something a bit too quickly. When opening a project, I was prompted to click on where a model was located. I accidentally clicked on another model by mistake. I quickly exited out of loading the file. However, when I go to open the file now, it doesn't prompt me for the model again. I have now opened the project. Now, it would be simple if my project did not have any animation keyframes for the model that is supposed to be there in the first place. The model I accidentally imported in its place, is associated with the animated keyframes (both models are human bipeds and rigged exactly the same).
Is there an easy way to replace the orroneous model with the original model?
I'm assuming that if I delete the orroneous model, all keyframes will be deleted with it?
I know I could probably export out keyframes as an Action from the Chor window, and then import as Action and replace model; but, I'm wondering if there is a simple replace method?
Thanks in advance.
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Luuk,
So, a 2D tracker that can export BVH motion is in the newest release of the Tracker?
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Oh sure Rodney, make me work harder
Well, Poser is not the easiest to do when it comes to animating. I imported the file into Carrara 6 to render faster and add some arm movements to the falling guy. Oh and I added a shooter just for you.
Bigboote, not sure about setting mass on Rigid Body in AM. I'll check into that tomorrow. Maybe by then someone will enlighten us about the physics system and there may be something i'm not aware of.
Meanwhile, this is for Rodney.
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Rodney,
that's it pretty much in a nutshell. The only other thing to do is constrain the AM character to the bvh file, drag n drop Action on model in Choregraphy. I had to translate model a bit. For some reason when I exported the .bvh file from Poser, it translated the Poser character back to zero origin, but I think I didn't translate Body in Poser very well. This was all just a quick test to see what results would be given. Not bad, with a bit of tweaking here and there it could be better.
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I thought about it a little further, and since Poser can export a .bvh file, I did that and imported into AM and constrained human character to the .bvh file. Seems to be not bad at all. Sure needs tweakin', but what don't.
A glimpse.
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This one is for the gurus and experts out there that know a lil sumthin sumthin about the capabilities of physic simulations in Hash AM.
Yesterday I saw the movie Untraceable and there was a scene were a guy fell from a bridge. To me it looked quite good, but I wondered if they used physics simulation and a CG stunt double for the action.
I tried recreating this scene in Hash, but I'm quite the novice with the physics stuff to really understand what needs to be setup and done. Is it possible to have a rigged human character and constrain with a Rigid Body constraint and have it simulate realworld physics?
Not getting very far in Hash, I decided to switch over to Poser 7 with their physics simulation to work it out. It's a quick simulation, just to see what is possible. Hopefully the animated gif will show up here, but it's for reference only to see if this type of "stunt" would be possible in Hash AM. I have version 13t. Any comments and suggestions are welcome.
thanks.
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Paul,
Are you Baking from the Action or from the Choregraphy? I am on 13t (will upgrade after this project) and found that when I tried to bake in an Action, I got an exception error as well. However, when I Baked from Choregraphy, everything went accordingly.
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rezman,
if you go back to page 10, there is some information there about setting up a rig or rigging a face for Zign Track. One method is Orient Like bones and another is relationships for muscle poses.
I've been creating bones for the face and Orienting Like to correspond to bvh file that Zign Track creates. I'm not so good at the relationship creation process to know if one is better or easier than the other.
I've been busy converting my characters to use with Zign Track, as well as CP Weighting many joints. I was never so good with Smartskinning; so, CP Weight has been a wonderful enlightenment. But, boy, lots of joints in fingers. hehe But, all this is in anticipation for full scale production once I purchase Zign Track sometime next week.
So, I'm mainly looking at things from a production pipeline aspect to see how the flow works. I've been looking into BVH Baking (as Bendy has suggested); but, in working with some files, I've notice that for some walking to bvh files, the skeleton rig I am using tends to make that a bit difficult. but, standing motion type bvh files work quite well.
Anyone have other examples of Zign Track videos and their characters? enjoy seeing others work. I like the bug one too!! and I'm not biased just cause he has my name
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OMG Bendy that's what I've been looking for. Something that will allow me to have Actions based on a bvh file, but without the bvh file attached in some way.
I was going to take the long way and Action my model's bones to the bvh bones. Actually manually move each bone in accordance with the bvh bone in an Action window but with fewer keyframes
. It's actually quite easy, but time consuming. But this way, i'll just need to attach the model to the bvh rig and then bake out the action in Chor. It's still going to be a time consuming to go through several bvh files; but, far less time. However, in baking out the action, what would be a nice Unit of Error Tolerance for Channel Reduction? I did a test with "1" and it seems that various keyframes for various bone rotations were strewn throughout the action. No biggy, but tweaking the Action after that will take some adjusting.
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hey all,
not sure anyone else has ran across this situation. I'll give a little background as to how I am currently working with Zign Track.
1. create video reference with dots on face
2. run through Zign Track and export bvh file
3. Open AM, import model and create action
4. assign bones and constraints
5. Save as Action
Then, say I have created 3 actions from Zign bvh files (I've named the Actions differently).
1. Open new project and import model
2. import Actions
3. New Chor
4. place model and then drag actions onto model
Here is where things become a bit disorganized. It seems that the BVH Action Objects (if not named differently) are getting in the way as they all seem to have similiar names (ie, BioVision BVH File1, BioVision BVH File2, etc.). When creating the actions for individual bvh files, it seems the actions are looking for a specific named bvh file. However, if multiple bvh files are named the same, you might run across not knowing which bvh file it is looking at (as you will notice, in your Objects folder, there will be multiple BioVision BVH Files with similiar names).
I've had to go back and recreate the Actions but also rename the BioVision BVH File to something similiar in order to relate the Action to a specific BVH file. Now, when importing the Actions into a new project, the corresponding BVH shows up in the Objects folder. It also helps with assigning constraints with the picker; as the pop up list will show a Shortcut to
and the related bvh bones to that bvh file. Not sure anyone else has run across this, but I'd thought I'd pass it along. Also, if anyone else has a different way or insight into whether it's just me.
Also, Luuk, you might want to add as an improvement in the future. What I am doing, is using Bauhaus Mirage to import my video reference and pre-process the video before importing into Zign Track. The pre-process I am doing is eliminating all other colors (except tracker dot green) from the video. Something similiar to the little girl in the red coat process in Schindler's List. I have found out that it allows much better tracking of the color.
What are some other ways people are doing to use Zign Track and their workflows. Thanks
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Sorry to get back so late.
I was having too much fun
Ok, did a quick animation test with one of my models. Luuk, your face setup was just right in what I'm capable of understanding and implementing. I uploaded a clip on to youtube:
I am pleased with the results. However, I do think I need to tweak CPs and CP Weighting to get things even better. I'll work on things this weekend. I'm also rigging other characters and then will work on my tracking in Zign Track. I think I need to get better 'dots' and better placement on my face. I just did a quick track to work with Zign Track and see how things work.
Luuk, I'll let you know my thoughts on improvements. I've have SynthEyes and worked with it; so, I'll focus on what would be nice to have in Zign Track. BTW, I'll be purchasing around 12/6.
Also, on the FPS front, I create a new project at 30 FPS in AM, and imported the BVH file; all worked well. Also, I did the suggestions about expanding the action; those worked just as well. It just caught me off guard the first time I imported it.
Hope you guys enjoy the clip, and I'll work on some others. Oh, and disregard the voice part; I was concerned with that too much heheh
Thanks again Luuk for your brilliant program and all your efforts.
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Thank you Luuk, Paul and David (itsjustme) for your help and suggestions.
I managed to apply a setup similiar to Luuk's Frenchman model due to the fact that I will have to set this up for multiple characters and needed something I can manage, setup, and tweak (read: something ' I ' can understand) accordingly. I'm definately going to have to wade into CP Weighting a bit more (does Computing CP Weights before assigning CPs corrupt anyone elses models? hehe), seems to be the answer to some of my other issues.
I should be able to post something later today. I was setting things up last night (4 AM
), checking things, fixing, tweaking CPs, etc. in order to get the rig in the model and make sure nothing was too out of place.I do have 1 question Luuk. The AVI that I have imported into Zign Tracker shows frames 1 to 225 frames. However, when I export the BVH file and create the action in AM, it imports into AM with keyframes 1 to 195. But, it doesn't seem that it's truncating the BVH file; all the 'action' in the original AVI seems to be there. (That is, all the mouth movements to dialogue are covered and keyframes set for the words mouthed). I'm guessing that it might have something to do with Zign using 30 FPS and my setup in AM is for 24 FPS? I'll try a project setup for 30 FPS and see if that is it.
From what I have managed to render out for test videos so far, I could not be happier or more overwhelmed with possibilities. Luuk, YOU are DA MAN!!
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Thanks Luuk, I'll take a look at your example tonight. I've been trying to go through the v13_posable Squetchy Rig and trying to walk through the tutorials to rig one of my models...and...I think my brain exploded. I'll try to walk through your's and see if I can use constraints. I'm not a big Rigger person. Alot of this is new to me. I'm grateful to all who have contributed all this wonderful stuff and to truly take advantage and utilize what is out there, I feel will be a very patience-driven journey for me.
Episode 4 Underway
in Subject 99
Posted
I've begun Episode 4.
I've already got about 1 minute pulled together in the editor. Today, I spent some time modeling the police station where Boz and Raffie will be settling into. Here's a picture preview:
I was wanting to create flourescent hanging lights, but I'll have to look into that later. I tried bulbs and kliegs to a tube model; but, nothing came out to my satisfaction. But, I'm liking the station as it currently is.
Also, I spent the last couple of days going through files and trying to clean up some things that will make going forward easier. Asset management is becoming a big thing as the series progresses. It's good to know where particular files are located (whether they be picture, sound, music, models, projects, etc.). Another big thing is backing up all the data. I'm not a big fan of losing files, either. For example, the first episode contained about 10,000 files and weighed in at about 2.8 GB. It would not be a good thing to have those suddenly disappear. I figure one episode to one DVD should make it easier to find something or go back and redit, if necessary. In addition, naming files appropriately is a big help. You should stick to a naming convention religiously. For example, in shot 1 if you have multiple cameras set up, naming individual picture files should follow what the picture is; for example: shot1_cam1_0000.png. And if a particular background element goes with that picture, name it: shot1_BG_cam1_00000.png. Or, something along those lines. It's no good to name a picture file as frame_0000.png.
Ok, back to modeling. As always, critiques or comments are always welcome.