tobinjim
-
Posts
256 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by tobinjim
-
-
can't view your site, as there's a coding error somewhere in your browser check on frameset compatibility. My browser, Safari 1.2.3 handles frames fine, but your site is apparently trying a redirect to http://grandal.net:84 doesn't have port 84 open. The result is a white page, and an error ("Can't connect to host http://grandal.net:84").
But good luck with whatever you're working on!
-
Ken: Go read the April 2004 Scientific American article, "Tyranny of Choice"
-
Looking super silky smooth now! I'm not sure I'd worry any more about the actions. We're all too focused on such minute things in a short clip. My wife and children have watched it and not one of them has caught nor felt any unsmoothness!
You had written earlier about about 20 extra frames of preroll to give Kevin some time at the lecturn. If you were to do that (or longer) from a camera angle that gave us some sense of the audience he's addressing, then we'd have some visual anchors for where his eye movements fixate. My personal choice would be the camera pulling forward in the space between the shoulders of two people (if that's appropriate for you scene), such that the shoulders are very out of focus because depth-of-field is centered on Kevin. It'd be short and subtle.
I sure wish I could animate emotion the way you do! Is there a bio-wet chip I need to buy for my brain stem?
-
This is such a good piece it feels wrong to nitpick on it!
There's one combination of eye and head movement that seems repeated... less so in the latter versions. Right at the "like this" which follows "try your patience" his eyes move up and to his right the same way they did just a little bit earlier. I think what caught my eye was the uniformity of the movement both times. Since there's less of it in the more recent versions, I'd guess you see it too and are tweaking it out.
That said, this is awesome work.
-
Very cool! Since you're compositing, you might consider duplicating the grayscale and offsetting it about 3 frames to give a ghostly trail behind him.
Perhaps this would be cliche-ic, but if one of the lights passed through the wall just shortly after Thom did, you could end up with that "pop" of light that so much sci-fi uses to indicate removal of the paranormal from the scene.
-
-
Ken, it's been so long since I played with volumetrics that I don't even remember how... but my first thought while reading your post was "light lists!" Remember how if your light is added to a model it only lights that model? Is there a way to use that for your purposes? Here's hoping first thoughts work!
Jim
-
It's hot out here at LegoDude's college summer camp, so I made this little fan to keep him cool. Set the movie to loop and you too can stay cool!
(Unfortunately for LegoDude, when the conference ends, and he goes on stage to close things down, he's going to be melting in the heat, lose his footing, and get sucked into the fan... sort of a LegoDude meets Mr. Bill ending to a fun debut of LegoDude!
)If anyone wants the project, I'd be happy to share. Need to zip together a package so you'd get the decals (cookie cutter and transparency map). This represents about two hours of work, so things like on/off knob and (d'oh!) electrical cord are left to you to do! For my needs this fan is 'good enough' for the size and focus of the closing piece.
-
Hi all,
Thought I'd share my first public animation with a purpose! This is a short opener for a conference I'm helping with next week. LegoDude walks across the campus and enters the arts building (20 seconds; top frame is towards the end of that), then he enters the auditorium and walks down the aisle (a walk cycle down auditorium steps was fun!), climbs up onto the stage, then waves each arm to open each side of curtains (second image). After the curtains are open and the opening slide is onscreen behind him, LegoDude takes a bow (three different cameras capture this moment) -- last image.
Thanks for the help of all those who worked with me on the walk cycle learning.
Jim
P.S. I would post the animation, but I haven't come up with a good compromise between file size and lossy compression of what is some highly detailed imagery.
-
Watch it again and consider it in the light of NOT angry but CRAZY! In that context, I don't think the caveman should have ducked on that first shot at him -- he was living his on little fantasy and didn't expect real-world interaction!
OR he was so insane that he was didn't comprehend what just happened. Then the gun took control of his hand and started shooting.
So many iterations. That's rich! You could see his other hand coming over to grasp the gun hand, trying to regain control... at which point the inevitible struggle ensues as the gun hand begins to slowly, inexorably turn upwards towards his head...
Oh wait, that's been done before. Nevermind.
-
Yup: Cool, eh? Now you can start making cracks in the ground that swallow up whole groups of bad guys! Oh, sorry, in your world it'd be bad robots
-
Can't "mad" be taken in the sense of "insane" or at least a little odd?
This animation was about a video-game generation of shadow boxing. How many awards did some of those great old comedic routines about shadow boxing garner?
I was laughing the whole way through!
Watch it again and consider it in the light of NOT angry but CRAZY! In that context, I don't think the caveman should have ducked on that first shot at him -- he was living his on little fantasy and didn't expect real-world interaction!
So I suppose if the charcter was meant to be mad in the crazy sense, we should have been given more visual clues (the crazed look, etc.) to clear up the confusion.
But I'm still going to go watch it some more and keep chuckling!
-
Cute! The one in the middle has nice lag in the bill movement. Did you animate that by hand or is that a lag property or some secondary motion?
-
THANKS!
And "Thanks" to you, Yves, too!!
-
Hi folks,
I'm whipping together an end-of-season soccer video for my daughter's team party tonight. The title sequence could really benefit from a soccer ball zipping by...
Has anyone modeled a soccer ball they'd be willing to let me use?
Thanks!
-
In the interest of full disclosure, my wheel spun too fast because I was applying an old math formula incorrectly: I used the radius of the tire (i.e. 1/2 the diameter) multiplied against pi, and what I should have used was 2?r (2*pi*r)... in the wheel tut, the narrator placed his tire on the zero line of the y axis and a marker across the top of the wheel, which gave him the diameter, which is what he multiplied by pi to compute the stride length. Since I had measured only half the distance across the cirlcle, it makes perfect sense then that in doubling the Stride Length I corrected that math error.
I feel lots better now! Meanwhile, my computer is off rendering frames of a very nice walk cycle! Thanks all!
-
Rodney, I went through this tut and discovered (perhaps this is a bug with Animation Master 10.5r rel 1 for Mac OS X) that the stride length property is half what it needs to be!
In the wheel tut, he sets the rotation during the Action to 720 degrees. This was "okay" with me because of my belief that the Stride Length property is half the full distance covered by the character in its walk cycle action (you only measure the stride length of one foot, afterall).
Sure enough, my wheel spun way too fast. So, instead of changing the Action to be only 360 degrees, I doubled the value of the Stride Length and BINGO! the wheel rolled correctly.
Back in my "real" project, I doubled the Stride Length of my walk action, and my character now walks correctly across the path.
I'm feeling much better now. I hope this is a bug, as I thought the other understanding made more sense. Will work to get a ruling from support at the next earliest opportunity!
-
Mike, thanks for taking the time to write up your detailed response: I really appreciate it. I've placed a sticky note above the monitor: "Frames in Actions are not frames in Chor!" While I process the rest of your thoughts, I'll comment based on the tutorials Rodney and others are bringing up.
First, in none of the tutorials did they worry about ease. Nonetheless, I went into my chor with the intent of setting ease for the path constraint on my character. Before changing ease, I noticed that at the beginning of the chor the ease value for the contraint is 0% and at the end of the extent range it is still 0%. While on the last frame of the extent range I set the ease to 100%... while moving the ease slider I do see my character whiz along the path as the chor window catches up to the slider value; I also notice that the Timeline window, viewed in channels mode does now show a white line extending up and to the right from 0% ease to 100% over the extent range. Interestingly, as I scrub through the timeline, the ease value in the properties view flashes but remains at 100%. This might be a sign of a bug that is perplexing me... others can confirm whether this occurs for them too or not. In any case, adjusting the ease made no noticeable difference in the walk cycle. It didn't change the repeatedness of the shortcut in the timeline.
In this most recent tutorial that Rodney pointed out, it's crystal clear to me why we need to be able to enter a stride length by hand, in the case of the wheel (or any non-linear) object going about a cycle (a gear mesh is discussed in a different tutorial, if I recall correctly), as the stride length indicators don't work on non-linear cycles. But I'm still at a loss as to why I need to know the stride length of a linear cycle. I don't seem to be able to use that information in any other area of the action/choreography windows.
But what the tire or wheel tutorial did drive home is that when you "double" the Cycle Length of the shortcut, the cycle slows down. It appeared to cover the same distance, but the time was the same, so some aspect of the space-time continuum is out of whack!
Gotta go try that tut out on my machine instead of just watching it.For those who are following the thread, I think the tutorial on the wheel cycle missed one golden opportunity to explain something about walk cycles (this sage advice perplexedly coming from the guy who doesn't understand why his isn't working...): When setting up the rotation of the wheel, the demonstrator set it to rotate twice and didn't explain why. I believe the answer is that the stride length property applies to *half* the motion in the cycle; so when a character walks, the stride length is the measurement of just one foot moving from it's forward-most ground-planted position to it's rear-most just-about-to-leave-the-ground position, which is only half the motion of a bipedal walk cycle. Hope that makes sense to someone, probably someone trying to figure out how to make an eight-legged spider walk and not look like it's wearing roller-skates!
More if/when I get this more figured out! And Mike, thanks for the offer for individual help. For now I'm content to keep this discussion in public view in the hopes that it helps others. And for now, this is just hobby work with no express deadline and I'm just moving my skills forward frame by frame -- oops, er, time quantum by time quantum!
-
-
Thanks for the replies. I have watched both the tutorials on path ease and on "Take a Walk" -- both of those show the exact same steps I did: Create (or reuse) a walk cycle; create a path in the Choreography; drop your character in the Chor; add a Path constraint to the character; drop the walk cycle action on the character. My EagleEye™ observed that the timeline representation of an individual cycle length in those Time Lines matches the number of frames that were keyframed in the Action... and that little juicy detail differs from what happened when I dropped my action on to my character in the chor.
I will try to reproduce those tutorials exactly and if my results differ, I'll write up a bug report!
Wouldn't it seem most natural that if you create a Stride Length property (e.g. 9.75 centimeters over 30 frames) that when you drop your action onto a character who is constrained to a path, that the character would cross 9.75 centimeters of path every 30 frames, no matter how long the path is (assuming it's greater than 9.75 centimeters!)? Every time I've played with Ease, the result has moved the character along the path *at that frame in time* which has the effect of speeding up or slowing down his walking. But in doing that, the Stride Length is no longer working for you and you'll notice either real foot slippage (if Ease stretched things out) or perceived slippage as the cycle interpolates faster through the walk cycle than your eye can discern smooth motion. Part of the reason I think Master *has to* by default have your character walk along the path at Stride Lenth distance over Action-prescribed number of frames is that otherwise we would have to be able to determine the length of a path so that we could do the math properly to get the timing down, and that'd be a bear, given any path shape other than a straight line.
Again, thanks for the replies... When the lightbulb goes off maybe I'll write up a Walk Cycle Tutorial To End All Walk Cycle Tutorials!
-
Sorry, my server isn't communicating through my ISP... I'll post elsewhere...
http://homepage.mac.com/tobinj/WalkCycleTooFast.jpg
-
-
Hi all,
I'm still trying to understand how all the properties of a walk cycle come together in the choreography. David Rodgers "Animation Master 2002: A Complete Guide" was very helpful in getting my stride length set properly, but as that book focuses on the 2002 version, the 10.5r (Mac OS X) version I'm using now is a little beyond the book.
I had thought that once you had your walk cycle action created (a range of motion over a prescribed set of time, with the stride length measured using the stride length start and end points), that you could constrain a character to a path in the Chor, then drop the action onto your character and it would walk naturally across the path.
When I do that, the shortcut to the walk cycle action shows correctly as repeating in the timeline, but the walk cycle has been compressed from it's prescribed two-second stride to something like 11 frames!
In the picture below you can see what I'm talking about: The Action is a two-second walk... but down in the Chor the repeatedness is about every 11 frames.
What property have I overlooked or set inadvertently?
-
That's not a blink! She's batting her eyes at me! The longer I drag the playhead back and forth through the first quarter of the .mov, the longer she bats her eyes at me! I like it!
(Is her head mostly grey, or is that shadow behind her face?
Very nice... thanks for sharing... now back to my/your adoring lady friend....
Joe Williamsons Huntress with Mo Cap
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
Let's all be very honest in answer this question:
How many times did you have to watch it before you noticed her arms go through the purple headdress on several occassions?