ypoissant

To be more precise, Mary looks toward the right and John looks toward the left. So whatever the shot, be it a two shot or a set of one shots, Mary always looks toward the right and John always looks toward the left. Mary could be shot from behind, from the side or from the front but she will always look toward the right. As Ken mentioned, the line can be crossed but it is usually better to do that with a camera trolley so the viewer is aware of the crossing. You could also cross the line at a very highly emotional point in the scene but doing that properly requires more experience.

Yeah! Auto-bracketing is cool for HDRI too. It simplifies the process greatly. The only drawback of auto-bracketiung is when you want to photograph a scene with moving people or objects but if your scene is static and you use a tripod, auto-bracketing is quite good. Exact. AO is a shading trick. It does not do real shadows. This said, you will get the same diffuse (real) shadows with a skylight rig. Does this mean you don't set different levels of reflectivity? Or that all objects in the scene should have reflectivity of 100% with the specularity diffusing the highlights? That's a whole Pandora box. Reflectivity is a CG concept. In the real world, we talk about reflectance but reflectance is a much more complex and encompassing property than reflectivity. All surfaces have a reflectance. This is what gives the surface its color and appearance. If we wanted to be purist, we would use only reflectance in CG but that requires a lot of rendering time so we end up using all the available CG tricks to fake reflectance. So all surfaces are reflective. Diffuse surfaces are reflective too but their reflection pattern is totally random because their surface is very rough (although microscopically rough). In A:M, you can sort of make a diffuse surface by setting its color, then 100% reflective but set the specular size to some very high number such as 50000% and then wait and wait for the render. For perfectly diffuse surfaces (if such a thing really exist) you are better off not using reflectivity at all. The tradeoff point needs to be decided for surfaces that are neither purely mirrorlike not purely diffuse. The tradeoff is yours. You decide when the visual effect is convincing enough. For the type of HDRI based renders you are after, I would say the tradeoff point must be quite high. My own decision point is when the surface is to look metalic or gloss or semi-gloss painted, I use reflectivity as set above and play with specular size to get the effect I want. Bare metalic surfaces always require reflectivity and specular size adjustment to get the metalic look. For tissue, plants, skin, rough surfaces ot flat painted surfaces, I don't bother with reflectivity. Some tissues have a very characteristic reflectance pattern due to the material and the threading pattern and it is not possible to emulate that with simple reflectivity. Then there is the issue of coated surfaces such as a rough coat of paint covered with a clear coat of varnish where I set the specular color to the varnish coat color and play with the "reflection filter" to get the characteristic reflection pattern. Like I said, this is a Pandora box.

It is all very black. I kind of liked the way your prison model was being developped but now I wonder why you went into all this trouble for an image where we see only a couple white spots in a large black sea? Have you considered just roughly modeling the structure of the prison except for the few cells that need to be lit? It would dramatically cut down on the choreo size and help streamline your manipulation and rendering of it.

I may repeat myself but here are a few more info. If you are using a digital camera that can save in RAW file format, then you already are in business as far as getting HDRI files suitable for most renders and reflections. Canon Rebel digital cameras are very good at doing this. Of course, Pro digital cameras can do this too. RAW format can already record 1 or 2 f-stops more in the highlights. Add to that that the RAW format is stored in 12 to 14 bits deep then you already have the potential to capture from 4 to 6 f-stops more than a LDR image. So all you need to do with your digital camera, is to photograph your scene with 2 f-stops darker. With the additional 2 f-stops that the RAW format gives you, you get 4 f-stops of highlights. When you save that photograph in an EXR file, just increase the exposure by 2 f-stops and voilà.

Very good looking set. I like the atmosphere and the variety of textures. Quite a remarkable texturing job on economic models BTW. You've got great design, illustration and painting skills. I like your consistence and persistence. Just one observation I wanted to say for a while. In your Animation Cookbook, page 13, the storyboard breaks the 180° rules several times. Take care of that. Otherwise, you're doing a fine job.

When you create the action, you select the cell model (see note below) as the base model. Then you add new action objects which is the cell model again. You position the new cell next to the first one. Then add a new action object cell again, etc. In the documenation, look for "Action object". In choreography, you drop the base object in choreography and then you drop the action onto the object shortcut in the choreography. Note: Personally, I prefer to create an empty model and use the empty model as a base model for the action where I wuld add the cells.

You are doing amazing scenes. I like how you use the toon shading to get an illustration look. You have a unique style.

To avoid that in the future, always save your project with incremental names "project001.prj", "Project002.prj", etc. Do the same for your model files BTW. For something like that, I would have a model of one cell only. Then I would assemble a cell block in an action and then I would assemble the prison in the choreography using the action. This way, if you ever have to change your cell, the job will be easier. Plus, the model file is smaller and more manageable.

Here is an interesting follow up on this rhythm issue. I was browsing "In the Blink of an Eye - A Perspective on Film Editing" by Walter Murch and here is a quote from the author at page 20:¸ No less. BTW, his list contains 6 criteria, in importance order (the percentage indicate the author's importance estimation), which should be simultaneously be satisfied in an ideal cut: 51% Emotion 23% Story 10% Rhythm 7% Eye-trace 5% Two-dimensional plane of screen 4% Tree-dimensional space of action

I will not make an editing job but here are my thoughts: Usually, at least, when music is added to a film sequence, the composer takes care that the strong music moments match the strong sequence moment. The music supports and even lift the sequence in that way. Music is added after most of the editing is done. Film musics are rarely scored to a fixed beat. It slows down or accelerates to follow the action. Experienced directors already have a good sense of rhythm and pacing that they adapt to each scene or sequence mood. Actors have their own natural rhythm too but they also adapt. The editors are the ones who rely the most heavily on a sense of rhythm and beats that emerge naturally in each sequence and this sense of beat guides their decisions to cut. All in all, when the music composer receive a sequence, it is not very difficult for him to figure the natural rhythms and beats and adapt the music accordingly. Rhythm and regular beats have a purpose in films. They prepare the audience to strongly expect something on beat. When it does not come or when something else comes, it have a strong emotional impact on the audience. Films have several rhythms embedded one inside the other, like a fractal. For animated sequences, music traditionally come before the animation and the director uses bar sheets to precisely time the animation to the music. Exposure sheets can also be used for this timing operation. This is not a requirement though. I did a few animations in the past for educational multimedia products and I quickly learned to time my animations to the background music because it worked better with the viewer. And even when the animation did not have any background music, I would take a music track (not a song) I felt was in the right mood for the animation and I would use it to time my animatics before animating. I never read any in-depth discussions about this topic in any animation books because when that topic of matching music beats to animation beats is discussed, the author just takes that matching for granted and that this is the way it should be done without further developing why it works. But I had a few opportunities to discuss this issue with my multimedia collegues. The most agreed upon argument was that when music and animation have different beats, they fight each other for the viewer attention while when the two beats are in harmony, they support each other and do not distract the viewer attention. I think there is also a cultural expectation to see people dance or move in rhythm with the music when there are musics. I think when animation is accompanied with a music, then the animation should be choreographed to the music almost like a dance choreography. Action beats and cuts should match music beats. I don't mean a purely mechanical adherence to the music beat but more like a musician would adapt to the music beat while still creating a unique perrformance. Like in music, animation may have silences and skip a beat or a bar for a hold, could wait for an off-beat, could use eighth-notes, sixteenth-notes, half-notes, etc. This becomes especially important when the music is very prominent. I'd like to hear opinions from musicians on this issue.

I agree. The music does not work. It is distracting, it does not fit with the story, it does not have the same rhythm, it does not support the animation. You would need, at least, to adapt the animation so the moves are paced with the music and the rhythm is matched to the music. This might not be a bad idea. But I think your animation worked without the music.

Very well done. You have a good sense of acting and rhythm. You have a nice economy of movements and action but it still reads unequivocably well. And I especially appreciate that you did not overdo the anticipations. It shows that animation can read very well without this crazy anticipation we see everywhere and it gives your animation a beautifull subtlety and a style of its own.

I will try to explain a couple things but there are so many angles to cover that it might take a few Q and A to get all information out. HDRI are excellent for reflections. Much better than LDRI especially on colored reflective surfaces. But getting the correct light range right can be tricky. First, here is a procedure I use to cap the range of HDRI files: This works in Photoshop CS but it might be different for CS2 and/or CS3 because I know that Adobe now can process HDRI files directely without the need to convert them. So say, I want to cap my HDRI file to +2f-stops. I open the file and in the EXR preview dialog, I drop the exposure by -2f-stops (and make sure the gamma is set to 1). When loaded, the file is converted to 16 bits. I then save the file back as an EXR format. Photoshop asks me is I want to recompensate for the dropped f-stop (or something like that). I click Yes and voilà. THe EXR file have now a maximum of 2 f-stops of dynamic range. In version of Photoshop that can process HDRI files without conversion, I would probably need to drop the f-stop, then save the file to a 16-bits format, then reload that 16-bits format, raise the f-stop and then save back to exr again to get the same result. Now that you know how to cap the dynamic range, here is why you would want to do that. On highly reflective surfaces, large dynamic range will produce strong aliasing if the surface is highly specular or will tend to produce noise of bright pixels if the surface is softly reflective. So you want to drop the dynamic range as much as possible to reduce those aliasing effects. The problem is when you also have low reflective surfaces in the same scene. Painted surface such as the plane in your scene. You want to keep enough dynamic range so the reflections on the plane look right. It is a wuestion of finding how much dynamic range is enough for that plane and not too much for the gladiator armor and the plane exhaust pipes. In this scene, we have 4 different types of surfaces: 1) non-reflective surface - those we don't need to bother about. 2) the plane exhaust pipes - they are highly reflective and highly specular. 3) the gladiator armor - it is highly reflective but lowly specular and 4) the plane red paint - it is relatively highly specular but have a medium reflectivity due to the paint. The surface characteristic that will drive our decision of how much dynamic range we need is the surface with the lowest reflectivity. In this scene, that would be the plane red paint. There are some rule of thumbs to help figure the highest dynamic range that a scene would require but it might also be easier to find that by trial and error by saving several version of the EXR file with differently capped ranges and just try them all until the optimal one if decided upon. The rule of thumb is this: Take your darkest reflective surface color, here that would be the plane red paint. Check its color. This is the simplified reflectance of the surface. Say the color is RGB( 100, 30, 30). 255/100 = 2.55 meaning that you need 2.5 more light in your HDRI file so you can probably get an acceptable result with +2 f-stops or even +1.5 f-stops. But for optimal results, you need to take the lowest of the RGB component reflectance so 255/30 = 8.5 so a +3 f-stop would work. Now I did a little magic to get to 3 f-stops. Every f-stop step multiplies the amount of light by a factor of 2. +1 f-stop = 2 times more light. +2 f-stops = 4 times more light and +3 f-stops = 8 times more light which is pretty near 8.5. And, of course, +4 f-stops = 16, then 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, ... When working with HDRI files and reflections, you will most certainly need to increase the samplings in your render to get rid of aliasing artefacts that HDRI tends to produce. That is the nature of the beast. For highly specular, highly reflective surfaces you will most probably need to increase the number of passes in your render. For lowly specular (soft reflective) and highly reflective surface, you will need to increase the soft reflection's "Quality" property in the render panel. Finally, when working with HDRI files for reflections, let the surface color (reflectance) do the reflectvity work. That means set the surface reflectivity to 100%, reflection filter to 100%, reflective blend to 100% and the reflectivity falloff to 0. And use specularity size property to control the reflection softness.

Looking good. The character to the extreme right have a significantly smaller head than the rest. It looks like that character was scaled down rather than being younger or really smaller.

"Constrained" may be a little too strong a word here but I don't have any other word that explains what I mean. When The Peanuts were created, there were no other expected output but the comic strips. In that sense, it was a constraint. Not a concious constraint but the intrinsic nature of the medium imposed some design decisions that were refined through the years of using this medium. The Peanuts characters are very simple in design but they all have a very distinctive graphic feature that distinguish them from another. What distinguishes Charlie is his distinctive pattern on his shirt. What distinguishes Linus is his blanket. The mass of black that is Lucy's hair is a stong enough graphic element to unmistakenly distinguish her from the rest. Pigpen is distinguished by his dust cloud. Etc. Their design were made to capitalize on the high contrast black and white medium so their distinguishing features uses this contrast efficiently. The Peanut characters are usually drawn in some iconic POV. There are well know face, side and 3/4 views of each of them. The "limited animation" movies that were made with The Peanuts relied on those views to make the characters recognizable. The limited animations were made to look like animated comic strips and thus respect the character design intents. Paractically speaking, the characters could be used in other stagings, even in 3D. Everything is possible. But I think their optimal usage is within it's designed comic strip staging. Again, character design should take into account how they are going to be used. That is what "design" is for. Pixar "For the boids" is indeed a good example. The idea was to make one bird different from the others so all the other needed to look similar and they were well designed for expressing exactly that. For a cast of character that would be designed to act together as a gang, I would suggest making them all similar. But for a cast of character having all their different contribution to a complex story development, I would suggest making them obviously different. If each character personality is to be only sketchy and basically of simple follower of a leader, then making them look similar would be a design decision perfectly in line with the desire to make them look like simple followers. If each character is to have a clearly defined personality, then their design should enforce their uniqueness. Character design includes also body posture, attitude and gestures that transmit the character's personality. Clothes and accessories will also go along that as well as voice and mannerism, etc. Body and head shapes and proportions are just another tool in the designer's arsenal to help communicate a character's uniqueness if they are to be unique. Having differently shaped characters of different heights opens up new composition and staging possibilities in a 3D medium too. If all the characters are of the same height, showing them all together pactically means that they will all be next to the others in a single line otherwise, they will hide one another. Having different height, they can be placed at different depth and some triangular composition become imaginable.

The reference to "The Peanuts" made me think. Why do this design choice of making all the characters almost the same heights and proportions work? When I woke up this morning, I had this thought: This design is constrained by the medium and works because of the medium. First, the character design have evolved through the years to stabilize about 4 years after the comic strip beginnings. Then, it started evolving some more when new artists took over drawing the strip. The design did not really required large variations in character shapes because the strip rarely featured more than two characters simultaneously and they were generally staged in a theatrical frame where the bottom of the frame is more or less the ground for the characters and each character occupied their specific portion of the frame for the whole strip. Also, during the years, there have been long periods where the strip featured the same one character or the same two characters in long series of themed interactions. The reader was never in a situation where confusion about which character is who would keep from following what is going on in those strips. The Peanuts cast of character is, today, so well known by everybody that they can be used in animation films without getting the viewer confused about which character is who. Fat Albert and Little Rascals cast of characters is quite diversified in body shape as well as in body attitude and dressings. In fact, it is surprising to observe the diversity in the cast of characters in Little Rascals even though they are true kids. Bottom line: It all depends on how are those characters going to be used. If they are designed to be used in comic strips, like the peanuts, where interaction between characters is generally reduced to one-on-one, then similar designs would work. But if the characters are to be featured in an animation where the interaction is complex, with exchanges, plots and tradings between the characters that influence the whole development of the story, if the viewer needs to remember who said what to who and figure the network of interactions, if the film will be made of interleaved short sequences featuring different characters doing things in parallel, then the character design should be thought out so that each character is unmistakably recognizable. Jirard, You are obviously knowing what you are doing. Your character designs are very cool, especially the adult characters you did so far, and I love them. I also like your influences and I think you are definitely on a good track. Consider my discussion about character design as just discussion on a subject.

Not here. I don't want to hijack this thread. But details will come in due time.

Nice style of characters. Clothes need more texturing. I am also in a character design stage myself, for a short animation, so while I'm in a character design mindset, I'd like to offer a few observations and suggestions. I feel all the characters share too much of the same proportions. There are some differences in the facial structures in the first posted characters, the skin colors are the more prominent differences and the shoes are quite different. But I feel there could be much more variety. All the characters share the same body proportions. That is same head to body proportions, same upper body to legs length proportions, same arm length, same body size, etc. Same general morphologies. There are no endomorphic, ectomorphic or mesomorphic body shapes distinctions or any inbetween variations. There are no variations in heights or weights too. If you are planing to place all those characters together as a gang, for instance, they will be barely distinguishable from one another. There is much more efforts put in distinguishing the shoes for instance. I guess that this sameness in body shapes is what caught David's attentions to differences in shoes. And there are some efforts in differentiating the faces too but this is not pushed far enough IMO. For the head and face only, there can be wide variations in proportions and positions of the facial features as well as head shapes. I'd suggest you do test different body shapes and proportions. I'd suggest you do some sketches but if you are not a good draftsman, you could test ideas with the help of distortion boxes in A:M. Try long and skinny, short and fat, large and bulky, short and thin, short and bulky, high and fat, etc. for body shapes. Try round, square, oval, triangular and inverted triangular for head shapes. And try small, large, thin, wide, close together, spaced apart eyes. small, short, long, wide, fat, thin noses. etc. Try placing the eyes, the nose, the mouth higher or lower in the face or at different height relationships in the face. Concerning this mini-controversy about design vs style, here, all those variations could be designed while still keeping with the current style. Within a given style, design can go in so many different directions that style is barely limiting. To me, design and style are two different vectors. While they are somewhat related, they can barely restrict, impose or justify one another.

Make sure your ground have "cast shadow" turned on if you want to use z-buffer shadows. I recommend you use ray-traced shadows anyway. Not at all. That would be way overkill.

Increase the number of rays in your light shadows properties and use multi-pass.

I think you want to precisely center the model. Here is a solution: Select the whole model. then shift-click one CP on your model vertical axis (the topmost CP will do that). In the manipulator properties, enter "0" for "X offset" property. Then select one CP on your model horizontal axis (the rightmost CP will do that) and enter 0 in the "Y Offset" property.

There is still radiosity in there but it looks like the ligt intensity have droped dramatically.

For a lighting provided by only 3 candles, this is quite high. The wall, especially is it is natural rocks, would be darker. And there must be some gradual falloff (attenuation) of the light as it is further from the candles. We don't see that. I suspect your candle lights falloff distances are very large. Reduce the light falloff distances to some very short distance and increase the light intensity. This will give you a nice attenuation overall in the scene and produce bright highlights on the top of the chandelier. Apart from the other suggestions (different candle heights, wax drops, wood texture), I would add to turn the chandelier so it is not just facing straight at the camera.

WOW! This is beautifull. The only thing I'm seeing is the bump map on the tiles looks reversed. Apart from that, all look fine.

What you are doing is very beautifull. Lots of character and mood plus nice compositions.