ypoissant

it could also mean "Public Address"

Thanks Neils. It would be nice if the BMP ws posted somewhere along with the songs. Is this information already available somewhere. I know tht when I worked with Woot's "I want to be an adventurr" song, I had to stopwatch it. Also, what about adjusting the BPM of the songs so that it falls nicely on 24th of second?

First, Same as Will advise: Use a distortion grid to reproportion your mesh features to fit with the prop. Second: Refine the adjusting in front view by moving the CPs on X and Y to get the best match as possible. You do that with mirror mode ON. Third, Then still in mirror mode, turn bird's eye view and with the "3" key presssed to constraint to Z displacements, pull and push the CPs to fit the prop surface. Fourth, When all the CPs are fitted to the prop surface, you can move the CPs along the spline tangents, with the "4" key presssed (or is it "5"?), to get a better distribution of splines. You will eventually get what you want.

Yes. But the projection map itself will not illuminate the scene. You would set the projection map sphere to 100% transparent with an IOR of 1.01 and instaall a skylight rig outside the sphere. Shadow OFF on the sphere and ON on the objects. Use the Environment Shader plugin or the Environment Material plugin.

A:M can import both HDR and OpenEXR HDRI files. HDR format I don't recommend anymore because the up-side-down information in the file header is unreliable.

Grat Looking.

Reflectivity will ony reflect models or images around the reflecting object. Not light. If you want to reflect light, you have two choices. Eiher set the specular size and intensity to simulate reflecting light or build a model of the light and set its ambiance to 100%.

Yes. "From Pencil to pixels" is a huge book. 500 pages. I am reading it and I'm now at page 380. Things I find a plus for the book is that, as Rodney mentions, Tony White covers about every aspect of animation including the financing, project management, story, animation techniques, etc. Everything really. For example, there is a section of the book that explains and show how to properly do page flipping to preview a set of frames. The technique is different when working with top pegs vs bottom pegs and he explains both ot them. This is not an "how to draw and animate" book though. It is really more about the process of making an animation, the tools, the supporting documents, the preparations, the markups, etc. The principles of animations are also reviewed but not more than in his previous book "The animator's Workbook". For someone looking for how to proceed for an animation project, this book covers it all from start to finish. I like that Mr White debunks some of the accepted "rules" of animation that were devised for when everything had to be done manually and mechanically but have no good reasons to still be used now that we work with computers. He also debunks some more fundamental rules too. I did like his passage about Squash and Stretch where he recommends staying with squashes and stretches that stay anatomically plausible. He writes : And he continues on by showing how squash and stretch should be done. Still very exagerated but still anatomically plausible. Mr White wrote this book to try to supplement the lack of mentoring in the animation industry. He really wanted this book to accompany a newbee animator and be a printed mentor. If I have a critique about this book, though, it is that it is heavy with text for an "animation" book. Yes, everything is covered in its tiny details. Even the most obvious. It is everything you always wanted to know about doing animation. But I wonder how many people will actually read it. Fortunately, there are anough illustrations and photos to be informative even without reading it from cover to cover.

Yes. this is a problem with HDR files. They have a header that is supposed to give the image loader information onhow to load the image but this information is most of the time not reliable. Even HDRShop will load an image upsade-down when saved from HDR-Shop itself. So for this reason, I now don't use HDR files anymore. I only use EXR files and I use a utility that converts HDR files to Exr. This way I have no more up-side-down problems. The utility is called hdr2exr and runs on Win XP.

Superb modeling job. Nice scene setup and shot. You should use an HDR environment map for the sky to reflect on the car. Right now, the reflections are rather flat. Otherwise. looks nice.

Depending on the distance we are observing the surface and on the size of the surface bumps, we will simulate them in different ways and each way have a name. There are three types of CG roughness simulations in a continuum from macro to micro: geometric details, textures, BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function). At the "Geometric level of details, you just model the surface bumps and render. At the texture level, you apply a bump texture and render with antialiasing. At the BRDF level, you just simulate the look. If you look closely, soft reflection is doing exactly that, including the bluring with distance. Soft Reflection is not just a post effect. It is the actual simulation of the diffusion of reflections. Soft Reflection is simulating the BRDF of a rough isotropic surface. And yes, it pushes render time through the roof because in order to do that, the renderer must not only shoot one reflection ray but must shoot as many as is required to produce the soft reflection look. The larger the soft reflection spread, the more the number of reflection rays that must be cast in the scene from any pixel. The reflection rays are casted from inside a cone starting on the surface and spreading in the environment. The smaller the specularity size, the tighter the reflection cone and thus the sharper the reflected images. And conversely, the larger the specularity size, the wider the reflection cone spread and thus the blurrier the reflected images. The blur fading with distance is a direct consequence of sampling reflection rays from inside a cone. A reflected object sitting at, lets say 10cm from a soft reflective surface will look twice as blurry as another object sitting at 5cm because the blur radius is twice as large.

You used the qualificative "anisotropic" yesterday. That is the right word for what you are describing with the pole. But the anisotropy is usually not a characteristic of metal per se. It is a characteristic of the manufacturing process. Anisotropy is visible when the scratches on a surface are directionally oriented in one direction more than others. When this is the case, the reflection softness is tighter in one direction then in its perpendicular direction. Metal surfaces come in different smoothness. Some silverware are so buffed that they are almost like mirrors. On the other side of the spectrum, some surfaces are explicitly made rough because we have to handle them and we don.t want them to slip out of our hands. Another cause may be erosion. An initially very smooth silverware could be rendered relatively dull (rough) because its been used and washed so often. Indeed, the dull or rough look is caused by micro (or not so micro) bumps. That is what soft reflection is supposed to give you. We don't do anisotropic reflections though. We have an anisotropic shader but it is only affects the specularity.

Oups! Just rereading my post, I saw that I made an important error. I corrected it in the original post. It was about this statement: It is not 100% of course for reflective blend to add the difuse color to the reflections. It should read 0%.

I'm not working on solutions. I think the solutions are already implemented in A:M. Oh Yeah! I'm glad you ask because this will allow me to explain a couple things about reflections. The model itself is absolutely awesome. I like the pose. Good use of foreshortening. Something is bothering me with the composition but I can't put my finger on what it is exactly. I have the impression that his body is placed too high and too left in the compositon. But for a one hour work, you certainly didn't take the time to tweak the composition to your liking. The ankle pivot seems placed too high and it is difficult to separate the character from the background. But that is the issue we are going to discuss. The properties you are looking for are "Reflection Filter" and "Reflective Blend" right under "Reflectivity". Metals will usually have a reflection filter of 100% and a reflective blend of 100%. Reflective Blend controld how the reflected colors are blended into the base diffuse color. At 0%, the reflected colors will be added to the base diffuse color and at 100%, the reflected colors will replace the diffuse colors in proportion to the reflectivity. If reflectivity is set to 40% and blend is set to 100%, the final color will be 60% of the base diffuse color and 60% of the reflected colors. If Reflectivity is 100% and blend is set to 100%, then there will be no contribution coming the diffuse color. For realistic reflective surfaces, reflective blend should be set to 100% but this can be adjusted according to the particular needs of different projects. A Reflective Blend of 0% can produce unrealistic reflections because the reflections are added to the base diffuse color so the reflected colors will be brighter than the actual objects that are being reflected. Say a surface with some diffuse color, 100% reflectivity and 0% blend. because the base diffuse color is added to the 100% reflections, the resulting color will clearly be brighter than the object reflected. Reflective Filter works with the specular color. It will filter the reflected colors using the specular colors. This can allow to imitate several types of materials. Most of the time, you don't need to set a specific specular color. In this case, the reflective color will use the diffuse color and most of the time, for most of the materials, this is exactly what you want. Some special materials where you would want to set a different specular color are plastics or any clear coated materials like varnished wood for instance. Those materials are layered materials and the layer that actually specularly reflects colors is a different layer than the one that diffusely reflects colors. In varnished wood, for instance, the wood is covered with a transparent varnish. In this case, you would want to set the specular color to the color of the varnish. Plastic is layered because you have colored pigments suspended in a clear substrate so the pigments produce a diffuse reflection element and the substrate will produce the specular reflection element. Because the clear coat is usually much smoother than the underlying material or pigments, it is the coating that produce the charateristicly sharp reflections. There exist other types of coated materials that are much more complex than that such as some metal flake car paints. But this is much more involved to simulate in CG. Most other materials just reflect and filter light using the diffuse color. This includes metals too. Layered materials must have their reflectivity set to less than 100% to let the diffuse reflection component coming from the underlying material or pigments to show through. In fact, the reflectivity would be the inverse of the transparency of the clear coat material. That is why, when we set reflectivity to significantly less than 100% on any material, it starts to look like coated materials. The recipe for realistic metals is, Reflectivity, Reflection Filter and Reflective Blend all set to 100% and the particular metal reflectivity color set in the diffuse color. Some metal reflectivity colors can be found on Webmineral.com. For instance here is the Webmineral Silver data sheet. If you scroll down to the section called "Optical Properties of Silver", you will see a spectrum chart along with the RGB representation in the "S R(l)" column. Some metals like Tin are anisotropic and thus have two reflectivities. Anyway, if you use a color picker (or look in the source code of that page) you will find out that the RGB representation is F0EAD7 or R:240, G:234, B:215 or R:94%, G:91%, B:84%. So Silver reflectivity if pinkish and that would be our diffuse color. Why this recipe? By setting Reflectivity to 100% but also both Reflective Blend and Reflection Filter to 100% we get a surface that will reflect the light at the required percentage of reflectivity for each RGB channels. We effectively end up with a surface that have 94% reflectivity on the Red channel, 91% reflectivity on the Green channel, and 84% reflectivity on the blue channel which is the characteristic reflectivity of Silver. If Silver is pure, that is it is not oxidized, nor covered with dirt, then its reflectivity will be R:94%, G:91%, B:84% (or higher because of the Fresnel effect). But the next most important surface property that will affect its appearance is the surface roughness. If the silver surface is perfectly smooth, it will act like a mirror and as the silver surface gets rougher, it will act less like a mirror and start reflect light coming from more distributed locations. In other words, it will look more diffuse. This is where Soft Reflection comes into the picture. Soft Reflection softness is controlled by the Specularity Size. The larger the specularity size, the rougher will look the reflections if Soft Reflections is turned ON. BTW, noticed how many reflectivity attributes are controled by Specularity properties? That is because Reflectivity and Specularity are two different CG tricks to help simulate the same physical surface properties. Reflectivity controls how surrounding objects are reflected off the surface of an object while Specularity controls how the lights are reflected off the surface of an object. For this very reason, for more realistic renders, the Specular Intensity should match the Reflectivity. That is for a 60% reflective surface, its Specular Intensity should also be set to 60%. If you set the Reflective Blend to 0%, the reflections will add to the diffuse color. This should give you what you are looking for since Silver is quite already a pale color. And you can adjust this Reflective Blend to suit your requirements.

This is a much more complex question than it seems. The main visual characteristic of material the color of course. The second most important characteristic is rough vs shiny. When you try to reproduce real world material, try to analyse them from those two characteristics. Through the years in which computer graphics have developped, researchers have come up with a whole set of cheap tricks to help simulate in CG what we perceive in real life. Thus the plethora of surface properties available such as diffuse falloff, specularity size, intensity and color, reflectivity, etc. In reality, material appearance is very much more simpler than that. It all boils down to reflectance or more to the point to "Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function", commonly known as BRDF. That's all. A BRDF represents how light is reflected off a material surface. The catch, though is that a BRDF itself is a very complex 5D function. It is very expensive to acquire a BRDF of a material because it requires very expensive equipment and thus only large studios can acquire them and they keep the data for themselve. So there are a very small set of low quality BRDF data available on the net. The other catch is that, as the name implies, a BRDF is, by its very nature "distributed", which, in the computer simulation world, signify that it takes large CPU resource to correctly use a BRDF once you have one which means very long render times. For this reason, most 3D application users still prefer to use the old efficient tricks like specularity, reflectivity, etc. to simulate material appearance. Unfortunately, there are no scientific rules that will translate a BRDF into a set of those trick properties. You need to experiment and tweak until you get the look you want for the given scene you are building. A:M comes with a good set of "materials". Those are preset material properties that gives believable characteristic appearances. I recomment you start by using those materials and examine how they were setup to give their appearances. This will help you understand how to use A:M surface properties and come up with your own materials. There are a very few number of material masters in the 3D universe. Those who have become masters have been working with material setup for a long time. And, unfortunately, there are very few tutorials on the subject too. This is a vast and complex subject and mastering it requires both a strong technical basis as well as a keen artistic eye.

DPI is irrelevent when doing textures. DPI is for printed medium. And even in those circumstances DPI is not directly related to the render resolution. For texturing work, you normally want the texture map to be double resolution as the closest render you will make of it. Let's say you are rendering a 640x480 image. Let's say you render a portion of the wall, no matter which distance from the camera. Then the map resolution should be designed so the portion that is being rendered would be approximatively 1280 x 960 pixels.

Treeez plugin is included with A:M v13. You can also download it from Zpider (Marcel Bricman) web site. The web site also have a tutorial on how to use the plugin.

Great resource Theresa. ... Hey! What's that? Real eyes cannot open from shut to wide open like that in one single frame like that! ... (Joking of course )

On some display drivers, if the rotoscope map is of higher resolution than the screen, the map will show all white. You can try applying a lower resolution map first. And once applied, replace the map file with a higher resolution one.

All render resolutions produce the same quality. Smaller resolutions produce smaller images and larger resolutions produce larger images.

Looks like you did not adjust the choreography length. Look at the choreography properties.

Argument of generalization. Another sophism.

That is OK. So I also disagree with you. But I think it is mainly because you are reading way too far into what I wrote. That is an argument of authority. A sophism. That doesn't validate anything. Of course. I don't disagree with that. What I have against is when those rules are elevated as an animation system. A school of animation. A church of animation with its animation cathechism: "You shalt not... You shall..." There is a point where too much is just too much. It is like the difference between knowing about the golden ratio for guiding composition or obsessively applying it on every aspect of composition and then denouncing anyone who don't abide by the golden rule. Yes, knowing about the 12 rules of animation is a must for an animator. But once those rules are integrated into the animator experience, there must be a councious effort to try to do otherwise, to try to not apply them, to try to find a different way, a more efficient way. Let the artist's intuition guide the art rather than let the rules guide the art. When the rules are the guiding force behind a piece of animation, the result just look like an technical rehash of animation tricks. Déjà vu. Animation "in the manner of" is what I call mannerism. Rules are made to be integrated and then forgotten. I can point to a lot of places myself. But that is not the point and is not something I like to do when I see such a tremendous work by basically one person. I like to focus on aspects that were done really well and work. Personally I like to point on the positive aspects. I'm not looking for the little misshaps to point to them as if they were sins. In a piece like that, there is obviously a lot of places where things could be improved if one is looking for that. But Stephen is not a big studio. He doesn't have a large team of artistic and technical helpers behing him. And he did a hell of a good job. This said, about the eye darting: The eyes didn't bother me at all when I first saw the clip. I think they were effective in conveying the emotion at stake. And the fact that someone mentioned something about the eyes is not going to make me change my mind. Looking at the animation again and again, I just cannot agree with this "eye darting" comment. What bothers me more is when I see those followers, who, after someone mentions the said "eye darting" problem, just parrot "Yeah! Me too I have an issue with the eyes". I just can't give credibility to those "me too" posters. ??? I don't understand where that argument comes from. I certainly don't think, let alone imply, that Stephen is using any excuses. It's probably not what you meant either but just to be clear. I agree that there are peoples that use the "it's my style" excuse to skip learning and integrating the basics. What can I say? Each their own. Nevertheless, a few of those artists have produced or are going to produce some stunning animations. When I go at animation festivals, those who really departs from the crowd are those who are not animating by the rules. Those who have developped a true personal style. Those who I can recognize just by looking at their animation. I don't care how they got there, if they just developped their personal style or if they first learned and integrated the basics and then departed from it. I can see storytelling mastery when I see it. But I get to see way too much animation done in a very technical "by the rules" way that don't have a tiny bit of story to tell. And this bothers me.

A better (shorter and more direct to the point) read, from the same author, it the "Eye Alive" article in pdf where the author shows that saccades happen in between 5 to 7 frames at 30 fps or 4 to 5.5 frames at 24 fps. I didn't watch the Briar Rose clip on a frame by frame basis so I can't tell how fast the eyes are really going (although they seemed to move at the right speed) but to me, the effect of those eye movement was to raise the dramatic tension. And to this effect, the eye movements were really effective. One particular aspect I really appreciate about this piece of animation is that it is not animated in the mannerism style that I way too often see in animated features these days. Instead of focussing on trying to blindly apply all the 12 infamous rules of animation, Stephen focused on telling the story. I watched this clip several times and in half speed too. There are a lot of subtleties in attitudes, movements, facial expressions and body language. Subtleties that would be simply incompatible with the nervous animation mannerism style. So bravo for developing a personalized animation style. Bravo for exploring the true expressiveness of your characters. Bravo for not falling in the trap of animating by the 12 rules. Bravo for avoiding the animation mannerism.

Well, I'm late at this thread. I resisted installing QT7 until you posted this trailer and I read all the comments. And in addition, I love the Briar Rose character. You know that. What a fantastic job you did there all around. Bravo! Yeah! Lighting takes a lot of patience and perseverance along with a fast rendering computer. In addition, lighting comes hand in hand with composition and camera placement. Doing lighting on TWO for a while, that was probably the aspect I took the most interest and care observing. And you did a hell of a good job on this aspect. You worked a lot on this and it shows marvelously. I particularly appreciated how you used the interior night shot to use light in an impressionistic way and support the tension and emotions. Now, I just need to view it a fourth time, this time to look at the poses, animations and expressions. Did I wrote Bravo!?