OdinsEye2k

Of course, the moment I speak up on this kind of thing, I get super busy. But anyways - with my sporadic availability, I'm kind of thinking of more of a show-and-tell type start for the group. I think just about every time in past few years I've had a big idea for animation, I got buried in my engineering life. My two bits anyways.

Well, you have one in the range. I live in Glendale. Pencil me as a maybe and we'll see who else pops up. Bjorn

Random technical addition: I was also going to be clever and add Coriolis effect to the motions of my players (since the station would be rotated for gravity). Problem is that my designed station is too small to generate any useful gravity. At the spin rates necessary to get any decent artificial gravity, all of my poor astronauts would get horribly sick (Coriolis effect in the inner ear is a human factor to worry about when design artificial gravity through spinning).

I'm thinking more like "NFL Blitz 2050."

So, thanks to the help of those on the forum in reminding me of a couple of old tricks, I cooked up something for my return to animating. My problem is that I have two teams of 7 that I would like to place and move about on the inner surface of a cylinder. So, to make my life a little easier, I did the following: -Made 14 "pointer" bones for the cylinder. -Made a Constrain to Surface constraint with a separate pointer bone assigned to each player. Now, I wanted to deal with laying people out on a flat version of the cylinder's surface (just easier to think that way), and so I made up 14 nulls to place on a control grid. This control grid related the location of the null relative to its surface to the pointer bones via two Expressions: (..|..|..|..|..|..|BlueTarget1.Transform.Translate.X-..|..|..|..|..|..|Shortcut to ControlBoard.Transform.Translate.X)/88*360/2.54-180 (..|..|..|..|..|..|Shortcut to ControlBoard.Transform.Translate.Z-..|..|..|..|..|..|BlueTarget1.Transform.Translate.Z)*10 So, the end result is that when I diagram the positions of players on my 2d grid, they appear at the appropriate part of the cylinder.

Spacebar does the trick. I've got kind of a neat little rig I invented just before dashing into LA this morning. I'll try and show you what I have tomorrow.

Hey all, So, I'm starting back up into AM and one of the first projects I'm tackling is trying to do some kind of a zero-g thing. I've got a number of characters (currently just stick figures while I experiment with motion) within a cylindrical can. I've used the "Constrain to Surface" type constraint to ensure that they are standing on the edges of the can. I plan to manipulate the level of enforcement in order to make them able to leave the surface of the can. Anyways, using all those pointer bones is a little bit cumbersome, so I thought of trying to use Nulls with "Aim At" constraints applied to the pointer bones to make things easier. Problem is that when I move the Nulls, the location of the people does not update. The pointer bones are certainly moving, but their control is not being represented. When I reload the file, all the new position information created by the Null is properly applied to both pointer bone and to model. Is there anything I need to do to get AM to update in real time?

Hey Robcat, So, how did you finally get the value to stop changing? Did you actually manage to save it? Because if we're talking saved values (and can do the trick more than once), we're talking the possibility to run differential equations in Expressions. And then real damage can be done.

Hey all, As a delinquent member, I just wanted to pop in and say hi. I haven't touched AM about since my last contest entry because life as a student is absolutely crazy. In addition, I am currently working at an aerospace software house in Berlin (Pacelab for the US website) for the summer. The job came as a real surprise, so I've been learning German as I go. Luckily my project manager speaks very good English, so I can simply try to learn at lunch when it's not so high-stakes. Anyways, I hope y'all are doing well and still smokin'! Bjorn

Maybe it's the parka, but for some reason the latest Russian Batman pic looks like a shot from Robot Chicken. Or maybe it's the pose. It looks like something from real life, but at a small scale.

Cookie cutter decals will give you flat patches of hair if you do the stamps on a plane.

Dunno about kindergarten, but a couple of grades later it's easier. Defining a planet seems like defining the class bully. If it's big and aggressive, it's a planet.

Yeah, clearing the neighborhood is going to be a kind of confusing definition for non-experts (and probably some dueling between them as well). The Trojans of Jupiter are a good point, although they orbit in Jupiter's gravitational Lagrange points, so you could argue that they are already "captured" by Jupiter (actually, looks like the Wiki article agrees with me). If any asteroid leaves those two zones, they are likely leaving that orbit as they encounter Jupiter's gravity. Neptune and Pluto don't really share an orbit, they just cross over each other once in a while, but Pluto is really out of the plane that the other eight planets roughly share. This is pretty wild below. The gas giants are actually weaker in clearing their brethren away than, say Earth or Venus. It probably has to do with how much bigger in space the outer orbits are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar...ry_discriminant

Hey guys, Been a while since I've had any A:M'ing time. I got inspired by one of the Bradburies (I think it was Matt) who had done the planets. There are some *huge* textures out there (also, Blue Marble Next Gen is awesome cuz it has a picture for every month on the year so you can see the snow advance and retreat) that can be put to good use. I still need a cloud map, and I'd like to have some kind of auroral "roadway" from the Eastern Washington, California and New Mexico areas to finish it off. But here it is in progress. It is actually the opening screen (no text) for my thesis proposal presentation. I'll be dry-running in about two weeks, and hopefully have the paper ready to go in a month and a half. And in case anyone wonders, the topic is technology evolution, or as one might say, "intelligent design." There's actually quite a few economists out there trying to generalize Darwinism in order to handle the inputs of directed rather than random innovation.

Strange bit of trivia (and thus slightly OT) - you may have to take Pluto out or add a few more bodies. That trans-Neptune neighborhood is getting pretty strange: Pluto may still be a planet. Also, it may turn out that Charon is not really a moon of Pluto, but more like they are a "double planet." PS - Nice renders.

It actually worked pretty nicely for my Mars contest entry as well. Getting that reflection at the strength/coloration I wanted it at would have been a truly colossal pain otherwise. And also - the Spidey is sweet.

If so, Ken, we can always have Captain Thom standing proudly with the com tower raising high in the background.

Oooh ... if we did a weekend, I could also get some hang-glide lessons in at Lookout Mountain (early mornings and late afternoons are when the winds are quiet, I think). Whenabouts were y'all thinking about this? I also have been slacking mega-time on A:M. However, I did have a trick or two up my sleeve that I wanted to show around - mostly a fun potential use for the surface constraint.

I've got a couple of ideas for how to formulate an auto-skin feature (based on basic prototypes like shoulders and such). The problem is that I need to sling a lot of bones and apply Expressions for appropriate control (and also so I can extend the basics with my refined control concept).

Hey all, I'm crossposting from the same topic on the SDK. What I'm trying to do is apply a Constraint (well, an Expression would be ideal) onto a bone inside a Pose. The RelationshipSample shows how to make a pose and rig up some properties there, but I can't figure out how to actually apply the Expression. My first attempt had me walking through pointers with this code (assuming the HModel hm comes from editing the Pose): HEulerRotateDriver *qrd = HEulerRotateDriver::New(); HFloatDriver *hfd = qrd->GetZ(); HBone *grabbone = hm->FindBone("Bone1"); HTransformProperty *tp = grabbone->GetTransform(); HRotateProperty *rp = tp->GetRotate(); rp->AddDriver(hfd); Not really sure if this is working so far ... And the other question I have is where would the Expression come into play? Or have I totally made a mess of this?

Euler angles represent successive rotations about three different axes. Which axes they are, and in which order, is a matter of convention (someone makes an arbitrary choice and everyone agrees, often for an advantage stemming from the math). Real gimbal lock comes from a physical device. An old form of space measurement (the Apollo "IMU") actually used a device with three nested rings (each pivot point was one of the Euler axes) to measure the difference between the spacecraft's current pointing and an arbitrary reference. Usually the references were things like the direction to point for a rocket burn or the moon's landing site or something like that. A defect in the IMU's design allowed two of these axes to line up (just like in Euler drivers), and suddenly, the same rotation could be represented as many different sets of Euler angles! http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/gimbals.html Now, there was a well-known way to avoid this by using a fourth, and redundant, axis. Even the Apollo guys knew, but since this was a race, they grabbed something that worked well enough (remember, these were the nation's finest pilots - avoiding gimbal lock wasn't a major task for them). AM's default mode is to use Quaternions to represent rotation. They have a fourth axis like the magical lock-proof IMU. To the original question, see attached. I want to make sure to explain this right. If you specify a set of Euler angles for an angle, you are fine. Euler angle -> rotation is unique in *all* circumstances. Now, if you want to solve for Euler angles from a rotation, that is when you get screwed. See what happens to the Expression-driven Bone2 when Bone1 goes to the pole. Then play with the roll handle and watch it freak out. EDIT: Well, to be honest, quaternions actually only have one axis, but four parameters. They are actually pretty complex mathematical objects. GimbalLock.zip

Maybe a non-isotropic surface? Like when mud and clay mix around on the ground? Not really a deep concern, just trying to clarify...

Or if you are looking for a little encouragement: http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gtg724n/scars.html Ignore the words if you want - just look at the absolute junk I started with and how it evolved into something tolerable.

Since there are so many still examples out there, I thought I'd post myself up a moving version. I think others have shown this technique before, but here's my thinking and set-up behind this particular scheme: You have the overall muscle bulk laid out (arm/leg masses, chest, etc). To add definition, you set up complex AM models (which would animate only with difficulty if part of the main mesh) as 'plus-ups.' These models would be good for structures like triceps, all those back muscles around the shoulder/spine area, tendons and whatnot. You could either paint these and try to animate them - or - you could build them out of splines, animate the splines for flex/relax poses. Applying a gradient material would be one way to get elevation data (I don't know where depth buffering is anymore or if it exists, if it has as many levels as EXR, etc.) - just run a flat plane though the 'muscle groups' to be your 128 ('flat') datum. This way, you've got all your stuff in quite an animatable form. Now, the results in this vid aren't close to anatomic, I suck at lighting it, etc. But I'm hoping you can see where I'm going. flextest.zip

Very cool.