vnavone

Big Bang is lying low right now for various reasons so I'm not going to repost any content at this time. Rest assured that it is not dead and will return sometime in the future...

Thanks! What happens next is a part of the story that I don't want to reveal just yet, which is why it may feel like there's a beat missing at the end.

Only thing I can think of is to reinstall a fresh copy of Quicktime on your machine. Or maybe try downloading it to your local drive and playing it back in Quicktime Player rather than in your browser.

I know what you mean. I'm actually stretching the neck pretty far it you check out frame 98 or so. I suppose I could start the reaction a couple of frames earlier...

I went back in and made some more changes. Redid the hands AGAIN as well as some other little tweaks. Enjoy! 1.5mb Quicktime Movie

Damn you, Keates. Damn you and your valid notes. Now that I look at the hands again I don't like them. Back to the drawing board, I guess. That may be a preferences issue. I've ammended the title.

Here's an updated version of the animation (I left the original version up on page 1 for comparison). 1.5 mb Quicktime Movie Caveats: Lighting, textures and background are still temp. There are still problems with deformations in the neck and shoulders. Notes: Timing has been adjusted in various places, and more time added to the end. The spacing on the flip has been reworked and I moved the center of gravity for the midair animation from the chest to the base of the skull (seemed a more reasonable place given the size of his head). I tried having him flip in the reverse direction and didn't like it as much. After reanimating the hands 3 times for the rocking sequence I finally just decided to keep them simple and stuck to the planet. Next: I want to start playing around with v12's multi-channel rendering and improved raytrace shadows! Comments welcome, as always. Enjoy!

I'm using expressions for gross squash & strech in the head and body, but that's all. I'm not a fan of using limits because I often like to "break" joints to get a good pose. I can switch between IK and FK in the arms and legs. Nothing else fancy. No automation going on; everthing is hand-keyframed. I'm just picky that way.

It's my own rig created from scratch. There are no real lids. Each eye has five or six pose sliders to control blinks, bends, tapers, etc. They can also rotate, translate and scale via bones. You get a closer look at them in this old face test I posted: Giant Face Test thread

Nothing yet. I've been revising the animation in this thread, which I will post when it's done. Then I'm going to start experimenting with rendering and compositing techniques to figure out the final look. I'm also revising the story reel right now, which is why it's taking me so long to finish the animation. Sorry for the delay!

Mmmmmmaaaayyyyyybbbbeeeee....

I'm not so sure...

Good suggestions all! That's why I love this forum!

That's what they do already, but sometimes I run into a pose where I can't tilt the rings any further out of the way without them intersecting somewhere else on the body. I'm also trying to avoid really extreme movements of the rings over a few frames that would draw the eye unecessarily.

I thought about this, but it doesn't feel right to the "material" of the rings. Even though they are technically composed of lots of particles, I see them as being rigid rather than flexible. Once you see them bend they would cease to look like planetary rings.

Very nice. Looks like the seat on the left needs to be cleaned, though!

It's all out of my head. I did thumbnail drawings to plan the shot, but most of the facial stuff I figured out as I was animating. I do use a mirror sometimes for reference.

Nothing special about the lighting. Just a warm key light, a bunch of reddish fill lights to warm up the shadow areas, and some cool rim lights. Again, this is just temporary lighting and its a quick shaded render. No shadows or anything.

This is an issue, especially with those long arms. I'll probably ending up cheating a lot of it and painting or comping out the intersections.

I think I understand what you're saying in the first crit. I'm going to be playing around with the timing in there. As for the end, he will be "shaking it off" immediately after this, but that coincides with a story event that I've chosen not to include here.

That's a cute idea, but I've already worked out how he gets the rings on his head earlier in the story. I guess I should have mentioned as another caveat that this shot is from the middle of the film, so many events take place before and after this.

Thanks for all the feedback, especially the notes. These help keep me honest! Yeah, I'm not totally happy with the hand animation for the rocking sequence. It was really hard to get pleasing shapes in the wrist and still sell the physicality of the action. I'll need to revisit this. Can you elaborate? All done by "eye", for what it's worth. Everything is hand-animated, though I'd be curious to see what a dynamic constraint would give me. Nothing unusual. I was just very specific about sculpting the elbow shapes using rotational relationships. I try to keep the outside of the elbow pointed and the inside curved. Sigh. Yeah, I see this now that I've posted it for everyone to see. Funny how that works. I'll play with the timing and spacing on this, and I may end up reversing the direction of his flip. Most of the squash and stretch is achieved through animation, but I do have some squetch built into the head an body using simple volume preservation expressions. I'll probably add stretch controls to the arms later. I thought about that but I think I want to keep the planet feeling more solid for contrast to his squishy body. Well, I like the ring, and my vote wins! I figure for someone whose head is the size of a planet the only thing you could find to serve as a hat would be rings. Also provides an opportunity for some secondary animation and adds some interest to an otherwise very simple head. It's not terribly important to the story, but I'm stuck on the idea. Perhaps you're objecting to the way the ring is animated and not the design itself. There's a fine line between realistic overlap and distracting motion in this case. Hopefully I'll be able to make these changes within the next day or so. Thanks again for all the feedback!

Here is an animation test for the Giant character from my short film "Big Bang". I decided to go ahead and animate and actual shot from the film to kill multiple birds with fewer stones. Critiques are always welcome. Caveats: lighting, texturing and background are temp. There are some outstanding deformation problems in the model, most noteably in the upper arms and wrists, that I haven't figured out how to solve yet. This film may not be finished before AM 25.1 ships. Next I'll be experimenting with lighting, rendering and compositing techniques on this shot to figure out the final look of the film. Enjoy! 2.1 mb Quicktime Movie

Hi Yves, great stuff! I think I'll be using your skin shader in my short film. I have a couple of questions about the skin shader (I couldn't find any documentation on your site): First off, what do the "shading falloff" and "hue shift from saturation" controls do? The former didn't seem to have any effect when I changed values, and I'm not not sure of the use of the latter. Also, what diffuse shading model are you using? Is it based on CookTorrence or a gradient? Would it be possible for this shader to control ambience and ambient color too, or would that have to be a separate ambient shader? What I've really been wanting to see is an ambient gradient shader - a shader that behaves just like the diffuse gradient shader but controls ambience value and color instead. This would allow the user to pull the shading terminator beyond the point of surface tangency with the light source (let me know if I'm not saying that right) so that a single light can "wrap around" an object without changing the diffuse color. I'm thinking this would be useful for giving the appearance of light bouncing around beneath the skin (fake SSS). Might cause problems with shadows, though. Any thoughts?

Hi Dean, it sounds like you've got a good understanding of what I did. Just to restate: Each of the radial splines of the mouth has its own UpDown bone. A CP located right at the opening of the mouth is weighted to 100% (standard CP assignment in Bones mode) for its specific UD bone, and the CPs further down the spline are weighted to be affected less and less by this UD bone as they get further from the mouth. The neighboring spline CPs are not included in this weighting; they are only affected by their own unique UD bones. Therefore any radial spline of the mouth can be controlled explicitely without affecting its neighbors. The exception is at the corner of the mouth where a bunch of splines come together and I had to do some wacky hand-blending.