MikePett
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Posts posted by MikePett
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It was actually two and a half times faster than normal.
M
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I just listened to this accidentally on what I think was double speed and I suggest that everyone do so. I think that maybe there is something to be gained from upping the pace a bit?
Mike
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Thanks Rodney, and thank you for all you do for the community here. (Yes I have been known to lurk!)
Mike
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Thanks Mark, I will make sure to make use of your wealth of knowledge!
Mike
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Here's the secrets of Hackfest:
(1) Force yourself to work - no matter what.
(2) Do something every day.
(3) Post whatever crap you have.
(4) Don't take critiques personally. (Easier said than done.)
(5) Get better.
(6) Offer critiques on other people's work.
(7) Work like a son-of-a-gun.
(8) Drive yourself renlentlessly to finish in the stretch.
(9) Completely collapse from mental & emotional exhaustion.
(10) Recuperate for the next project. (We don't know how long that takes yet?)
Thanks for the response Martin!
I have to say that this list looks just like the process here at the animation studio at which I work. I don't take critiques poorly so I know the secret of keeping on keeping on. We have nutty schedules and I know all about 7.8.9 and 10.
Thank you for your input.
Mike
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Hi gang,
I know that this is out of nowhere from some one who had never done a darn thing around here but I have a question. Is Scarecrow in the Hackfest mode? Are all sorts of us interested newbies to the production process going to be able to lend a hand to the work now that it is in the limp along mode? Do we need to get the Art of Animation cred. before we get cued in or not?
I am very impressed that Tin Woodman of Oz is done and out there and I would really like to have persisted in my intention to contribute. I don't want to miss out on this next opportunity and I see now that my idea that I wouldn't be able to commit enough to make a difference on your productions was wrong. My bad, sorry I didn't grab a corner and lift. (hangs head in shame)
Essentially I am looking at your awesome, towering sand castle, standing there with my plastic pail and shovel and saying, "Can I play!"
Mike
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Yay! I love completed work!
very entertaining...
I am trying to come up with an egg joke and...
...yeah... sorry.
Mike
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sweet, and a good thing you responded because in the mayhem of being temporarily laid off due to the writer's strike I now know what to do with some of the copious time I have had on my hands.
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Hey Rodney,
I just wanted to thank you. I got a notification of this post via e-mail a day after I had revisited my efforts toward TaoA:M. I am putting it in the top of my priorities and will be setting my deadlines for completion this week. Just the nudge I needed and good timing.
Thanks again,
MikePett
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The A:M forum is so educational isn't it.
Well, if this is a study of human male behavior, it's nothing startling or new.
eh hem.
Yours in 3DoubleD,
MikePett
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Not to be snarky but in my movie the rear foot stays above ground.
Sorry, must have been some strange cache thing on my end.
Feel free to be snarky anytime I claim your Knight's feet sink in the mud.
Took a look at the genuine Mike Pett pitch and what is there to say except 'Well Done!'.
Pretty accurate foot placement there. Did you use video reference? Are you a Pitcher? Do you know one?
Reveal all those hidden animation secrets!!!
Seriously Mike... well done!
I like the 3/4 view of the camera.
Sorry for the mix up. (For what its worth I liked the mud sinking one by Adrian too!)
Ooops! My bad Rodney.
I had actually uploaded my very first timing test render. I called it the same thing as my final it was just in a different folder. Those feet sank. But I had not gone through and edited splines much at that point.
Secrets: Act it out. I have never been anygood at base ball but I got up off my chair, which incidentally relieves 'animator spread', and wadded up a piece of paper and pitched a no-hitter right in my own living room. From that I could feel where the feet should go and the rest. I stilll kinda think I should have taken a few frames to hold in the initial pose but it is ok.
I try to do the assignment exactly as directed. I work in animation and if they tell you 'pitch the ball and settle into a standing position in 1:06' then you had better animate exactly that over one second and six frames. It is just a habit I have from work. I think that the embellishments that folks are doing are awesome, and heck this is the time to do them because once you are in production you no longer have such luxury. My point is just that if I was going to add time I would have made the wind up a bit more lengthy and worked the kick of that forward leg where the pitch gets it's momentum to be a bit more extreme but I think that it is serviceable the way that it is.
One thing I tried to stay concious of was the overall shape of the pose and the throughlines of the arms and legs during the actioin. I took a 3d animation class where the instructor (Cam Hood, a Dreamworks animator on Spirit and Shark Tale among others) looks at animation as though there are only five shapes that a character can take that have any rythm to them. This is true for all characters from a flour sack to a knight in armor.
The five shapes as he teaches are:
S
C
Straight
Backwards C
Backwards S
He taught us to work the main/key poses into these shapes as much as possible. I tried to do that in this animation. It seems to make the animation that much more fluid.
Another thing he taught and I think I didn't do it very well on this exercise was to animate the veritcal 'Y' axis on the pelvis first and to make the contacts with the ground hard. I E when the arc of the spline hits the bottom like on a bouncing ball, you make that cp point and bend the spline sharply at that point of contact. Like when a heel hits the ground during a walk or even if the the character just shifts their weight during dialogue.
so there are all my 'secrets', now I have none!
Yours in 3D,
Mikepett
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Has anyone else noticed that about six and a half to seven minutes into this tutorial the mic goes out and we are listening through what sounds like a distant laptop mic?
Is that just me?
I tried downloading it as well as the web version and it seems like it is the same.
Mike
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Name: Steven Ellinger
Exercise Completed: Exercise 5 Take A Walk
Date Completed: 1-27-07
Instructor: None
Remarks/Suggestions: Here is my walk cycle. The full fifteen seconds was to big, so I Picked a smaller section to show. I don't have a website, so this is the best I could do.
I liked your walk a lot!
Mikepett
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So take a look at that!
Mike
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Seemed like it should be so much longer after all that work.
LOL - And the audience will pay little more attention to it than after they proceed out the theater doors.
They are already thinking about what movie they're gonna see next.
Ah, the life of the animator.
My only quibble in an otherwise perfectly executed exercise... Knight seems to be pitching in quicksand.
Add some rain effects and splashy mud and call 'er done!
Nice pitch Mike!
Added:
I wanted to add this for anyone looking in that will be doing 'Its a Pitch' later. (No need to do this Mike!)
Think about the Knight's silhouette no matter what angle you render him from.
While not required to be a successful exercise you'll be pleased with the results if you can see him clearly move through the entire action.
For instance, in Mike's pitch as a director I might ask him to have the Knight throw his pitch just a little more from the side... baseball experts what is that... a curve ball? What this does is free the pitching arm from the silhouette of the Knight's body.
A solid silhouette helps lead to clarity.
if you look closely at that movie it is the last one uploaded to the forum not the one I made. I am trying to rectify this. I think that alll i have done so far is break the link.
Not to be snarky but in my movie the rear foot stays above ground.
Mike
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Here is my "It's A Pitch" movie.
Seemed like it should be so much longer after all that work.
Mike
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Today I bought a copy of 'Everyone's Hero', the animated movie about a boy, baseball and Babe Ruth's bat. I haven't opened the case and watched it yet but my daughter says, "It's great".
Of course, I'm very interested in seeing how they deal with the animating of pitching balls and swinging bats.
Hey they did that at my studio! Well Starz did it anyway and I think that they at least did some of the story stuff there in Burbank.
Mike
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Here's Mine. I tried to copy the book as best I could but mostly I was going after the spirit of the poses. These were done pretty quickly.
Yours in 3d,
Mike
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I too am done with exercise two.
Here is a still.
I did notice that the dance action needed to be set to cycle if you made the movie three seconds as in the online tute and not 2 seconds like in the book.
Thank you to everyone who is making this happen/keeping this going.
Mike
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I have completed this exercise and here is the image.
Incidentally on my first attempt I did something (I think) which caused Keekat's tongue to lose all volume along it's length. Strange. Had to start all over.
Mike
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Hi Rodney and all.
I have been a user since the software was called apprentice and ran only on amigas. I have been banging around the lists a good while too.
Currently I am an animation professional working in the L.A. area. I have dabbled in and played with Animation:Master over the years and had a lot of fun and now I think it would be good to really get a mastery of 3d animation. To that end I am going through TAoA:M and then Boot Camp.
It's been slow going but I am restructuring my time use and should see better results. I would like to be completed by the end of the year.
Yours in 3D,
Mike
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Are you sure you are looking at the right bone when scaling the base bone? The head bone sticks up higher than the base bone. (This is going to be fixed in the next update)
I was either looking at the wrong bone or I didn't get my position saved properly. Back from step six or seven where the cheeks wont reach Arrrr. I assumed that I had done it right when you mentioned it. Lesson learned. (sheepish glances)
Thank you for all your hard work and attention to detial. This system rocks.
Mike
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Just to mention that the translate_white_leg_install_bone_Y_axis maximum value of 1200 is not high enough to position the hips joint wherei should be.
I am having the same issue and am proceeding with JD's hips a bit low.
Mike
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Thank you for your prompt response.
Mike
Story Write your self or buy ?
in Off Topic
Posted
Hey guys, long time no see!
I just want to encourage tbenefi33 to take the "write it yourself" approach. And I will tell you why.
I work in the animation industry and for many years I was married to a story artist who worked on a LOT of animated films at major studios and also taught the freshman and upper level story classes at California Institute of the Arts, (CalArts). This is a school that is known for turning out many of the animation professionals in the industry here in Los Angeles and I just tell you that so that you know that she has chops.
She would love it when people like you were in class. They would let her help them avoid mistakes, take on challenges but not overwhelm themselves and, most importantly, finish the films that they started.
The fact that you don't think that you can write will save you from getting attached to something weird, too hard or just plain awful.
You are likely to listen when people say things like, "Are you sure that you want to set your piece at the superbowl? Won't those crowd shots be hard?" or "You really want to do a 30 min piece with a cast of twenty who are on screen 80% of the time?"
I bet that you will listen when people say things like, "Even if your character is just putting a stamp on an envelope we will care if we have some idea of who she is."
Also I don't think anyone here would let you get started without knowing your beginning, middle and end; the major downfall of many student films.
I think that you have the right attitude to write, of course if you just don't want to, more power to you. Keep in mind that much of the "writing" that goes on in animation is in the form of ridiculously simple drawings about the size of your thumbnail called, you guessed it, "thumbnails". These little comic strips guide most of the work and serve as the visual script. It is much better to draw a movie, even a short one, that makes sense without dialogue and then stick the chatty stuff in where ever you really want to hear what the characters are thinking or saying to each other. It makes you show the story, the whole point of this fine medium and gets you away from having characters standing around telling us everything. (ZZZZZZZZZ) Plus you can work out dynamic camera angles that help tell the story while keeping things clear WAY before you get distracted by all those mouth shapes.
I am sure if you brainstormed ideas here right in front of everyone you could come up with something that inspires you and makes you jump out of bed in the morning to check your renders and start tweaking those curves!
Good luck and no matter how you choose to proceed, awesome!!!!
MikePett