Jeetman

It's pretty good. As Mark mentioned, your ball motion needs work. The motion looks more like a yo-yo because of how it accelerates then decelerates and accelerate as the ball is being thrown to the ground. It needs to have a constant increase in speed as it is thrown down. If you look at your animation, you'll see that this is not what is happening. You have a point that just after he throws the ball down and lets go of the ball where it slows down. This is impossible to do unless it's controlled. Building on what Robert suggested: You need more overlapping motion to give more realism to the throw. Again look at the wind up and the release. It's too stiff. Even the anticipation of the throw could use a little offsetting. If you do this the movement will look more fluid. In the throw, look at the lean back to falling forward. Notice there is no (or very little) hip snap. watch a clip of a real pitcher. You'll notice that there's actually a chain reaction of movements. Each body part lags a little behind the actual throw. The reason for this is because for a pitcher to get maximum acceleration from a throw, he build the speed through the body by overlapping each movement. I'll try to give a visual.... The order of movement in a pitch is pretty much like this: legs hips torso shoulders arm wrist Each movement builds the speed. The leg initiate the movement. The hips lag slightly but come into play as the legs are still moving into position. The torso does the same thing. The torso lags slightly but comes into play with the hips and the legs. Shoulder lags but then is moving with the torso, hips legs and so on. This happens right up until the release of the ball. What's actually happening is a whipping effect. Each part moves to increase the speed of the throw. Once the ball is released, the speed is the result of the accumulation of the speeds of the body parts. Right now you may be thinking,"ummm..I just wanted to know if my animation looked good LOL." If you add the over lapping motion based on this, and can get the right timing (we are talking all this happening in about 1 second), then it will look really good and if this is for a demo reel, you need to go all out and be very conscious that your motions are arcing motions. Oh and this would also apply in the follow through motion at the end. Just remember that you don't want your animation to look stiff and the way to loosen it up is to offset your body part motions a little. When I heard that a 10 second clip of animation could take a week or more, I thought that was ridiculous. I mean common, it's ONLY 10 seconds right? Well, that was until I actually DID work on a couple of 10 second animations LOL. I hope this helps, George

Stian, First time I've seen this post and I read mostly all the threads and one thing I really like about checking out a WIP late is watching the progress unfold in the following threads. All I can say Stian is I've seen your work and you are the epitome of what I aspire to when it comes to mechanical modeling. Your modeling skills are amazing and Martin must have counted his blessings the day you agreed to work on TWO! George

Are you making this for a project to use or just for practice? The reason I ask is because there's an excellent X-Wing model in the donated models section on the hash site. I used it for the project I worked on for my brother-in-law and his friend. Check it out. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=a...st&id=21470 If you are just doing it as practice, then you're doing a great job so far!!! George Jeetman, Would you be so kind as to enlighten me where the donated models section is? I would really like to get my hands on that X-Wing. Nicely done video, btw I got it a while ago on the original site. The set up was different then in that you could download from different model catagories but this all in one should have the X-Wing model on it. I couldn't find the name of the person who made it unfortunately otherwise I WOULD have given credit where credit was due. Here's the link to the extra's CD. You can download a zip here http://www.hash.com/freemodels/

Here's the way I did the fly through. On frame 0, I constrained the camera to the path. Then constrained a null on the same path and set the ease to 4. This puts the null a little bit in front of the camera. I then set the ease of the "null" (not the camera) on the last frame to 100. I went back to frame 0 and created an "aim at" constraint for the camera to the null. This forces the camera to aim at the null that's a little ahead. I set the path so it travels very close to the objects in the scene. There's a lot you could do that I didn't experiment with. You could add "aim at constraints for the objects and transfer the enforcements as needed. That way you should get a smooth transition to aim at the objects and back to the path. It's really fun to tweek. I hope this help you, George Here's the project. school2.prj

Looking good Al

Hi Holmes, under the "Rigging & Relationships thread there's a sub-topic called Squetch Rig. Here's where you'll find the rigging thread and Mark takes you step by step in how to setup the poseable squetch rig. Just make sure you have all the latest files for it. George

Are you making this for a project to use or just for practice? The reason I ask is because there's an excellent X-Wing model in the donated models section on the hash site. I used it for the project I worked on for my brother-in-law and his friend. Check it out. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=a...st&id=21470 If you are just doing it as practice, then you're doing a great job so far!!! George

Thanks Moonshire There is a dust volumetric effect. To be within the allotted file size, the mov file I had to reduce the render. In the original that's about 260 meg, you clearly see the subtle dust plume. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Hey. My brother-in-law and his friend who originally were going to use this clip as part of an entry to a Discovery Channel contest, have told me they're going to finally finish the short even though the contest is done. He and the other creator/actor in the short who has finally purchased Animation Master, is Funky Monkey. Read his post. You can see his unbiased opinion LOL. George

No George, the Posable version of the rig is added on to this...it's some added installation bones and a bunch of additional poses. Mark will post an update that matches this update soon...probably tonight some time. Thanks for the clarification I have a rig control request that hopefully you can add to the squetch rig. In posing the TWO characters there's one movement that a single added bone in FK and null in IK would give more control in the foot setup. In IK it would have to control the whole foot null. In FK it would control the foot, calf and thigh rotation. Both pivots would come from the center of the ball of the foot (like dancers and martial artists do when they pivot on their feet). here are some pics to show you where I mean. In the current rig set up, the heel control pivot point is basically on the heel only. There are times where pivoting from the ball of the foot is desirable. I've had to do this a few times by rotating by the heel then figuring out the translation center of the ball of the foot. I really hope that this control could be added. Here's a mov showing Tin man demonstrating the movement. The only part to look at here is the foot pivot. the hips up would not be part of the control. tin_man_spinning.mov Thanks George

Is this the update to the poseable rig that Mark was talking about and do we just replace the poseable 5 finger squetch rig with this one? George

Is there going to be a thread to explain how to do this?

I cannot believe how easy this is!!!! THANK YOU!!!! OK on to step 5 LOL.

OK I got it working but my numbers don't match your's exactly to get the same positioning as in your pics. I take it that's OK though.

Mark, I'm doing each step as instructed but my model doesn't look like yours in the feet bone area. Did I do something wrong? Here's what my screen looks like. Note the size and positions of the foot and toe bone (I think thats what they are anyway). George

So far so good. I'm completely on the same page. I'm moving on to Step 1 Great job Mark! George

Sorry I didn't respond sooner. I just happen to see this thread and just now saw your post. You probably have already figured it out but if not, here's what to do: Once you have the tga sequential files created in a folder, in A:M, in the Project Work Space, at the top under the project name, right click on the "images" folder and choose [import - Animation or image sequence...] go to your folder that contains the tga sequential files and click open. Done. Something to think about.... To adjust the imported tgas' start frame: Go to the Images folder and click on the pic representing the imported tga's. go the the properties window and set the start image number and the end image number to set up where you want the tga's to start and end. George

As I said in the A:M community chat/TWO meeting, Thank you for doing this and I'm DEFINITELY IN!!!!!! George

Al, That is excellent!!!! I started modeling this. I have all the specs for it too but time and lack of ability has prevented me from making it. I do have a robot model started. I'll see if I can finish that up and when your Jupiter 2 is done we can put the robot in it. REALLY OUTSTANDING JOB!!!!! I loved watching Lost in Space when I was a kid and still do today at 43 hehe George

It looks great but if you rounded the corners a little it would look better. not too much just enough so it doesn't have that solid edge.

Hi Bob, I second Bruce's comments and add this.... The newer version (which I just upgraded to v14) allows people to participate in the "TWO" project. If you really want to come back with a vengeance, I'd really recommend you to check out this exciting opportunity offered only to A:M users using v13 or higher on account of the new svn feature (read up on it in the forums). Martin Hash is doing a very revolutionary thing. He's making a full feature movie (The Tin Woodman of OZ commonly referred to as "TWO") that is created by all Animation Master (A:M) volunteers from around the world all working together. There is also a complete certification program that Rodney keeps up if your A:M skills are a bit rusty you should check it out. That's how I started. Currently I am part of a team of over 100 A:M users working on the movie. The new updates since 8.5 are vast and the added features and stability is well worth the 100 bucks. Just do it!! Seriously, you won't be disappointed. George

I basically needed a break. I'm back now though working on the TWO movie. See you in chat George

Here's an animation I created to try to help out Technodandy in going from path animation to breaking from the path and continuing with a choreography action. Here's the finished product. I didn't make it perfect. Also, after seeing how cool it looked I wondered if I could modify the Hash Rabbit and give him a superman (or bunny in this case) costume. It was relatively easy to make the costume so here it is. It's not great but still pretty cool. Here are the steps I did for the animation. I'm sure there are a few things I could have done differently (like use blend to match up the path actions) but I at least accomplished my goal. I took the walk cycle I created a while ago and deleted all but the first pose. I turned off the "has stride length" option and created a quick walking to standing action and saved it as "my walk to stop.act". I then created a path, constrained the super_rabbit model and used the same "my walk" action (I created from the book a long time ago) that I also used for the first pose in my "my walk to stop.act" animation. I set the ease to 100 and the enforcement to 0 at the end of the path. I adjusted the red bar of the walking animation to be at the end of the last cycle by stretching or shrinking the end. I imported the "walk to standing" action and placed it with a frame or 2 of overlap. I then created a choreography action and moved the starting point to be right after the "walk to standing" animation which also has the constrain to path set to 0. I then created a choreography action of him touching his face, looking up, squatting down and flying in the air. The hard part was lining up the model bone to match the ending path animation (the walking to standing one not the walking one). Because this was just a test, I did not go all out to make this a movie release. I didn't for example try to match up the smile and eye lids as you'll probably notice. I did what I wanted to do. I went from a constrained path to breaking from the path to complete control by using a choreography action. The only reason my original suggestion didn't work (besides the fact I was wrong about having to set the position before hand) is because apparently you can't smoothly go from a "cycle" action to a choreography action. BUT, if you add a non-cycle action (I.E. no stride length set), to the character and place it at the end where it lines up with the end of the cycle animation it blends quite well. I hope this is helpful to someone. It was fun figuring it out. Super_Rabbit2.mdl And here's the decal for the symbol on his chest. Here's the super_bunny. You'll need A:M 14 to use it though. path_to_choreography_action_with_super_bunny.mov George

OK now you REALLY are going all out. You did it. You made me say WOW!!! Great JOB!!!!!!!!

Black!!!! looks awesome!!!! Great job man!!

The animation looks very cool T-Dogg. Just imagine the camera angles you can use after you finish the model! The model is coming along nicely. Keep it up! Also....LOL I thought I was the only one who used Paintshop Pro here. All I ever hear used is photoshop. Nice to know there are others out there hehe. George