Bill_Y
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Posts posted by Bill_Y
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Answer: A+B+C+D.
Expression is derived from many aspects of the face. The position of the eye lids relative to how the brow is contorted along with mouth, cheek and nose positions are what convey emotion. You can't pick one aspect and say this is the most important. Angry brows are only read as angry if the eyes, mouth, nose and cheeks are also positioned in an angry fashion. Like sneering the upper lip and wrinkling the nasolabial fold. Now you could do away with the squinting of the eyes at this point and it would still probably read ok, but it's the sublties that help really convey this emotion, so to say it's not important is to admit your pose isn't as strong as it could be. Now if you took that same angry brow line and put a smile on the mouth, flair the nostril wings, crease the nasolabial fold at the corners of the mouth and bulge the eyes you would read these totaly differently. Mischievous intentions perhaps.
There are even more things that add to the expression of a character like the forehead and crows feet, but I'm going a bit far now.
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Is the contest only for owners of TSM2?
No.
Can you use a TSM2 rigged model, that someone else rigged?
Yes.
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Lets clear up some confusion! It says you must use a TSM2 rigged character.
--Must be created using character(s) rigged with TSM2 (NOT TSM1). You will have to show your rig construction.--You CAN use the sample characters included with TSM2
The TSM2 rigged centaur is available for download from the TSM2 web page on our store site. Also we're going to be posting a few more characters from the CD soon so that other A:M users can try out the rigs and do some animations as well. So to answer the question of do you need to own TSM2 for the contest? The answer is no you don't, but you do have to use a TSM2 rigged character.
-Bill Y.
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Yes, but they need to contain right or left appropriately in the name so tsm knows what bones to flip.
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Siggraph seems like a blur in my eyes... Of course this is the shortest time I've spent at one; however, I always enjoy placing faces with names, and chatting it up with other A:M users. The guys at Hash were great as usual, and I even got a surprize as I walked bye the ATI booth at roughly 11:30 AM and herd the announcer introduce James Hash demoing Animation Master... Needless to say I did a 180, and sat down to enjoy that show. The animation theaters this year were technically the best I've ever seen. Some animations were a little slow, and others lacked in stories, but they were all technically well done. The Hash Party Animations were also a lot of fun to watch. Speaking of the hash party... There are some great pictures that were snapped by Steve S. and some people got a little crazy with the temp tatoos. (Not me of course =p), but despite the increasingly smaller size of the exhibition hall this year the content seemed better than ever. One of the coolest things imo was Chicken Little. Disney has broken the conventional 3d rig in such a way that the animators pose the characters based off shape to achieve many of the line of action style poses and squash and stretch techniques used in more traditional 2d animation. The animation shown for siggraph was very interesting, and nothing like the teaser trailer that has been circulating the web. I'm hoping that the story will be as fun as the animation is.
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Alpha channels
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This is a WIP for the next mastering materials volume. Thought people would be interested in seeing a face made of 95% materials. There are only 4 image maps used and 3 are for hair control. The last is for an environment map.
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Another option is to turn up the radius for the proximity of the mirrored points. This can easily be done by opening the options panel, going to the modeling tab and setting the mirror mode tolerance to something like .1 instead of the default .05. This could cause some points close together to unwantingly snap, but it should resolve the issue in most cases.
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You need to make sure that you're model is identical across the 0 line of the y axis. If the face isn't centered then mirroring won't work. Another thing that could be the problem is you might not have key muscle on. If key muscle is not active, then you can't copy and paste mirrored. If these two suggestions don't fix the problem then you might post an image of the wireframe of the face and then I'll try and give you more suggestions.
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Truly and entertaining thread for those of use old enough to have used an amiga. Any one else still follow Eric Schwartz? I use to have every animation he did from "The Swiss Army F-16 in Combat" to some of his later epics like "Quality Time." I'm with Vern about Martin's "mullet"... Very amusing to see him with this look as I've only known the clean cut/shaven guy I've met at Siggraph over the past several years.
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Darn I missed the animated showing. The effect in the images looks pretty sweet. I'd love to take a look at the animation.
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As far as I can tell, the new controls give you all of the power of A:M Weights and Weightmover. Those systems added control to the CP weighting in V10 to achieve what is now the standard control over weighting that is in V11.
I thought the selling point of Weight Mover was that you could do your SmartSkinning on a (easier to smartSkin) low-res version of your model and then it would transfer those intentions to your original (hard to smartSkin) hi-res mesh. I don't see any way CP weights would do that for you.
Indeed Weight mover alows you to transfer weights from one mesh to another wich can't be done with the current weight system. Some of the things Weight mover could do like the feathers ect. can now be achieved with the new weight system, but they do work in different ways. Weight mover is particularly good when you have a fairly dense mesh you wish to weight, and don't want to spend the time grouping and weighting all the CP's. You can simply weight a proxy version, and then do a weight transfer and the weights are for the most part done. This can be a huge time saver, and if there are still some problems you can then use the built in weighting adjustments to tweak any problematic points further. Both A:M weights and the built in weight system can do this fine tweaking, but can't do the mass weighting the way Weight mover can.
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Try adding a little specular to your hair as it will add a little sheen to each hair. Currently the hair color looks pretty good, but with out a bit of specular the hair looks flat. Also it looks as if you might have a bit of ambiance in your hair, and thus it doesn't look like there is much fall off happening on the left side of the character's hair when compared to the rest of the character. Removing or lowering the ambiance will also help add a little more depth to it. As a last suggestion I would try doing a render with the hair casting shadows as in this last image their are none,a nd it also might be contributing to the "flat" look of the hair.
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Face machine is still along ways off; however, I'm doing research and tests that will get applied to it now. They've been mostly successful at this point; however, there is a lot more testing to do before it will get done. Expect a new rigging a face CD to be coming out soon as part of the results on the way to making the Face Machine.
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TSM 2 is being worked on as we speak. We're hopping it will be done before siggraph, but can't make any promises.
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I didn't download the project, but I would simply rig this as a normal foot, then add fingers for the toes. The problematic area is the webbing. You would have to do a little setup of your own there. You might start by trying a few fan/cog bones between the two toes to move the webbing evenly as the toes moved. Another option would be to weight the webbing between the two toes by either using the stock weighting system, or if you have it, Weight Mover.
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Where ever you are... I hope you have a Happy One!
(Can you believe Billy Eggington is only 31!!!)
Now I feel old...
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You say you want more Keekat? No problem.
Way back when.... Anzovin Studios let the A:M Community see a few character tests. Here is one of them.
Facial Animation and Body Movement test by Anzovin Studios - on A:M Films
actually, Thats a mistake. We didn't do this animation. This was done by one of the other animators on the paw island project if I recall correctly. We did do 3 in house test animations of KeeKat, but this isn't one of them. I'm looking to see if we can find the tests some place so that thy could be added to A:M films.
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Well if you would like a suggestion then I would say that the front of the ears aren't flush with the side of the head; however, it's kind of hard to offer more suggestions with out seeing the wireframe.
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X effects (or did effect haven't checked this out recently) a bones shaded mode while in default mode (7 key on alpha numeric). If your model didn't have any bones this would shift the base bone for a model into shaded mode; however, if you have bones in your model you would simply select the bone, and hit X to turn shading mode on for all patches assigned to that bone. Selecting the base model then hitting X would shade the entire model. This mode is useful when in an action or a choreography and you want to see a few models shaded while the rest of the models remain in wireframe. I do recommend that you turn off bone shading after you are done with using it as it has been known in the past to impact performance on a few systems. If for some reason your manipulation of things slows down dramatically, I would recommend hopping into this mode and looking for shaded bones and turning them all off as they might be the culprit.
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Indeed TSM's FK rig is designed to be flexible. This alows you to position the FK arm in an IK fashion. The big difference between FK and IK are how the bones interpolate their movement. In an IK arm the goal or hand drives the animation and you wind up having to insert extra keys to cause the arm to look as if it's moving in arcs. Also the elbow in an IK arm is typically a second goal and the elbow will almost always try and move towards it instead of the hand in an IK system unless you animate the elbow moving as well. These two issues with IK arms are what typically cause animators to say IK is not the preferred choice for Arm animation. This leaves people with the option of an FK driven arm. With FK driven arms the rotation of the arm starts at the shoulder, moves down through the upper arm, lower arm, and ends in the hand/fingers (depending on the detail you put in.); however, with most FK systems you loose the placement flexibility of the IK system. This means that to get a finger tip to a specific location in space and move in a straight line as if it were pushing a button can take much longer to animate than in an IK system. This shows that both systems can have obvious limitations; however, A:M's base bone system works differently than almost every other bone system on the market.
In A:M bones can be positioned in an IK fashion and end up with FK movement; however, an ungoaled IK chain can be very messy as their is nothing to tell it what direction to bend joints like the elbow. This results in joints like the elbow breaking and bending improperly. TSM's FK arms are allowed to be manipulated using the IK positioning found in A:M's base bone movement system with the exception that the elbow will automatically be rotated to keep it from breaking. This does however mean that the shoulder might bend strangely at times to keep the elbow pointing correctly. unfortunately to keep this IK flexibility of the FK arms this had to be a trade off. So this leads to the problem you are experiencing and the ways to solve it.
Several methods have already been mentioned. The most traditional solution is to lock off the individual joints using the joint lock button on each bone to prevent them from working in an IK fashion, and then rotating them joint by joint into position. The next solution (and my favorite) is to put limits on their rotation to prevent them from moving badly as you manipulate them in an IK fashion. The reason that this isn't automatically done by TSM is that there is no way for it to know the exact amounts of rotation each characters rig will need to bend. Some people like to have hyper extending arms and others don't. Thus the option must remain open to the individual setting up the rig. The next solution is to create a hybrid IK chain where the upper arm is targeted to an elbow goal. This restricts the direction of the elbow by using a goal; however, introduces the elbow position movement inaccuracy mentioned in a traditional IK system while leaving the forearm and hand in FK movement resulting in movement that is mostly FK, but can suffer from elbow IK errors if the goal system isn't rigged well. (TSM's elbow rig should avoid this kind of problem if it is used) Lastly you can position the FK rig in an IK fashion and move the elbow joint back into position after you've roughed out the position. This can cause the forearm and hand to move requiring more tweaking. TSM was designed to give the individual the most flexibility when rigging arms, and so this is the reason that it works the way it does.
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Not quite following this question. Do you want to know how to prevent the bicep from rotating to much, or the forearm?
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Just to let you know the Alpha channel issue was fixed in v11beta8. So if you want to get the nooks and crannies on the edge of your J.D. label it shouldn't be a problem any more.
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Strangely I have an affinity for using paths to make my selections... ;P
Suggest new topics for Anzovin CDs
in Anzovin Products
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Egads... we don't want to frighten people off by modeling my gut...