nyahkitty

Similar thoughts as Nerrazzi. Overall, you are on the right track. I'm looking forward to seeing more from you in the future. Thanks for showing us your movie.

Wow! A:M and Syntheyes. What a combination. Compared to manually match moving by hand, this is seamless. Good work!

Sorry for the dead thread. I'd lost track of it. Basically I drew a spline shape of the hole I wanted to "cut" attached this to the sphere, rather than attach the sphere CP's to the shape. Then I broke splines, deleted CP's. Then I extruded new patches and closed up the inside of the hole so that it was similar to the shape that was supposed to "cut" a hole. It took quite a bit of time to smooth out the surface of the sphere after doing all of this. All of it was done manually. This method is usefull if you need the hole to be permanent geometry, rather than just a hole made by a bone boolean. Perhaps I'll do a tutorial with illustrations, if there's call for it. Really, it's just a matter of putting together various modeling techniques.

Thanks for the comments. Star Trash II is an effort in making myself ready for the industry by means of practice. It does seem to get better as we go along. It's fun too. We really do hope to complete the project by Spring of next year. My only regret is that I wish I had started out with Hash A:M in the first place instead of Carrara. That would have opened up more options for what is possible in this project. See you at the movies!

So now that a number of you have had a look at the trailer, thoughts and impressions? Has it succeeded in presenting a clear message?

Yay Skeeters! Congrats, huzzahs and such.

Star Trash II: The Wrath of Pecan is currently in post production. It seemed like a good idea to post a trailer. The link to it is in the lower left corner of the web page. Enjoy! Link to the Trailer

Can you use a stylus on that? Looks like it's buttons only, all the way.

Having read through all five pages, I must say that I'm thoroughly impressed by your knowledge of anatomy and uber-efficient splinage. When you have finished this project of yours, would you mind providing a modeling video tutorial and a copy of the model file of this character? I would be very interested in studying how you built the mesh. I do believe that for animators, the art of people watching is a far more noble pursuit in the form of "field research". Unfortunately, all too often a rather large slobbering, hairy fan boy comes along and ruins it for the rest of us. Keep up the good work!

Make it look like it has a very slight layer of dust and maybe a few hairs as if the photographer forgot to clean those off. Do this for the balls and the flat surface. Try using depth of field. Try making the reflections slightly blurry and only partially visible. Make the reflections in the spheres partially faded.

First attempt. Please see attached. I do wonder why the distort cage does not curve like splines normally do. Part of the problem might be that too many of the sections of the cage are centered on the hand. How to fix that? Hmmm.... I still think this has potential.... but if this does not work right now, I could always assignn a bone per spline ring on the arm and assign those to nulls, so I can use a few nulls to effect a swirly curve, using only a few nulls. STRETCH_Project1.prj

Eeeeexxcellent. I am genuinely looking forward to the completion of this project. Besides the obvious contrast issue, the color scheme is spot on. It sets the mood quite nicely, which has been your aim in this project. It has this painterly effect which is hard to miss, yet undistracting. Let's hear "yay" for highly crafted, sci-fi furry music videos. P.S. regarding the opening and closing of the door, what do you think of slowing those actions down ever so slightly and delaying when it closes by a further 1 or 2 seconds for dramatic effect?

In all seriousness on my part, I found it difficult to identify this particular item out of context. I'm sure that those who attend the event will likely recognize the thing right away, but perhaps strapping that thing around a kilt might help. It's a very nice render. I wouldn't mind seeing a closeup.

The psuedo Thom that I made by modifying the sample rigged guy from TSM 2 seems to behave quite nicely. No strange translations. Are you referring to that or the original Thom?

I bet if you had enough geometry built into his limbs and enough sections in the distortion cage, with bones for each cage "ring" or box, that you could make his arms stretch and wrap around things like certain elastic super hero's.

I wonder if you rendered that finger out using the depth field buffer only and then use that data in a compositing software to fake DOF blur. Who knows, maybe you could even comp it in A:M. That would be cool. If it's possible to comp using Z axis data, then you could make nice renders in final mode, process it in a comp app and then have a nice DOF image in far less time. Someone care to try this? I'm busy adding a CG set extension to live action footage of a movie set where the camera pans (the Anzovin Live Action CD's are a wonder).

Excellent! I've always said, "Distortion cages are your friend." If you're finding a multi-cage setup to be stable now, I see much possibility for highly stylized cartoony animation. Party on, dude!

I must say that I like your focus on mechanical modeling and the results that you are getting.

I've fiddled with layering actions and came up with this: Pseudo Thom Walk Please right click and save the file before playing. It's by no means perfect, but it does contain the main bits I intend to cover in the final reel.

I noticed something I had to deal with in creating walk cycles: If you do the three step cycle method, then the "seam" of the cycle when the right foot reaches the end of it's second step is noticable. If you are encountering a slight stutter or pause in the cycle when previewing it in a chor, then you could try looking at the first and last keyframes of every item keyed in the action and switch those to zero slope in the motion curve graph mode of the timeline. That might help with this. If you already do this, whether it works or not, then great.

-Now that it has been pointed out, I would say that the wrist does appear twisted and pinched. -When the stop sign is knocked out of the hand of the construction worker, he eventually turns his head. I wonder if it would be in keeping with the style of the show if there was a slight delay and then he quickly turns his head, with this action being accented by zero slope on the keyframes. His mouth could open after he turns his head to look, as this would be a surpised reaction to what he finally notices. Maybe get some slight, zero-sloped shoulder and hip movement in there. -Very nice timing of when the construction worker is introduced and when the car passes him by. Excellent kinematic animation with the traffic cones and road barrier. -Likewise, the restaurant patron sitting to the right of the table in the background could benefit from slightly snappier timing. -Basically, a lot of the timing of motion is snappy and life-like, while there are spots which seem floaty. I did like the floatiness where it is found in the vehicles and tricycle. For some reason, that seems to combine well with when the the vehicle animation is snappy. -It does seem that a little more random film artifacts and making that persistant white scratch line thinner would help the "old film" feel. -The poor fellow with his own cell phone, the guy who got ran over. Yeah, that guy..... the joke works and the animation works. The last bit, "Good-ARRGGGH"... it might do well to cut that last bit of dialogue out in order to maintain the flow of the show. -I really liked how you made dirt come out of the dump truck. -The newspaper at the end of the show had a nice secondary action. -Definitely change the lighting so the audience can read all of the newspaper text. -I think Shaggy's appeal is that he is very much in the style of Jim Henson's Muppets. Their facial expressions don't really change in the normal sense as expected of flesh and blood characters. But their movements are such that they progress the action and the acting to effectively tell the story. This is why Empire Strikes Back Yoda was so convincing (well.....for those who thought he did good in that movie). Overall, well done!

This was the worst animation I've ever seen. Motion was "floaty" throughout, with piss-poor timing that ruined most of the so-called "gags." The decision to render the whole thing in black and white was clearly an attempt to cover up the animator's lazy texturing, and the less said about the laughably expressionless "Shaggy," the better. I've seen better animated faces on "Thunderbirds." Overall, a sad, childlike attempt at animation that ran far too long and had nothing to say. The people involved with this animation should be ashamed. I am ashamed of myself for watching it. The entire medium of animation has been diminished by this atrocity, and on behalf of all mankind, I would urge this ZachBG person never to go near a computer again. .......or not.

ooooo... shiny conch shell... er...um, I mean..... My first choice for controlling the motion curve of a keyframe is "Zero Slope". This serves several purposes: -automatically eases in and out of a positional transformation or whatever other value is keyframed. -it keeps bones from drifting. -You can still control the magnitude of bias handle of the keyframe in timeline when it is when it is in channel edit mode. -The bias handle remains at the same angle even if the keyframe is moved. Tastes great. Less filling. Ok... I'm done.

Here's the next update: Psuedo Thom Walk The first twenty seconds are quite nice. After that, it gets a bit dodgy, particulary with the hands. The make-hand-into-fist pose sliders are no longer responding past the first 20 seconds. With the chor containing over twelve actions, I think I overdid it too soon. I'll probably need to scale back a bit to experimenting with just a few actions in order to see how they behave.

Hello, This might be day three of making humanoid walk cycles. I've found good results with Anzovin's most current sample Rigged Guy. However, I still pine for the days of Thom. So I changed the surface color. What once was Rigged Guy is now officially.......... Pseudo Thom! He's faster. He's stronger. He juleanne's. Thank you Anzovin people! Current project stats: 2 days = 16 hours I think there's 6 regular actions and two chor actions layered together Mpeg4 video file Attached. PSEUDO_THOM_WALK.zip