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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

Exercise 7: Can You Say That


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  • 4 weeks later...

Mike Dalton

Exercise 7

Completed: Feb 16th 2006

 

On this one, I didn't use the dopesheet at all. I really like the "Henson" theory of lip-sync - Jim Henson had 2 phenomes (open & closed) for his mouth movement, and it worked fine. For this animation, I used the "A" phenome for all mouth movement, with a few exceptions. I added a slight sneer on the "s" in the two uses of "secret", and also used the "D" phenome I believe to make two "O" sounds - during "you" and "so". Other than those 4 changes, it's all just the A phenome in various degrees. Comments are welcome.

 

If possible, this thread at least needs to allow 2mb of file uploads. Not much point in posting a 1mb file with audio. You can hardly make out that it's KeeKat, much less critique the animation. Ah well.

secret_small.mov

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Well Mike I like the way you have done this.I think I am going to experiment with the "Jim Henson" theory

as well :) .

I am a bit surprised with the size of your movie file.I have made my test animations with the

"sorenson 3"codec for quicktime and the files are small and the quality is very acceptable.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Okay I'm back. Here's the screenshot. This screenshot was taken after I entered the words into the dope sheet. As you can see, the words don't appear underneath the sound, so I don't know where they went. I've followed the AM book word for word up to this point, so I'm not sure what's going on. Help?[attachmentid=14881]

 

edit: okay, since this I found the dope sheet in the project workspace, but I still don't know how to get the words on the time line in order to position them.

Ivegotasecret.doc

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I don't know? I went to add this attachment and then add this to post, because it wouldn't let me paste the picture. I pasted it in word, because I don't have a paint program.

 

Edited: Sorry, I think I just figured out what you meant, here it goes. . . [attachmentid=14912]

Edited: ugh, that didn't work either. Sorry, I think I'll just skip this exercise and come back to it at the end!

Picture_1.pdf

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Completed exercise 7

 

:( Sorry it is out of order from my previous exercise posts, but I am haveing some trouble getting the keyframes to work right on Exercise 6

 

Name: Bob Koonce

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 7: Can You Say That?

 

Date Completed: 3-7-06

 

Instructor: None at this time

 

Remarks/Suggestions for Improvement: Animation sure can be taxing. <_<

 

Any comments will be appreciated

 

Thankx,

Bob Koonce B)

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Bob,

 

I wouldn't worry about doing the tutorials out of order. I did most of mine that way. I would do the easy ones first and then go back and work on the harder ones last. It took me a few months before I even finished the dreaded Exercise 6. In regards to this one, I like what you did with the eyes. You are right though, animation can be very tedious and sometimes very time consuming. But then if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. I personal love the technicanl side of it, laying out the animation and doing it and then going in and tweaking it to make it perfect. But thats me, just being twisted in the mind.

 

Once again good job,

 

Leo B)

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Teresa,

 

Take your time. Sometimes you have to just take a step back and get away and then come back with fresh eyes. Lucky for me my wife isn't an artist. This way I can show her stuff and get feedback from her. She doesn't look at it the same way we all do. Believe me, I know the easy stuff can be frustrating sometimes. I am currently working on the bootcamps and am tweaking the two balls bouncing across the screen. It's easy enough in theory but there is actually alot that goes into. I will prevail though.

 

Good luck,

 

Leo

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Name: Stephen Molloy

 

Exercise #7

 

Date: March 19 2006

 

Instructor : online video and book

 

Remarks: i had to make a few changes to the Kat to make easier to render ( i deleted all the materials and coloured the skin .....this made a huge time difference from 9 hours to 22 mins ...i also turned reflections off)

 

i did have a problem with sound and have no idea how to fix.

 

now the sound is playing only on the left side in the rendered video ....(it plays in both sides in the project)...and another weird thing is if you hit the rewind button on the Quicktime the sound is playing in the rightside.

 

Has anyone else had problems with sound playback ...

 

ps the sound was set at default stereo 44,100 hz ....

 

 

in V12 t

Secret_talk.zip

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For quick renders use real time with sorensen video 3

 

Thanks again Robert-Jank ( on the short cutting rendering time )

 

i think i solved my sound problem ....A.M. on my PC is somehow putting all the sound on the left ( and if you rewind in play mode on Qtime the Rightside sound is there too)

 

so i have Qtime pro6.5 ...i exported the movie ( in mono ) and poof i have sound in both sides

 

 

 

 

i tried the same project in V11 V12 and in V13 alpha 9

 

i got the same sound quality ( even with stereo not checked off )

 

weird bug

 

sm

Secret_talk_2.zip

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Stephen,

 

Good job despite the audio problems you were having. Your animation came out good, but does seem a little stiff in the body when KeeKat walks. Also when he is talking, only his head and hands are moving. The rest of the body could have used some subtle movement, like adding some secondary motion to his tail to help convey his emotions a little more. Just my .02 though

 

Keep up the good work

 

Leo

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Hi All -

 

I have completed ex. 7 and thus finished the animation section of the tutorials - WOO HOO! Of course I have a LONG way to go before I've mastered (heck, before I'm even proficient) with animating using A:M. But it's a start. I'm excited to move on to modeling so that I can begin creating my own creations and learn how to animate them.

 

Name: Michael Fortunato

Exercise Completed: Ex. 7, Can you say that? (completed ex. 1 - 7)

Date Completed: 03-24-2006

Instructor: Art of A:M

Remarks: Keykat is adorable. And as such, I felt he needed a "cuter" voice to be telling us about a secret. So I recorded the voiceover with my own voice (digitally modified). This made my wife laugh every time she saw Keykat animated. So I hope you enjoy it too.

 

Thanks.

- Michael

Ex7_CanYouSayThat_MichaelFortunato.zip

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Michael,

 

First off, great job in taking it to the next level with using your own voice. There are a few things that kinda stick out though. The feel of the voice gives me the impression of a mechanical creature almost. Also the mouth movements seem to move faster than the actual sound. The last thing I can say(and I was guilty of this and still am at times) is when your animating, you want to try not to leave your character static for too long. Even subtle movements in the tail and hips can go a long way to adding more realism to him. These are just my opinions though.

 

Over all nice job, good luck with the rest of the exercises

 

Leo

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Michael,

 

First off, great job in taking it to the next level with using your own voice. There are a few things that kinda stick out though. The feel of the voice gives me the impression of a mechanical creature almost. Also the mouth movements seem to move faster than the actual sound. The last thing I can say(and I was guilty of this and still am at times) is when your animating, you want to try not to leave your character static for too long. Even subtle movements in the tail and hips can go a long way to adding more realism to him. These are just my opinions though.

 

Over all nice job, good luck with the rest of the exercises

 

Leo

 

 

Thanks for the comments, Leo! Listening to it, you're right, it's a little mechanical. I could give the voice more life. Whisper it more, perhaps. And, yeah, something weird happened with the dope sheet link to the actual voice file and Keykat. When I move the words on the dope sheet around, they do not affect keykat anymore. I figured I must have moved something to the wrong group, so I'll keep playing with that until I can fix it.

Lastly, you are so right about the subtle movements. I felt his lower body was too stiff as well. I think I'll go back to this one tonight and see if I can make those corrections.

 

Thanks again!

- Michael

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  • 2 weeks later...

John,

 

Good job on this one. I think it came out good with the added facial animation that you put in. I just think the arms moving slowly from beginning to end could be tweaked a little.

 

Keep up the good work.

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Ok I didn't do the tut as is in the book, Idid it as it says to though, anyway I have a problem, and I know it's me :( but everything works fine in the cho. but when I render to final my sound clip is sped up and the lipsync is off ..... any ideas on how to fix this? :(

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Name: Tyson Oswald

Exercise #7 Can You Say That

Date: April 17, 2006

Instructor : Manual

 

URL : EX7

 

It's not exactly what I wanted to do, but with my skill level so far I like it. I had to toy around a lot to get the motion the way I sort of wanted. His arm movement I admit could be better, and his feet are pretty stationary. I do like the head motion at the end. Perhaps afer I get some more practice I will attempt it again. Overall I found it to be a fun exercise. I had issues at first with the dope sheet and the timeline. After I upgraded to Tiger that all seemed to go away.

 

later,

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Pretty Decent Looking. The lipsynch looks correct for the most part and the use of the eyes is good. I dont know why the eye passes through the eyelid briefly but that is not your fault. You will have to deal with stuff like that later. I would have liked to see more use of the body and secondary action but that's just me and how I did the exercise. I was already using the program for a while though before I did the exercise so maybe that is too much for you now, I don't know. But you did a good job. Be proud

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  • 2 months later...
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Hi guys. I jumped ahead one lesson here cause I wanted to play around with lesson 7 a bit, but I am getting an error. Cant find the dictionary.dic file when I load the dope sheet. I know the video tutorial said it was on the cd, but I can’t find it there either. I did a search on both the disk and my hard drive but I don’t seem to have this file. Does anybody know more about this? I have the Am version 12 upgraded to v13e. Appreciate any help you can give me.

 

 

Update: After hunting around in Hash Inc.'s ftp site I located the file that was missing. it seems to be working fine now. Back to playing around with it.

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Here is my completed exercise 7. I had to zip the .mov file as it was just over 4 MByte in size.

 

The audio was tweaked a bit in Audacity and the background layer was an image Googled and downloaded from the internet ('3Drt.com'). Since Halloween is fast approaching, I was trying for a slightly spooky atmosphere.

 

Name: Al Dinelt

Exercise Completed: Exercise 7: Can You Say That?

Date Completed: October 1, 2006

Instructor: TAoA:M and a bit of experimenting...

 

[attachmentid=21015]

 

[attachmentid=21016]

exercise_7.jpg

exercise_7.zip

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Hi Jim:

 

That was a great video. I have watched it several times and laughed each time. Really well done. The only thing I noticed is the left arm seems to jump as it moves up towards the right arm the first time. Other than that, the animation looked really smooth and the facial expressions were great.

 

Al

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Hi Al,

 

Yup, you're absolutely right! I think I was so wrapped up in getting that last part in, his 'Soprano' take, that I didn't go back for another clean-up. Actually, there's probably a dozen other things too, but I'm bad that way, I could go over the same short animation forever and never call it done. :P

 

That spot with the arm is the transition between a Chor Action and a KeeKat Action, and I really should have used more frames for it.

 

-Jim

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