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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

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Posted

This one is for the gurus and experts out there that know a lil sumthin sumthin about the capabilities of physic simulations in Hash AM.

 

Yesterday I saw the movie Untraceable and there was a scene were a guy fell from a bridge. To me it looked quite good, but I wondered if they used physics simulation and a CG stunt double for the action.

 

I tried recreating this scene in Hash, but I'm quite the novice with the physics stuff to really understand what needs to be setup and done. Is it possible to have a rigged human character and constrain with a Rigid Body constraint and have it simulate realworld physics?

 

Not getting very far in Hash, I decided to switch over to Poser 7 with their physics simulation to work it out. It's a quick simulation, just to see what is possible. Hopefully the animated gif will show up here, but it's for reference only to see if this type of "stunt" would be possible in Hash AM. I have version 13t. Any comments and suggestions are welcome.

 

thanks.

 

untraceable.gif

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Posted

I thought about it a little further, and since Poser can export a .bvh file, I did that and imported into AM and constrained human character to the .bvh file. Seems to be not bad at all. Sure needs tweakin', but what don't.

 

A glimpse.

 

AMuntrace.gif

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Posted

Hey, that's pretty slick. :)

 

Just so I understand correctly here...

You animated the fall dynamically in Poser...

Exported the resulting BVH motion from that...

Imported the BVH into A:M...

Rendered.

 

I know that is an oversimplification in any case but I'm curious.

 

P.S. That fall looks quite painful!

Posted

Rodney,

 

that's it pretty much in a nutshell. The only other thing to do is constrain the AM character to the bvh file, drag n drop Action on model in Choregraphy. I had to translate model a bit. For some reason when I exported the .bvh file from Poser, it translated the Poser character back to zero origin, but I think I didn't translate Body in Poser very well. This was all just a quick test to see what results would be given. Not bad, with a bit of tweaking here and there it could be better.

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Posted
This was all just a quick test to see what results would be given. Not bad, with a bit of tweaking here and there it could be better.

 

Well sure... you could even have him react to getting shot multiple times FIRST, THEN crash through a couple walls, THEN plummet toward the ground where he narrowly escapes certain doom but landing on a car and rolling off BUT then getting ran over by another car. :P

 

Seriously though. You are making it look easy.

 

I don't use Poser but I know other people that do.

They are sure to be interested in such things as this as they are always looking for new ways to use Poser and A:M together.

For me its mostly just an enjoyable look into the process of animating things dynamically.

 

You are making good progress. :)

The only thing that really stands out as being particularly off to me is the extended time delayed (balancing back and forth?) before the fall.

 

Again... looks pretty slick to me!

Posted

That's interesting research you are doing. There must be a way to do this in A:M using a combination of Newton/ Dynamic Constraints/ and any rigged character. Can you set the mass for an object with Newton?

Posted

Oh sure Rodney, make me work harder :P

 

Well, Poser is not the easiest to do when it comes to animating. I imported the file into Carrara 6 to render faster and add some arm movements to the falling guy. Oh and I added a shooter just for you.

 

Bigboote, not sure about setting mass on Rigid Body in AM. I'll check into that tomorrow. Maybe by then someone will enlighten us about the physics system and there may be something i'm not aware of.

 

Meanwhile, this is for Rodney.Car_untrac.gif

Posted

I remember reading ages ago that the author of the newton plugin for AM was working on "rag doll" physics. I guess he hasn't finished that yet or is there a way to do that "by hand"?

 

p.s. The guy falling should cut down on the caffeine. He looks a bit "jittery". ;)

 

-vern

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Posted
Meanwhile, this is for Rodney

 

:wub:

 

Nice addition.

I have a soft spot for the GIF format too. There was a time GIF animation was pretty much the only option available to many of us. Anything else wouldn't easily fit onto a floppy disk. ;)

Posted

Wow.. I guess I just need to get a better understanding of what is possible. When I see stuff like this in movies/TV, I assume animators did everything using the computer, not that the computer did some of the work. Looks awesome to me!

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