Christmas animation 2009

[Gerry]

Well if there's a question about it working, it would be easier to Save As... and have three versions of the action. I don't anticipate the settings changing much at all and the test I did the other day seems to be optimal, so it's not hugely complex, just trying to save steps and get familiar with different uses for actions at the same time.

 

Here's a test of the "kickline" though the G-men aren't rigged yet. this is just to set up the lighting etc. The spinning plates re-use two actions, one a clockwise spin and one counterclockwise.

Shot_6_test_h264.mov

[Gerry]

Here's a final quality still from the sequence. I do like those soft reflections on the stage!

[Darkwing]

aw man, that's awesome!!!!

[KenH]

Looking good. Just a preference thing, but I would have the plates spinning a little slower.

[Gerry]

Good suggestion Ken. As I'm working on these G-men (I'm gettin tired of typing out, y'know...) I just KNOW when folks see it finished they'll want to know why their faces aren't animated!

[Gerry]

Here's a test render of all three G-men getting their bites. It appears all three boolean cutters are leaving artifacts. I may just deal with that in post if they're still visible. In the final animation they'll only be on screen for an instant.

 

I noticed in an earlier test that having hooks in the boolean objects caused artifacts like these, only worse. So I'm making progress.

Three_bite_test_h264.mov

[Darkwing]

quirky!! i really like it

[jimd]

Here's a test render of all three G-men getting their bites. It appears all three boolean cutters are leaving artifacts. I may just deal with that in post if they're still visible. In the final animation they'll only be on screen for an instant.

 

I noticed in an earlier test that having hooks in the boolean objects caused artifacts like these, only worse. So I'm making progress.

 

nice fx hope you clean up those artifacts

they seem to pop back in when the crumbs appear

maybe a quick way around this is to make a crumb layer, just a thought don't know how it's rigged

[Gerry]

Yeah, the artifacts come and go. this is just a test so I'll see when the actual shot is set up how much I have to deal with. Maybe they won't even appear if it's at a different angle.

 

EDIT: heck, I may just rerender this test with a different camera. You never know what will effect artifacts like these.

[robcat2075]

I'm going to guess the artifact is some sort of non-enclosed boolean problem.

[tbenefi33]

Hay gerrry that's looking nice.

[Gerry]

I'm going to guess the artifact is some sort of non-enclosed boolean problem.

That may be part of it, I'll check over all the boolean objects. The odd thing is that with the first G-man, there's an artifact for one frame, then it goes away. And the others, the artifacts change when the G-men do their little jumps. When I had a problem with booleans two years ago, I found that with a different camera (or cam angle) the artifacts changed or went away entirely.

[Gerry]

Here are two tests, one of a first stab at a dance routine for the G-men, very simple and a little spastic. Second is a first test of Annie all rigged, just trying out the face controls. Holmes was an enormous help with the rigging.

GingerDanceTest_h264.mov

AnnieRigTest_h264.mov

[Darkwing]

what's that horizontal line on the annie test? looks pretty good so far though, I am quite excited for this!

[robcat2075]

I think they need to kick higher.

[KenH]

Oh yeah. They need to do vertical splits. It's not like they're made of biscuit and going to break or anything.

Annie needs bigger irises.

[largento]

Lookin' good, Gerry! I agree with Ken about the irises. With them being black, they look like they are the pupils and that the irises are white... kinda' creepy. :-)

[Gerry]

Well, there's no decaling as yet. I have an iris decal but every time I loaded the prj I had to relocate it manually, so I deleted it for the time being. As for the Gmen kicking higher, I was getting some funny behavior in the legs when I did, but I may just need to get more familiar with the controls.

 

Once I have Annie fully decaled I think she'll look a little nicer. Like having eyebrows, for instance.

 

I think that horizontal line is an artifact from an unintended alpha channel, so that will go away.

 

Thanks for the comments!

[HomeSlice]

I think they need to kick higher.

 

Maybe something like this?

ginger_dance_lowrez.mov

[Gerry]

Dude, you're hired!

[Gerry]

Here's a still of the first shot, still a little work to do but it's coming along.

[HomeSlice]

That looks nice Gerry! Are you going to put some kind of outside landscape decal on, or behind, the Window? If not, setting the camera background color to black or dark blue may make the fact that there is nothing behind the window a little less obvious.

[robcat2075]

Here's a still of the first shot, still a little work to do but it's coming along.

 

Could I suggest loosening her up a bit by tucking one leg under the other. Or leaning her against the armrest of the couch.

[Gerry]

There will be snow out the window eventually, which will be visible from the initial closeup of the plate of cookies. And that's not a bad suggestion about the pose, Robcat.

 

I'm currently cutting the soundtrack together, then I'm going to redo the animatic to the beats of the music so I can time out the animation. It's ironic that in this whole process the actual animation comes last!

[HomeSlice]

It's ironic that in this whole process the actual animation comes last!

Not quite last

Rendering, fixing things, re-rendering, troubleshooting, re-re-rendering, and editing can actually be quite a bit of work.

[Darkwing]

don't forget bashing head against wooden board when frusterated, that happens through the whole process though

[Paul Forwood]

Gerry, she looks really cute.

[KenH]

don't forget bashing head against wooden board when frusterated, that happens through the whole process though

 

Ah yes. Such is the torment yet satisfaction of 3D animation.

 

That's shaping up nicely Gerry.

[Gerry]

Not quite last

Rendering, fixing things, re-rendering, troubleshooting, re-re-rendering, and editing can actually be quite a bit of work.

Oh right, those things too!

 

Here's the new animatic timed to the music, lots of rough edges but it will help me time out the shots.

master_comp_h264.mov

[Darkwing]

really can't wait!!!! keep up the good work

[Gerry]

If I have the boolean cutter for the Gmen bites, and then the Gmen continue to move their arms in the action, those parts could pop through the boolean cutter and reappear, couldn't they? I need to think about this a bit more. Maybe swap out a separate Gman model with the bitten part already missing.

[Darkwing]

look at jeff lew's website. he ran into a similar problem when doing the matrix style bullets, but found a way around it. he had it poted on his site a long time ago

[HomeSlice]

I think if you position the boolean cutter bone in a pose, then it will follow the body part as the model moves. Not totally sure about that, but it is worth a try.

 

You might also try constraining (Translate To, Orient Like) the boolean cutter to the desired body part.

[Gerry]

Darkwing, I'm not seeing anything on Jeff Lew's site like that. If you should come across it, maybe post a link here. What he's got there is mostly about Killer Beans and the training dvd's. Not seeing anything like technical hints etc.

 

Holmes, I will look at that, I need to determine just how long the "bitten" characters will actually be on screen. Also, I think it's more than constraining to another bone. For instance, suppose an arm gets bitten at the shoulder, then the arm bends. I'll need to plan out the bites pretty carefully. Or make the boolean objects bigger.

[Gerry]

So while I was over at Jeff's site I ordered the first training video. they're on sale until Sunday!

[Darkwing]

crap, he went and updated his site after all these years. ok, it went something like this:

 

the bullet effect used a material effector i think, and it worked fine, except when in close proximity to the characters, because then it would cut out a bit of the character. so what he did was render one with the bullet and effect, and one with just the character, and he would place the character one over the bullet effect one. i can't remember if he used chroma key or alpha channels, but you could experiment with video layers

[Gerry]

that's pretty much what I was thinking about doing if I understand you. Make a second model with the arm missing, then an instant after the bite, swap out the models on one keyframe, making the active one inactive and vise versa. Is that sort of it?

[Darkwing]

i guess that would do it too. in Lew's version, he would render out two separate video layers and add them in the post-production stage in an editing software.

[Gerry]

I've been through this before but I forget what the fix is. The settings for an animated decal are confusing me. I've got a 400 frame targa series animation of snow falling, but the settings insist that it's 351 and I can't adjust the length properly. Here's a shot of the settings. I want to slow it down (though having it run at its actual speed would probably fix it) and repeat twice.

[NancyGormezano]

Gerry - I always find it is easier to work with an image sequence - rather than a .mov or .avi

 

that way frame rate doesn't confoooze me.

 

1) so convert mov to image sequence (tgas is best)

 

2) import tga image sequence into A:M (all should come in)

 

3) apply decal with image sequence -

 

4) set the Crop start and end to be the same as range start and end (ignore length, speed, frame for now) - in my eg it was 0-121 images for whole thing

 

5) in chor - expand to show all drivers for the model that has the image sequence decal

 

6) go to frame that you want the sequence to start - set the frame number of the image in the sequence that you want it to start at (doesn't have to be 0)

 

7) go to frame that you want sequence to end - set the frame number to the end frame number of the sequence that you want to play

 

In my example I set the start of the sequence to be frame 0 on the animation frame 0, and the end frame to be 121 on frame 24 - thus frame 65 of image sequence will play on frame 13 of the animation

[Gerry]

Thanks Nancy. Everything's already as you describe (tga series etc) but I think the prob with getting the settings to obey was that I had set the speed where you didn't. Once I changed that to Not Set the chor and crop settings stopped misbehaving. Now I'm gonna do a quick render to see if I've fixed it.

 

edit: no it was that I didn't set the ending frame. All's good now!

[HomeSlice]

First, if AM is saying you have fewer frames in your image sequence that you think you have, make sure none of the images skips a number. For example, image_000.tga, image_0001.tga, image_0003.tga.

Also make sure there are actually 400 frames for the sequence in the container.

[Edit] As you said already, also make sure the "SPeed" property is "Not Set"

If you are sure all the frames are actually there, and the decal still shows fewer frames. Try deleting the decal and the sequence from the container and re-import the sequence, and make a new decal.

 

In addition to Nancy's excellent instructions. If you don't know how long your chor is going to be, and you want to play with the speed of the animated decal, you have two other options.

If your image sequence is 400 frames (0-399)

Option 1)

In the chor, on frame 0, enter 0 for the "frame" property of the decal. On frame 399, enter 399 for the "frame" property.

Set the "frame" property's default interpolation method to "Linear".

In the PWS Timeline, enter Spline View (or whatever it's called) so you can see the splines of the animatable channels.

Click on the decal's "frame" property so it is selected, it's spline should appear in the timeline.

Right-click on the keyframe on frame 399 and choose Curve > Post Extrapolation Method > Repeat. This will repeat the image sequence infinitely.

Go back to the default "Keyframe View" (or whatever it's called) in the timeline.

Adjust the speed of the image sequence playback by sliding the keyframe on frame 399 up or down the timeline.

 

Option 2)

Make a new Action with your Snow Emitter model.

Follow Nancy's instructions to set the decal's "Frame" property to 0 on frame 0 and 399 on frame 399.

Drag the action onto the model shortcut in the PWS and adjust the Action's "Cycle Length" until you get a speed you like.

Then adjust the Action's "Repeat" until it lasts for the duration of your chor.

[Gerry]

Thanks Holmes, that's a great help!

[maddle]

What s about a kind of Arabian Night Tale...

[Gerry]

...wrong thread, peut-etre?

[Gerry]

Here's a test for a Michael Jackson inspired dance step for the Gmen. I think when Annie first sees them dancing, it will be a Rockettes style kick line. But after she dives into the TV screen and joins them, it will be this one.

BeatItwireframe11_h264.mov

[Darkwing]

ok, that was asking for this:

 

MJ.mov

 

it kind of freeze frames at the end, you have garage band to thank for that

[Gerry]

Yeah it's different with music! they'll be dancing to springsteen so the tempo may change.

 

To create this routine I watched the "Beat It" video, chose one section, and freeze-framed it every 5 or 6 frames and sketched the pose. Filled three pages with stick-figure/Gman sketches, then in an action worked pose-to-pose strictly from my sketches.

 

Once the whole routine was in place I then had to do a lot of keyframe tweaking to give it some snap and remove floatiness. Should be interesting with a whole row of Gmen under the spotlights!

[Darkwing]

yeah, i just added the music, your timing is good BTW

[Darkwing]

somebody should do an MJ animation, I imagine it would be quite the action challenge!