Building Your First Rig: Part 2

[A:M Films]

 

 

 

The second part of a two part series guiding you through the process of building a very simple animation rig from scratch.

 

 

 

 

Added by: HomeSlice

 

Tags: rigging

Date: 2010-07-20

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[itsjustme]

Great job, Holmes! I'm not sure if you mentioned to rig the left arm, but that is pretty obvious. Nice starter rig!

[NancyGormezano]

Terrific!

 

Chock full of good information presented in a clear, easy to follow way with excellent explanations as to WHY things are done the way they are.

 

Gives a very good foundation for building onto. Bravo!

[HomeSlice]

Thanks guys

The audio starts to drift quite a bit after around the 30 minute mark, and I was hoping it was still intelligible after that point.

 

So I did this to test out Hypercam2, which is now free, and doesn't embed a "Made with Hypercam" image in the video. (Hypercam 3 still costs money)

I captured one clip at 10fps and another at 5fps. The audio syncs better at 10fps and I did not see much, if any, increase in file size.

For presentations under 30minutes in length, I think Hypercam 2 is a great choice.

 

I also tested various video codecs, since Hypercam compresses the video in real time. (Although you can't recompress the audio in Hypercam, you can set mono/stereo, KHz and bit rate. I used mono, 16KHz, 92Kb/sec)

 

By far, the best video quality/compression ratio came from x264, which is ever so slightly different from Apple's h264.

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

This codec gave MUCH smaller file sizes than Apple's h264 or Xvid or anything else I tried, while maintaining excellent quality. It has a dazzling array of configuration options, but I just left them all at the defaults except I set Multithreading to the number of cores in my cpu.

Hypercam recognized the codec without a problem.

In order to get Quicktime to play the movies however, I had to open them in SUPER and export to mov format, which took about 5min for a 95MB video.

[Paul Forwood]

Great tutorial, Holmes! The Hypercam 2 information is excellent too!

[Gerry]

Great work holmes, I only watched about the first 20 minutes but will watch the rest later. Great info, very thorough and well explained.

[animas3D]

This was a very nice tutorial. Thank you very much for making it.

 

Edit: By the way, the audio becomes out of sync with the video. It's really quite a shame because it is a great tutorial with important information. However the lag between the audio and video gets so confusing.

 

Holmes: Is there a simple way to fix it? Thanks.

[animas3D]

Hey Holmes,

 

Sorry to ask again, but any news on syncing up the audio on this fine tutorial?

[HomeSlice]

Sorry to ask again, but any news on syncing up the audio on this fine tutorial?

I might try to futz with it one day, but at the moment, I'm sorry to say it isn't a priority.

[animas3D]

I might try to futz with it one day, but at the moment, I'm sorry to say it isn't a priority.

 

Thanks for the reply Holmes. I understand. I hope that the things that are keeping you busy are Animation Master related! I look forward to seeing more of your work and any other tutorials you may make in the future.

 

Hmmm. I just wondered. What if one just time stretched the audio in Premiere or After Effects to help make it match? If you want me to do it for you, I could give it a shot if you are too busy and want to send me the movie file.

 

Thanks again for the great tutorial on rigging.

 

Cheers.

[HomeSlice]

You don't have to be so darn nice about it animas3D.

OK, I think I got it fixed. I'm re-encoding it now. Will try to upload the fixed version either tomorrow or Wed.

[HomeSlice]

OK man, I fixed the audio and uploaded a new version.

4421218a51b1e1f1b0ba

[animas3D]

Hooray!

 

Thanks, Holmes. That was very kind of you. Time to pour myself a cup of tea and watch the new and improved synced tutorial!

 

Thanks a million!