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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

the simple things


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i´ve made my first female character lately ( can´t believe it took me years to finally model a woman :D ), and i wanted to let her sing, somehow i always wanted to model a girl and see her sing..

so i took one of my favorite minnie riperton songs and started animating.

 

it´s just a short break from my "alive in the attic" project, which is all dark and spooky, and this one is bright and sunny... the only intention i have with this project is that it should look beautiful and light, and of course to learn stuff i didn´t know before. so far i´ve learned tons of stuff from it, i´m sure there´s more to come.

 

i´m pretty proud of my rendertimes on this one... i´ve always had issues to make the rendertimes of well lit outdoor-scenes with grass and trees suitable for animation, but now i´m down to 6 minutes per frame in 1280x720 on my macbook, so the big 8core mac should be able to render a frame in 4 minutes or so. i´m still hoping that fake AO for mac will come soon, it surely will look better with some sort of AO... i´m using smart SSAO in aftereffects with the help of the depth-map, but that doesn´t do too much...

 

here´s the main character, a final quality testrender, and some first anmation-tests... there are a few seconds missing in the animation-test vid, it will be filled with a shot of flowers and bees, which i already got from previous projects.

 

i still got some issues with the hair - when the character is moving fast, i can´t get rid of the stretching... i´ve already tried to decrease the number of control-points, with no result worth mentioning.

the collision-detection doesn´t work as precise as i want it to be, i´ve build an extra-dense mesh around the characters shoulder/neck/torso area like in matts tutorial, but there´s still some of the hair hanging in the shoulder as you can see sometimes ... i also have to work on the walkcycle, it doesn´t look completely right yet... also there´s some weird knee backwards-bending/popping sometimes in the chor, even though it looks fine in the action.

 

there also will be a waterfall in the background, i will composite that one in later with trapcode particular in after effects.

 

i hope you´ll like it..

lightingtest.jpg

thegirl.jpg

waterfalltest.mov

animtests.mov

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WOW! WOW! WOW!

 

Really beautifull workand excellent splinemanship!

 

Like your style!

 

What is trapcode?

it´s a company that makes plug-ins for after-effects, premiere, and final cut too (i think)... i could make the waterfall with sprites in a:m and get almost the same efect, but it´s rendering much much faster if i do it in post.

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I am so jealous ;) Just kidding. I love your style. Do you draw your on roto's? Please! You have got to gimme some tips LOL

to be honest: i can´t really draw... that´s why i don´t draw my characters first and use rotoscopes... i just start with a spline and see where it goes from there...

i really can´t give you that much advice on modeling, just start as simple as possible and then put in the splines that are really nescessary...

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thanks... here´s a testrender of the short scene with the bee and the flowers... not happy with the look of the DOF yet...

 

Dof is done in post right? I see a blue glow-like area there. Depending on your cameramovement I would recomment to useA:Ms dof with a high multipass and since that normally takes forever to render (especially with dof) I would separate the foreground and background for that shot. May be this will solve the problem and will although get rid of the strip-like look on the blurred plants...

 

(so I dont know that).

 

Separating fore and background could even work better with the post dof approach since you would not have to use dof at all but you could work with a simple blur filter....

 

*Fuchur*

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little update... here´s a new testrender of the bee-scene... much better, but still some issues with the grass in the area of the bees wing etc... i will render at least the grass in the foreground seperately, so i´ll have no problems with that anymore...

 

and a little update on the animation... just animated the bee-scene and some additional seconds... the timing when she lets the bird fly isn´t right though, got to be a bit faster...

animtests.mov

beetesting_new.jpg

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first thing that strikes me is how well your color scheme reflects the emotion of the song.

the hands, as robcat says, will make a difference.

the movement of her spine/shoulders/hips is amazingly well done when seen from the front.

 

your motion seems stylized, so not sure if more commentary matters, but there's one more area of interest, ahem, in case you feel like testing; her hips.

if you'd like a sense of natural weight in her (the weightless sensation does match the song!) you can move her legs differently in relation to her hips, keeping in mind the "walking is controlled falling down", and that the weight is moved first when there is enough certainty of how/where it can land.

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thanks guys...

 

since i always wanted to play around with the oceanrig, i´ve decided to make the set for the chorus a lakefront... here´s some 2 second test rendering of the scene (only 720x405, no dof, just 4 passes)...

 

 

and a little update of the animation progress (just a few additional seconds).... i´ve still got some problems with the hair, sometimes it stretches weirdly or jitters, i might have to try using forces to get the hair in place now and there...

 

oceanrig rocks!

scene04_testing_low.mov

animtests_low.mov

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