John Bigboote Posted October 3, 2012 Posted October 3, 2012 I didn't want to work today... and as I was looking at some artwork by Shawn Dickinson http://shawn-dickinson.blogspot.com/2012/07/blog-post.html I admired his skull designs and decided to reacquaint myself with A:M's great organic modeling tools. The texture is a matcap and the crack is a boolean, 'grunginess' is fastAO-GPU by Jenpy. skull.mov Quote
John Bigboote Posted October 3, 2012 Author Posted October 3, 2012 OH! - and the dark spots in the eyes and mouth are negative lights... Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted October 3, 2012 Hash Fellow Posted October 3, 2012 He's a charmer! I like that. Quote
Ilidrake Posted October 3, 2012 Posted October 3, 2012 John you have got to do my Death character for me! That thing is wicked sweet! Quote
Kamikaze Posted October 4, 2012 Posted October 4, 2012 Kinda scary looking ......and that's a good thing! Quote
Simon Edmondson Posted October 4, 2012 Posted October 4, 2012 I didn't want to work today... and as I was looking at some artwork by Shawn Dickinson http://shawn-dickinson.blogspot.com/2012/07/blog-post.html I admired his skull designs and decided to reacquaint myself with A:M's great organic modeling tools. The texture is a matcap and the crack is a boolean, 'grunginess' is fastAO-GPU by Jenpy. I just got my copy of the December issue of 3Dworld today and there is a whole article on making Horror characters. I think you have them beat ! simon Quote
John Bigboote Posted October 4, 2012 Author Posted October 4, 2012 Another one, I wanted to see how it could interact with another character... fun! Diggin' the hair's ability to collision-detect... and the interplay as some of the hair gets brushed by the skull as it lifts. I just wish I could figure out how to get the hair to NOT be so 'jiggery-jittery' as it is at rest against a surface. To get the hair like this, I run a simulation first (Bake Particle Systems) and I activate a pose which 'puts away' any nearby geometry that the hair can get 'stuck-up' on... like the bunny-ears, her real ears and earrings, and even her eyelash geometry- I hide it all inside her head where it is out of the way. THEN- once simulated, I put them back where they go for the render. I may take this one step further and have the girl say 'Happy Halloween' at the end if I can find a wav on the internet that works... skull3.mov Quote
gwinkelman Posted October 4, 2012 Posted October 4, 2012 WOW! I'm really impressed by the overall quality of the models and the animation. Is that cemetery background done in A:M as well? Quote
John Bigboote Posted October 4, 2012 Author Posted October 4, 2012 THANKS! No, I just Googled-up a cemetery background for a quickie. Quote
Admin Rodney Posted October 5, 2012 Admin Posted October 5, 2012 OH! - and the dark spots in the eyes and mouth are negative lights... Gotta love those negative lights. The only thing you've got to watch out for with them (well... probably not the only thing but...) is shadows. Negative lights tend to make shadows go negative as well. The fix for that is to turn off Cast Shadows in the Light and if necessary set up a second light to cast the 'real' shadows. The negative shadows might work well in spooky situations however. Great stuff Matt! Quote
John Bigboote Posted October 5, 2012 Author Posted October 5, 2012 Negative lights tend to make shadows go negative as well. AND- turn off specularity for those lights as well, I don't know if they would cast negative speculars (most likely would) but they too, defeat the purpose. Using negative lights in the model like this is a way of 'painting with light' (OR- painting withOUT light...) it's a cheat... but when you figure you can move those lights around in the pose phase... it's quite handy! Thanks, Rodney! Quote
Admin Rodney Posted October 5, 2012 Admin Posted October 5, 2012 I'm not trying to move this topic away from your cartoony skull so I'll try to keep it there while talking of negative lights. One of the reasons I like using negative lights (beside the control it gives us over making cool images) is that they are something we can't really use in the real world. We can't set up lights on a real world setting to suck all the light out of an area like we can in CG. The closest we can get in real life is to use filters, compositing or post effects (which we can also use in CG). And we can learn a lot about the use of color through use of negative lights... figuring out for instance that negative red equates to blue, etc. help in better understanding our mixing of regular lighting and color. I will note also that when lighting a scene it's good to work with surfaces that are (at least initially) mid gray in tone. Once things start to look right then we can shift the underlying color. The one thing that I think you could add to your animation would be to further consider the environment. You've got a far background, a mid ground and a foreground and it would be nice to see something that takes advantage of that. It could be something as simple as a few layers of whispy fog/smoke, or leaves floating, or a bat flying and if they move from the far back to the front so much the better as that will strengthen the illusion that these characters aren't there on a flat screen but are moving through real space, even if they themselves aren't moving through it. Another aspect of this is to consider what is immediately off screen. Perhaps the shadow of a tree that isn't in the shot can still be seen upon the ground. Perhaps moments before a bat flies by, its shadow it seen on a character. These are things that suggest there is an environment larger world than what we are just seeing with the camera. Sometimes this environmental effect can be brought into play by a slow movement of the camera... a slight tracking around the character.... a pull in... or a pushing outward. It's easy to overdo all of that camera movement and it should be calculated to add to the mood and not to detract. Color tinting itself can also heighten the environmental effect. Apologies for the tangent... your work has got me thinking about the lighting of sets! Quote
tbenefi33 Posted October 5, 2012 Posted October 5, 2012 Awesome work, that would make a cool ring have the mouth part where it's open wrap around the finger part. Quote
John Bigboote Posted October 12, 2012 Author Posted October 12, 2012 I ended-up embellishing the crap out of this... got a cool Halloween animation out of it! Quote
Fuchur Posted October 12, 2012 Posted October 12, 2012 Very Nice ! A Sexy Halloween clip.... Very very nice See you *Fuchur* Quote
fae_alba Posted October 13, 2012 Posted October 13, 2012 that girl could give herself a black eye if she's not careful! Quote
John Bigboote Posted October 13, 2012 Author Posted October 13, 2012 Thanks for all the views and responses! No post-production or compositing... that render is straight out of A:M ( I did use After Effects to mix the sound effects and render the frames to a .mov) Animation Master features used in this clip: -negative lights -matcaps -volumetric light -material combiner thru light on the background layer -Sub Surface Scattering on girls skin -particle baking and collision-detection on girls hair -sprites -animated choreography glow and glow size -dynamic constraints -depth-of-field and motion blur at 9 passes -FastAO CPU rendered to PNG sequence at 4 min per frame ave -constrain to path, Symbiont and gradient texture on snake Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted October 14, 2012 Hash Fellow Posted October 14, 2012 I hope she has submitted an appearance in "Rear Window". If not she ought to! She looks like perfect thru-the-window material. Quote
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