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The New Generation of Skeltoons


Wildsided

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Dan

 

Nancy is right about MuHair. but this past week I have tweak and learned a great deal more than I did before. Some wonderful results can be achieved with MuHair. The main settings are the strength values used. The second was so obvious to me that I overlooked it many times. It is the brightness control inside the Muhair settings. After about giving up on it, I played with this setting to achieve some really nice results. Anyway shoot me a note.

 

Steves@desdyninc.biz

 

Steve

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Quick question before I potentially waste a bunch of time. Should I be able to get perfectly functioning joints with proper weighting alone. Or will I need to smartskin in places? Coz I don't want to spend ages trying to weight the cps when I'll need to smart skin them anyway. I'd rather get them as close to right as I can and then smartskin if that's what's necessary. But I also don't want to smartskin stuff if I can achieve the same thing through proper weighting.

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Quick question before I potentially waste a bunch of time. Should I be able to get perfectly functioning joints with proper weighting alone. Or will I need to smartskin in places? Coz I don't want to spend ages trying to weight the cps when I'll need to smart skin them anyway. I'd rather get them as close to right as I can and then smartskin if that's what's necessary. But I also don't want to smartskin stuff if I can achieve the same thing through proper weighting.

 

I use CP Weighting and fan bones for most of it, then Smartskin for a final polish where necessary.

 

Hope that helps.

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Thanks David, I spent the morning weighting the model and got some nice results so far. I was asking coz Matthew Krick's tutorial you pointed me to don't mention weighting at all. But the tutorials are pretty old so maybe weighting wasn't an option back then.

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Finished weighting 'her' today. I really need to come up with a name. Had tangled on in the background while I was working and decided to parody one of my fave shots from the film.

 

Flynn (Eugene) looks very pleased. Can;t imagine why. (Also not this was just a gag to test out the body not a detailed attempt to insert the character perfectly into the scene.)

 

Tangled_parody.png

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Thanks for the tip Robert.

 

Here's a quick re-render, I still don't know what she's going to be wearing up top so I gave her a white patch vest for now. Also gave her star spangled leggings and a pink tartan skirt. Also that shoe isn't attached yet, coz I'm still working on it.

 

hair_test_4.mov

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  • Hash Fellow

Lets see... I recall that increasing the "damping" on the Bend angle and Stretch/Shear may be the more important parameter to making cloth settle down rather than Drag.

 

Try values between 1 and 5 for the Bend Angle.

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Having reached a point with cloth where I almost put my mouse through my monitor, I decided to change tact.

 

Instead I built a skirt and then rigged the living s**t out of it. I've decided I'd rather manually animate it and fix any poke through than spend any more time trying to get the cloth to simulate how I want it to.

 

So here's a picture

 

skirt0.png

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  • Hash Fellow

That will be tough. Sim cloth needs all surfaces to not be in contact with each other at the start of the simulation. The pleats would need to be unfolded initially, then pulled together.

 

You might nominate that for a future "It Can't be done" :P

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The skirt is pleated now because I abandoned the cloth. I had a nice cloth skirt made for her at one point at few posts back, but getting it to behave with a cloth shirt proved to be too much of a pain in the ass. One day cloth, one day....

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Thanks for the continued support guys. Quick question, does anyone know how to get normal weights to stay weighted?

 

I set the normal weights to smooth out the face, save and turn off for the day, but when I come back to the project the normal weights have set themselves back to zero. It's not a massive issue at the moment but when I want to Net Render later on if the weights don't stay set then the render won't be as smooth obviously.

 

So just wondering if anyone knows how to permanently set normal weights.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Loop it. seriously it's only a second long

 

If you want it to loop, open the movie into quicktime pro, choose view/loop (or ctrl+ L) then save the movie under new name and upload that one to forum. Do not know if regular QT player does this.

 

If you want to compress movie: Again in QT pro, do the compression first (File/export and save as), then open the compressed movie and set the loop feature, and then save the compressed, now looping movie.

 

I like her fashion sense! terrific leggings pattern and sparkley sleeves, neat laces!

 

But, to me, the skirt looks too plastic, stiff. It's probably because of the white specular color and size, intensity. Is that what you intended? Try a different spec color (closer to the skirt color) and perhaps smaller spec size and/or intensity, if that's not what you intended. Also could add a simple, subtle texture, to be consistent with rest of outfit?

 

Also I assume you intend to "colorize/texture/decal" her skin at some point (again to be consistent)? But maybe that is just my taste talking?

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Loop it. seriously it's only a second long

 

If you want it to loop, open the movie into quicktime pro, choose view/loop (or ctrl+ L) then save the movie under new name and upload that one to forum. Do not know if regular QT player does this.

 

If you want to compress movie: Again in QT pro, do the compression first (File/export and save as), then open the compressed movie and set the loop feature, and then save the compressed, now looping movie.

 

I like her fashion sense! terrific leggings pattern and sparkley sleeves, neat laces!

 

But, to me, the skirt looks too plastic, stiff. It's probably because of the white specular color and size, intensity. Is that what you intended? Try a different spec color (closer to the skirt color) and perhaps smaller spec size and/or intensity, if that's not what you intended. Also could add a simple, subtle texture, to be consistent with rest of outfit?

 

Also I assume you intend to "colorize/texture/decal" her skin at some point (again to be consistent)? But maybe that is just my taste talking?

 

I don't have Quicktime Pro Nancy. Sorry if my comment came across as rude, I was just making a joke about how short the render was. i thought loop was a function in the player but it's not there on the web player. I can just re-render it looped a couple of times.

 

I agree on her shirt, she's not finished yet. I just wanted to do some animation with her, my confidence has been rattled since I found all that negative press. Particularly the one that said "He hasn't made a video in over a year and he still hasn't learned how to do a decent walk cycle. That's like animation 101, there's tons of examples on the web,"

 

Until then I thought my stuff was at least passable. Not amazing but okay. Anyway that's the story behind the clip.

 

As for texturing her, I've made attempts, followed flattening tutorials and what not but exporting a base to open in photoshop and edit has alluded me thus far. But i'm working on it.

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I've renamed this thread so I can put more characters in it, also Lacey started out as an experiment and is now a full on member of the Skeltoons team. A new generation of characters, better made than the last generation and entirely my own.

 

In the spirit of this new generational thinking I've started redoing my old characters so they'll match the quality of the newer ones. Starting with everyone's favourite talking purple anthropomorphic dog Mr. Tech Nology.

 

Here's some dev pics.

 

New_tech1.png New_Tech_2.pngNew_Tech0.png New_Tech_with_fur0.png

New_Tech_with_fur.side0.png New_Tech_with_furback0.png

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K now she walks in a circle and has more texturing. Aside from her face.

 

new_cover.mov

 

I like the character! There's probably some keyframing that would fix the sliding walk.

 

 

Thanks Robert

 

Yeah the ease wasn't quite right and I didn't set up stride length, just wanted to see her moving. Looking forward to using her for something in the future though.

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I was thinking about your topic when I ran across this photo/drawing by legendary Disney animator Milt Kahl.

In it he attempts to distill how to translate the character Alice from the photo reference of the child actress, Kathryn Beaumont who also supplied the voice of the title character.

 

 

Milt Kahl draws over photo stats. For close ups: Keep the size of the head and shrink the body.

For long shots: Keep the size of the body and enlarge the head.

 

 

Source: http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com

 

 

Now, there are several things that are interesting about this drawing/photo.

The first is that many people don't think Milt Kahl used photo reference.

But there is an interesting dilemma to resolve with regard to CG animation for a stylistic approach like this.

How does one shrink and enlarge the body or the head at will?

Is it better to have multiple models and then use them where needed?

Should the rig be created to scale the parts up and down as necessary?

And how does one animate on the fly if/when the character moves in and out of the space delineated between close up and long shots?

 

Some interesting question derive from such a simple image.

 

In the case of CG the whole line of consideration (that of proportion)isn't as valid at the end (but moreso at the beginning) because the model can stay (relatively) the same size once it is created unless specifically needing to be changed. It isn't under the same constraints of an artist's constantly shifting perspective and sense of scale. Perhaps this is why some don't like to use reference? Milt is cluing us in a little bit here by illustrating how to distill the essence of his source material and adjust wherever necessary.

alice_reference.jpg

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That's interesting stuff Rodney. I've long been an advocate of using photo references, after all why imagine what a character would look like in a certain position when you can have a picture in front of you of exactly how it would look? It's up to us as artists to then apply creative license and stylizing to the pose to achieve the look we want.

 

I don't think it would take a lot of work to set up a % pose that scales the head/body up and down and as for going from a close up to a long shot in one continuous shot, I think the brain would interpret the shift in scale as an artefact of the character moving away from the camera. I think an experiment is in order.

 

Lacey!!!!!

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
  • Admin

Looking very good Dan.

 

My first instinct was to think... Tech is looking a bit girly (in the torso) and Lacy is looking a bit masculine (in the face).

A lot of this may be due to the angle (more of a straight on shot toward the camera/viewer).

How can I best demonstrate this beyond a draw over of your render? Hmmm... not sure.

Don't throw things at me... that was just my first impression!

 

That aside here's something else that came to mind: It seems to me that Tech's head is a bit small. That or Lacey's is too large?

I'm leaning toward the former.

 

All of this is not to say that the image (as is) isn't working.

In fact that look may be preferred.

 

Keep up the great work Dan!

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