Dan's Newer Stuff

[itsjustme]

Looks great, Dan!

[Wildsided]

Thanks David

[Wildsided]

[jirard]

Looks good Dan

Would you be willing to show a wireframe?

[Rodney]

There has got to be a story behind the green hair.

Come on Dan.... let's hear it!

 

For those that haven't clicked on the image... it's animated so... click to see.

[Wildsided]

There has got to be a story behind the green hair.

Come on Dan.... let's hear it!

 

For those that haven't clicked on the image... it's animated so... click to see.

 

The girl who plays Merilwen, Youtuber Ellen "Icklenellierose" Rose, pictured below, has a penchant for dying her hair. Blue for the most part which is why my original model of her has blue hair. But her D&D character is a wood elf and green is the colour most associated with nature. Also, there's a character in the video game Shining force 3, called Syntesis who had green hair and I always thought it was cool.

 

 

Also, I've seen people post gifs before and they autoplay, what do I need to do to get that to work?

 

Looks good Dan

Would you be willing to show a wireframe?

 

Thanks, Jirard. Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, for some reason I didn't check the thread until just before I went to bed last night.

Hope these Wireframes are okay.

 

[Wildsided]

Never mind, just read that they have to be 480 x 270 over in Jirard's thread.

[Rodney]

Also, I've seen people post gifs before and they autoplay, what do I need to do to get that to work?

Never mind, just read that they have to be 480 x 270 over in Jirard's thread.

 

 

It's worth repeating... so it's definitely worth repeating the requirement here.

In order to get the gif to animate in the post the gif has to be a a specific size.

 

A few years ago when gif animation capability was added to the forum I tested a few sizes..

Huge (or even large) animated gifs are generally better linked to (via uploading to the forum) because people usually open a topic to read the topic and don't like to wait for gif animations to ramp up. If a topic has a lot of gif animation files posted it can get unwieldy pretty quickly and back then people complained about delays in images displaying so I tried to avoid that. With faster computers these days and a resurgence of interest in gif animation we may need to revisit the size and perhaps allow slightly larger animated gifs to play in a post.

 

 

P.S. I knew there would be a great story behind the green hair!

[Wildsided]

Had some time to kill so installed some teeth, gums, tongue and inner mouth to my Ellen model. Also turned off the toon filter and gave her a bit of a smile.

 

 

[robcat2075]

Can you show a wire frame of that?

[Wildsided]

Sure thing Robert. I hid the back of her head to try and make it a bit clearer and did a couple of renders of just the inner mouth teeth.

 

[Wildsided]

Today was a special day. Today was the day that I finally got a cloth simulation to work without my computer dying or it telling me I forced geometry to intersect or something moved too fast.

 

Took some pointers from our resident cloth guy, Mr Robert Holmén and used his squish everything and reinflate it technique to get a t-shirt to work. Suddenly feel like a lot of possibilities have opened up for the future.

 

cloth experiment.avi

[robcat2075]

Hooray! that worked well!

You can reduce/eliminate the jitter after it settles by setting "sub steps" higher and/or making "precision" smaller. Those are settings in Chor props.

[Wildsided]

Been faffing with the model some more and made some sliders. The face can now:

 

Open and close both eyes

Adjust the size of the pupils

Look up, down, left and right

Raise each eyebrow individually

Lower each eyebrow individually

Raise the upper cheek facial muscles

Make the basic phoneme shapes

 

Still to do:

 

Individual open and close controls for the eyes to enable winking

Controls for the lower cheek muscles.

 

Here's a quick .avi of her pulling a couple of faces

 

 

eyebrow raise.avi

 

[robcat2075]

She's alive!

 

I would suggest rigging the eyebrows so they can be shaped rather than moved as unison forms. It's really parts nearest the nose that are most mobile.

[Wildsided]

Sounds good Robert, I'll make the tweaks.

[robcat2075]

In my "Paintfall" thread you can see gif that show my minimal way of doing it with three bones on the eyebrow. If your eyebrow covers more patches you may need more.

 

https://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=48269&p=414210

[Wildsided]

Been working on a thing that I hope to have done by Christmas, but who knows.

 

Cloth experimentation continues, in the picture below the skirt and coat are completely cloth based. Lots of things to fix still, there are holes in the coat where I haven't finished cleaning up the mesh for instance and I haven't done any kind of texturing on the coat either. But the important thing is that the cloth works so far. Don't know how much further I can push it before the simulation gets annoyed at me, but it let me put a collar and cuffs on the coat without complaining.

 

Nothing is set in stone at the minute, the hair and lighting particularly are going to be redone but I just wanted to get her into a very basic pose to check on the cloth and have something to post on here.

 

[Wildsided]

Okay, a quick update on the state of the winter project.

 

The girl will have 3 models in total. The one shown below where she'll be wearing a long coat, one where she'll be wearing a higher resolution version of the clothes beneath the coat and one where she'll be wearing a ball gown. It makes more sense to make 3 models than say have the high res undercoat version beneath the overcoat version. It would be way too resource heavy for one thing.

 

Anyway, I've added a top to her now and as I said in the previous post I've been reworking her hair. I've had her moving her head and upper body throughout the process so I could make sure the dynamic options weren't going bananas and I've just about got it under control. She really just needs her fringe (bangs) adding and then I can start thinking about animating the first part of the sequence. I still want to add a few texture details before that though and rework the lighting.

 

 

 

 

 

[Wildsided]

Hey guys, looking for some help with hair. I've given the model 2 seconds to give the hair time to settle before it moves into the start position of the actual animation. But it just won't sit still. As you can see from the little clip I've posted the hair twitches all over on every single frame. I've tried making it more/less stiff. Making the system Rod/not rod, increasing and decreasing the collision radius and nothing seems to fix the twitching. It's like the hair just can't settle.

 

I originally had the stiffness very low and the hair quite far from the body and let it fall naturally onto the model, but this seemed to result in the hair behaving properly until the animation started and then the hair just had a fit or passed right through the model. So I increased the stiffness and groomed the hair closer to the body. This made the hair not pass through the model (not perfect but serviceable) but now it jiggles around instead.

 

 

Any thoughts?

 

twitchy hair.mp4

 

[Wildsided]

After much faffing with settings, I managed to get the shot into a state that I find somewhat acceptable. Uploaded it to Youtube so you won't have to download the file to watch it.

 

 

 

https://youtu.be/tpdE4sztt4E

[robcat2075]

Sorry i didn't catch the hair question sooner. The stiff hair seems unnatural for what you are doing.

 

Has Matt (John BigBoote) weighed in? He does lots of hair stuff that flows naturally.

[robcat2075]

Here is some quick hair that is falling and moving naturally. What are we doing differently?

 

HairMotionTest02.prj

 

HairMotion1500.mp4

 

 

 

 

[Wildsided]

Hi Robert, the same issue I'm having happens with your project and that's the hair refuses to not penetrate the model. I've had my hair moving like that (using similar settings) but when she twirls away at the end the hair at the sides of her head passes straight through her face and ruins the shot.

 

I changed the hair settings on the model to the ones in your choreography and as you can see the hair just won't stay out of her face. Until I can figure out how to get the collisions to work there's not much point in having the hair flowing.

 

Hair settings test.mp4

 

 

[robcat2075]

I'm sure there's a solution. If want to send me the PRJ I'll try tinkering with it.

Here's hair with styling

 

HairMotionC000.mp4

[robcat2075]

Here's a test on one section. The hair is stable yet flexible and the collision detection works well until the fast jolt at the very end.

I will look at this further.

 

 

[Wildsided]

Thanks for looking Robert

[robcat2075]

Here is a comparison several different attempts...

 

[Wildsided]

Have you tried any of these with the hair at the length it was in the original model? Because at that length it isn't coming into contact with her face which is where I've been getting the collision problems, it''ll wrap around the top of her head but then as soon as it hits the cheeks/chin area it passes right through.  

[robcat2075]

I haven't yet.  I'll try to work up to that.

[robcat2075]

You may have noticed this already but for anyone else reading this I'll note that one limitation of "hair" is that the collision detection isn't really done by each hair, just by the "guide hairs" that exist at each patch corner.

All the hairs on one patch are really a structure that is  interpolated between whatever the four guide hairs at each corner are doing. So, it is possible for one guide hair to properly land in  front of a shoulder and for a neighboring guide hair to properly land in back of a shoulder and yet still have the hairs between them penetrating the shoulder.

That needs to be schemed around somehow.

However, i do notice that some guide hairs collide properly and some do not. High speed motion is part of that, but not all of it.

[Wildsided]

Yeah, I've noticed the guide hair thing. I try and groom all the guides to where they need to be before I simulate.

Been fiddling with settings and managed to get the following. It's not passing through her face at least

 

 

[robcat2075]

Here's a semi-promising long hair test...

 

[Wildsided]

Decided to leave the hair for now as it was slowly driving me even more insane than normal.

Instead, I thought I'd try making something for the Fall image contest. Don't know if I'll succeed in finishing something worth entering but It's given me a good excuse to make a lamp post and bench that I can reuse for other things and I've also built some carriages to go with the train I built a little while back.

[Wildsided]

Been doing some more work on the possible competition entry.

[Wildsided]

So I turned on radiosity for giggles and as well as taking an hour and a half to render, it turned the whole place into a disco. 😄

 

[largento]

Wow!

[robcat2075]

It looks festive!

A radiosity render with parameters set for higher quality would probably take many hours.

[Rodney]

Maybe put the whole scene inside a box so that the rays bounce back into the scene more quickly so you can ramp up the settings even higher.

I would imagine that could be a scene that you set to render at the start of a trip away from home so that you can return to having it finished much much later. 

[robcat2075]

Somewhere around here, Yves has some commentary on how to ascertain the right settings for radiosity renders.

 

[Wildsided]

Decided 6 days before Christmas to make a quick little something for the kids. Turned out alright for being thrown together in a few days. There's a few bits of A:M in there so figured I'd post a link here in case anybody fancied watching.

 

 

[robcat2075]

Charming!

[Wildsided]

Just before I decided to make the grumpy mouse skit, I decided to revisit my old video games dragon and try and update it. That ended up turning into a complete rebuild from the ground up...Well more like from the head down.

Old Dragon

W.I.P New dragon

[robcat2075]

That does look like some expertise has accumulated over the years.

[Wildsided]

This is a Squeep puppet by a company called Luna's Puppets. They announced a competition to win one just before the New Year. You had to submit a piece of artwork featuring the character so I entered. Didn't win but thought I'd post my entry being as though it was done in A:M.

[Wildsided]

Been doing some more work on the dragon remake, still lots to do but his body is coming together. I seem to have made him much more hench than I intended if anything he looks older than the original dragon, but I'll be fixing that as I go along. 

[robcat2075]

What is "hench"? 🤔

Have you thought of making the detail on the front of the small dragon more scales or plates?

[Wildsided]

Hench is a word I keep hearing around the internet that means muscular or well built.

Funnily enough the little dragon used to have scales (and was pink) but I just went back through the thread where I posted pics of it being built and it seems I didn't post any of it finished. 

[Wildsided]

Built me a Yoshi.

[Wildsided]

Made a bit of animation for a YouTuber/Twitch Streamer. Made it in A:M so figured you guys might like to see it. Shout out to Robert for his Jet from streaks topic.