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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

Dan's Newer Stuff


Wildsided

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19 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:

That was cute!

The client should be pleased!

 

Thanks, Robert, it wasn't a business/client transaction. I was just doing it because I like his science Yoshi avatar. He has asked for permission to use it in a video at some point and he and his community has been very kind with likes and retweets etc, is almost my most watched piece of content in less than 24 hours so getting some exposure at least.

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I've been working on my kids' book project and modelled Bernie's best friend Eleanor 'Nellie' Aisling. Also, it seems that when I transferred all my A:M stuff from my old computer a few of Bernie's textures didn't make the trip. I'll fix all that eventually, anyway, I just thought I'd post this little W.I.P render.   

bernienellie1.png

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38 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:

they don't make bedrooms big anymore, do they.

How did you do the rocks on the ground in the well scene?

I'm using my Granddad's house as a base for the one Bernie lives in and the room I have allocated as Bernie's really wasn't all that big, roughly 10ft x 10ft. There were 4 rooms on the second floor. A bathroom and 3 bedrooms. There were two pretty big rooms and that one little one that I assume was a guest bedroom (although granddad had a train set in there for a while when I younger.)

The cobble stone is a decal using a tile set I found online. It came with diffuse (colour), normal, height (displacement) set to 1000% and specular maps.

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Does anybody know what I might have done to cause this? To my knowledge, I didn't change any settings and now all of a sudden Bernie and Nellie's faces are glowing.

bernie's room Light test weirdness.pngbernie's room light test180.png

I think it must have something to do with hair because without it on things look fine.bernie's room light test no hair180.png

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Never mind, I fixed it. the choreography's glow value had somehow been set to 200% and when I set it to 0 the bright aura went away. This doesn't explain why models that didn't have any parts of them assigned to glow were glowing. But at least it's fixed for now.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I was working on the décor for Bernie's room and decided he needed a sound system. At roughly the same time I remembered that this Special Topics section is called Ace.Co Entertainment. Sadly A.C.E has been defunct for quite a while now but I decided to let its spirit live on as an electronics manufacturer in the Bernie series. 

Introducing the Ace.Co Electronics MX-2006DNK 

Aceco Stereo180.png

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I'm wondering how we could make a more effective treatment for the transparent cover.

So I had a rethink and made the inner portion of the lid totally transparent but left the inner edges slightly visible in order to keep a sense that the lid has thickness to it.

Aceco Stereo top redo180.png

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I tried treez and although I'm sure you could make something similiar with it I kept making trees that looked more like branches. So I made a trunk and a 'branch' and then manually assembled a tree branch by branch.

But the more branches I added the more A:M or my system or both struggled to cope with it. To the point it became totally unworkable. So I spent a couple of hours removing 50% of the CP's in the 'branch' and started over. Even that didn't manage to get me a full tree. So in the end I chopped the top off the trunk and made the top of the tree in a separate model.

 

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  • *A:M User*

Very cool.   Great mesh

I am revisiting my trees I created a few years ago.  I looked at how the trees were created in TWO.  The effects were great and the used emitters in several location with very low density to achieve great results.  

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2 hours ago, Shelton said:

Very cool.   Great mesh

I am revisiting my trees I created a few years ago.  I looked at how the trees were created in TWO.  The effects were great and the used emitters in several location with very low density to achieve great results.  

Cheers Steve.

I don't know how efficient it is, but I have 1 group called 'needles' made up of key points along each branch. I'd had it where each branch had a needles group of its own but it felt like over kill so I consolidated them all into 1 group.

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It was always the plan to turn my model of Ellen into the latest version of Annie from Breckridge. This was supposed to be a simple case of changing her hair texture from blue to back, her eyes to blue and her skin to the blueish grey of Annie's ghostly skin. After I did all that, I realised that Annie's hair is significantly longer than Ellen's. That meant I had to extend the lengths of 'cloth' I was using for the hair simualtion. Stretching them obviously stretched the decal which didn't look good and the increased distance between CP's affected the cloth deformation. So I extended the strands by extruding the ends, which meant the decals didn't cover the new geometry.  Spent some time yesterday separating, flattening and re-texturing the hair strands and came up with this.

Newer Annie for FB300 copy.png

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22 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:

So those are "locks" of cloth... that looks promising. Any motion experiments yet?

Not with the longer hair yet, Robert. But I posted a test of the idea back in February last year

 

On 2/27/2019 at 4:38 PM, Wildsided said:

Experimental hair using cloth simulation.Hair254.png

 

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here's a newer test. It's not perfect.

Troubles I've encountered so far include not being able to have cloth collisions on, so many pieces in such close quarters causes the simulation to either freak out or give up entirely. That means the strands higher up the head don't layer on top of the strands lower down. For this model I used lots of individual strands layered on top of each other. I've also experimented with making the hair out of larger pieces, but that was with the Bernie Snuffles characters so the art style isn't totally comparable.

I honestly wish I could use particle hair for making hair but I spent over 2 months last year trying hundreds of different setting variations and simply couldn't make it stop passing right through the models. The cloth collision detection system is vastly superior to the particle hair collision system. If we could specify an area as a deflector that the hair simulations guide hairs simply couldn't penetrate like we can with cloth then particle hair would be a million times more manageable. But at the end of the day I'm no coder so I have no idea how easy or even possible it would be to implement.  

 

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  • Hash Fellow

those look quite good!

Quote

so many pieces in such close quarters causes the simulation to either freak out or give up entirely.

Does your cloth simulation start with each piece of cloth distant from each other?

 

Quote

I honestly wish I could use particle hair for making hair but I spent over 2 months last year trying hundreds of different setting variations and simply couldn't make it stop passing right through the models.

Have you made a bug report of that?

 

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35 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:

Does your cloth simulation start with each piece of cloth distant from each other?

Lol, yeah she looks like she's stuck a fork in the mains until it's had a chance to settle. I think the trouble is that when layer upon layer start to stack the number of collisions just keeps increasing to a point it can't cope and either produces a completely wild result (Like a CP shooting off into the distance) or just quits.

I haven't made a report of the hair issues. I'll put one in.

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Ok, so....I was writing down the settings I have in the hair group and the choreography and I had a little thought. I turned on self collision and set the friction to zero (Well I set it to 1 first and it was deemed unsolvable) and this happened.

As you can see, it layered properly and gave her hair so much more body. Unfortunately it means I'd have to redo the hair on the top of her head because to give the hair more body with self collide switched off, I added more layers than I probably need. (Also ignore those 2 strands that go dancing by in the background I had to take them out because they were freaking out and I forgot to remove them before I rendered the sequence)

To gt the simulation to work I used the following settings. Hair Material on the left, Choreography on the right.

Hair settings.pngHair choreography setting.png

It also has to be done in V19h. I get an unsolvable error in 19j. Probably need to submit a bug report for that too.

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  • Hash Fellow
  • Friction, Stiffness, Air drag and particle mass are things where higher values make it harder to solve cloth. Basically anything that resists the free movement of the mesh makes it more difficult.
  • Collision Tolerance is a distance in cm. It is really the distance the mesh has to stay away from other mesh. Lower values make it easier to solve.
  • You probably don't need "Stretch/Shear" for Stretch type for this purpose. That attempts to simulate the way that cloth can stretch on the diagonal more than the "warp" and "weft"
  • I have had much better success with cloth in challenging situations after upping the Substeps and Adaptive subdivisions. 20, 40, 80... Those are typical Substep  starting points for me. 3 is just about the least that works at all for the simplest demo.
  • I have several cloth bugs reported that will be fixed in v19k , things that indeed worked in v19h but not later.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Been working on a model of Darren Greytail, the bully who is the bane of Bernie's existence in the book I'm working on. I rendered this out before I realised that I hadn't put the small scar on his cheek that he's supposed to have.

Darren0.png

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14 hours ago, robcat2075 said:

I am still wondering about your monitor gamma. When I view this as posted, almost all the detail of the clothing and tail is lost in black.

It has been a while since I've configured my monitor so I have just run a calibration thing and it does look darker than it did before. Although I'm never gonna get brilliant results with this 'monitor' because it's not a monitor at all it's a cheap TV I bought years ago when my then laptop fell off a table and the screen died. 

My sub expired a couple of weeks ago and Jason extended it to today because the store wasn't processing the free checkout that it uses to process purchases made with gift certificates and when I tried again again a few minutes ago it was still down (I know Jason has been ill) so once he gets it up and running again I'll have a look at the lighting and see about re-rendering it.

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  • Hash Fellow

I like this gamma test because it is easy. Adjust your gamma until the vertical bars in each color appear same-value at the desired gamma (2.2 typically).

However... DON'T view it in a browser. Browsers seem to alter the gamma of this image.

Load it into a paint program that does no color management and make sure it is sized to 100%

 

gamma-test-2.png

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When I finished the last chapter of Bernie book 1, I decided to do a bit more work on the character models for the artwork. I've also been making an effort since last year to make my models in the correct scale rather than resizing them to fit the scene. Because of this I noticed that when I stood Bernie's Grandpa (who was built to scale) and Bernie (who was not) side by side, when Bernie was scaled to his actual height he was totally out of proportion with all the other characters I've modeled so far.

Turns out his proportions matched that of a toddler and as Bernie is around 10 he didn't work when scaled to 4' 2" tall (Bernie is short for his age). So I made a new Bernie. He is to scale now and I've been working on making his textures, just figured I'd post a work in progress.

New Bernie .png

 

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