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Hash, Inc. - Animation:Master

Exercise 2: Chorus Line


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Name: James Lummel

Exercise Completed: #2

Date Completed: 2/12/2007

Instructor: A:M Tutorial Video & Manual

Remarks/Suggestions for Improvement: Learned a little on camera placement as well on this tutorial. A:M v13q uses a different rendering interface and things like antialiasing are no longer in the dialog.

 

Ex2_CanCan.mov

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Here is mine,

 

Sadly for some reason, I'm really battling with A:M My Can Can file got trashed as A:M crashed as it was saving it. Then when I tried to re-do it, the knight is no longer in the assets.

 

I've had small problems like this with most of my projects, it's pretty frustrating and I must admit, I walked away from A:M for over 2 months because of it.

 

So anyways, here is the Chorus line that I just wacked together. It's not as good as the one that crashed as I put extra things in like movements in mouths, eyes, fingers and did some pushing and pulling of the animation so everyone looked like they were their own person.

 

I just want to put it behind me now.

 

Clinton

cancan.mov

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Can i just ask why the curtains are flat?

 

Yes. By all means please do.

 

Oh... you seek answers! :D

 

I'm not sure this is the definitive answer but the set up of this scene (with materials) was creating an unnecessary rendering time for the lesson. If the exercise focus was on adding lights, textures etc. then it might be perfect for that. As its focus is on getting into character animation the scene was adjusted.

 

The older exercise is still available and you may eventually see that incremented as 2.1 in my annotated TaoA:M book.

 

An even better scene for exploring lighting and texturing and populating a scene would be the stage scene with a certain dancing rabbit and martian friend. If this exercise has a .5 related to it that project would probably be it. Lights, camera... action! Toon rendering and materials... its got it all.

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  • 1 month later...

An 1hr the book said Yah Right...LOL but I got it done had trouble with dragging the action on the character it kept shutting down yall may have slow the clip down it kind of play fast...LOL they wanted

to hury up and dance guess cause of stage fright. The clip is in wmv I've tryed everthing to up load quicktime but for some reason it wont do it...Bummer

 

Chorus_Line.WMV

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Wow. That certainly turned out nice. :)

 

A confession here:

I noticed a really interesting effect in your background.

I looked closer to investigate what did I discover... dust. My screen was collecting dust in all the right places.

There's a secret to texturing and lighting in there somewhere... maybe.. muddy it up? :P

 

Seriously though... great job!

 

 

---------------------------------

Anomoly Tracking Journal - Day 2

---------------------------------

No arm swinging problems there.

Investigation continues.

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Name: Roger Christenson

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 2

 

Date Completed: 5 April 2007

 

Instructor:

 

Here's my result from exercise 2.

ex2.avi

 

 

Just wondering if it makes any difference if the exercises are completed from the book alone or from the videos? . . .

 

Answering myself: From the next exercise I learned the videos are more detailed and very valuable.

 

-Roger

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  • 3 weeks later...

Worked fine, Geoff - great to know that you're finding your way around A:M, on the journey towards TWO.

 

Have a look under the render settings (advanced mode), click the arrow next to format, with a .mov chosen, and click Set. Change the Compression Type to Sorenson 3, and your movie size shoud be even smaller.

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Worked fine, Geoff - great to know that you're finding your way around A:M, on the journey towards TWO.

 

Have a look under the render settings (advanced mode), click the arrow next to format, with a .mov chosen, and click Set. Change the Compression Type to Sorenson 3, and your movie size shoud be even smaller.

 

kk ill try that

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  • 3 weeks later...

I too am done with exercise two.

 

 

Here is a still.

 

 

post-832-1180292017_thumb.jpg

 

I did notice that the dance action needed to be set to cycle if you made the movie three seconds as in the online tute and not 2 seconds like in the book.

 

Thank you to everyone who is making this happen/keeping this going.

 

Mike

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Thank you to everyone who is making this happen/keeping this going.

 

Today that'd be you. ;)

 

Keep it up!

 

BTW - Thanks for the tip. If I knew of the difference between the book/video in that regard I had forgotten.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Name: David Jerrell

Exercise: 2

Date: A while ago....though at a computer very near to here.... :P

 

Here is my second exercise from the handbook. I ended up not saving it correctly the first time, and re-did it to show a family member some of the capabilities of this software. I'm going to have to track down my exercise one, as I can't seem to find it.

 

When I tried to upload the avi file, I was not allowed, so here is jpg version of my.

**Edit**

The first file I tried is a .avi and it appears to be a blocked file type. The file size is 455k for a 2 second run (looks like I shorted by one second.) I converted the file to a .mov and it exceeds the 2 Mb file limit. I'm going to check the other options and see if I can get this uploaded.

**Editx2**

This time I changed the compresion from high to med which cut the file size from just over 2Mb to a little over 1.1Mb.

CanCan1b.mov

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Name: Mike Lapointe

Exercise: 2 Chorus Line

Date: June 19, 2007

Comments: I finished a couple of the exercises before I've posted, so I hope I'm not making some mistake over and over again! Had a little trouble getting the file size down, but appreciate all the previous posts, more suggestions than I've had time to try out yet. Just been working through the book so far, should I be looking at the videos instead as I complete the new ones?

Exercise2a.mov

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  • 1 month later...

Name: Heller Couch

 

Exercises Completed: 2

 

Date Completed: August 2, 2007

 

Instructor: Rodney and everybody else whoever posts on the forums

 

Remarks/Suggestions for Improvement: I've done this exercise by the book so many times over the years I decided to change the characters, which was no small effort since many of the newer models' rigs don't work properly with the older action files. Unfortunately I didn't spend as much time as I should have developing the lighting or anything else. Halfway through assembling this, I thought maybe this is what it would have been like if Robert Palmer had lived to a ripe old age.

 

One oddity I ran into: When using the two instances of the background dancers, there seemed to be some sort of "crosstalk" with the pose sliders. When I tried changing facial expressions on one, it affected the clone instead. I wound up scrapping the idea. I suppose a solution might be to save them as individual models with different names first, but I didn't test that.

 

Ex2_GizmoMkI.mov

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello fellow Hash users! I'm re-familiarizing myself with the software since the last time I used it was in Ver. 5! I'm using the latest version of Ver. 12 at the moment, and I'm really trying to go back to basics as Ver.12 is much, much different than the Ver.5 I used many years ago. I'm working my way through TaoA:M, and I figured I'd post up my progress after I complete each exercise.

 

So here it goes with the formalities...

 

Name: Paulie G

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise 2

 

For this one, I just went directly by the book since it was a pre-made action applied to the characters. The Knight's knee's arent' exactly right, but I think it has to do with the included rig. I'm sure there is an update of the rig that will fix that, but since this exercise was a drag and drop, I didn't feel compelled to fix it just yet.

 

:)

 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=92...41282&hl=en

 

- Paulie

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  • 2 weeks later...
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  • 3 weeks later...

I am rolling ... lol :P

 

I am having fun with it .....actually i wanted them to dance the Macarena .... :closedeyes:

 

Name: Christian Markert

 

Exercise Completed: Excercise 2

 

Date Completed: 09/26/2007

 

Instructor: Rodney

 

off to No 3 ... yeah the cert gets closer ... lol

 

excercise2768K_Stream001.mov

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here is my version of exercise #2

 

Name: Scott Bowers

 

Exercise Completed: Exercise#2

 

http://www.livevideo.com/video/886B7869ABE...e-2-taoa-m.aspx

 

Date Completed: 10-07-07

Instructor: The A:M community

 

Remarks/Suggestions for Improvement: It wont let me upload the avi file :angry: .....hmm I shall post it to live video and link it then. :P

 

~Zzzippo~

 

P.S. Im staying over at my parents house this week and man.......their ComCast goes out constantly.......It's certainly making it difficult for me to d/l the videos and upload my results.

 

Remind me to give my DSL modem a big hug and a kiss when I get home. :closedeyes:

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  • 1 month later...

Glad you sorted out your video drivers.

 

Great second exercise. One thing, though, you could probably make that movie a lot smaller in size (compressed I mean, not visually). You can do this by choosing the Advanced Render, then under Format > Save Options click Set. Choose Sorenson Video 3 for better compression.

 

I have seen another choice for compression, but I haven't tried it personally - MPEG-4 Video, Key Every 10 frames, Quality low.

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Name: Glenn M. Lewis

 

Exercises Completed: 2

 

Date Completed: November 29, 2007

 

Instructor: Rodney

 

Remarks/Suggestions for Improvement: I've tried several times, and I keep getting "Upload failed. You are not permitted to upload this type of file." It is an .AVI file, size=203KB, compressed with DiVX 6.0. Any ideas?

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