thefreshestever

very, very usefull... thanks a lot! the setting you were looking for at the beginning was "collision tolerance" in the simcloth properties in the chor btw...

yeah, i like the idea of showing bill as a kid that just like conflicts, no matter what... that would give the story a nice touch...

keep on going... honestly for me the story wasn´t that catchy when i was reading the storyboard, but in the end it´s all about the realization, often details tell the story... i don´t think you really need scene 7, the story is already told at the end of scene 6. if dave is falling really hard and rick laughs at it, everything is said.... about your "to-do-list": you forgot lighting, that will also take a while

looking goog! time for robcat to write his book and telling us how to get rid of the jittering in cloth simulations...

thanks guys... since i always wanted to play around with the oceanrig, i´ve decided to make the set for the chorus a lakefront... here´s some 2 second test rendering of the scene (only 720x405, no dof, just 4 passes)... and a little update of the animation progress (just a few additional seconds).... i´ve still got some problems with the hair, sometimes it stretches weirdly or jitters, i might have to try using forces to get the hair in place now and there... oceanrig rocks! scene04_testing_low.mov animtests_low.mov

very nice model... looks like he´s workin out several days a week please show us your results on the belly-thing as soon as you got something.

depends on how much control you´d like to have over the items, animating by hand could be less time consuming. for the cloth simulation above i fiddled around at least for 6 hours or so, remodeling the word (since geometry makes a huge difference, i´ve tried many variations) ,adjusting the cloth settings and running simulations... at the end i spend a whole day and wasn´t yet able to get a satisfying result. if it wouldn´t have mattered where exactly the words should land and if the camera weren´t that close, so the jittering wouldn´t stand out that much, it would have been a good solution to do this with cloth i think. but if you want full control, i recommend animating by hand. here´s the final animation, all animated by hand, no dynamics, no cloth, you can imagine that i would have taken a lot of patience to achieve that with cloth. at the end i liked the motion better that way, even though the physics are not completely realistic. but i some cases that´s a good thing i think... ld_anim_2011_low.mov

i was recently trying a similar thing... that´s what i came up with... i ended up animating the words by hand, because i wanted the words lo land on top of each other, and with cloth simulation they just wouldn´t stay on top, they were always falling down... also i couldn´t get rid of the jittering, and that bothered me... the ability to maintain it´s shape depends a lot on the grid-resolution, denser models require other settings, you just have to play around with them, until it fits your needs... i hope it helps.. audioanim_low.mov clothtest.prj.zip

for me the rotate snap angle is going back to its default 5° after restarting am since v16beta4 on a mac...

it doesn´t really matter when you´re doing the weighting. i always weight my characters after installing the control-rig.

wow... that looks amazing!

inspired by robs amazing tests i´m trying to use cloth for some typo animation for work, to get some sort of bouncing yelly-letters falling down. it wasn´t easy to get it to behave like this, but i´m pretty much there. the letters will have to be remodeled though, they´re not complex enough for a smooth cloth-simulation, i just left them as they were imported by the ai-wizard. i´ve tried several approaches, with the letters in a invisible box etc... but i wanted the whole word to look like it´s one piece and i wanted to have the letters return to their original form and position at the end of the simulation, so i connected the single letters with invisible geometry. and that worked just fine, as you can see... i will try to optimize it, i will post the project-file when it´s done, for those who are interested in the settings. audioanim_low.mov

I think I dealt with the SAME woman recently... I did a little graphic for her and at the final hour she demanded I give her the Maya file- and was infuriated when I told her there was none... 'How did you make it then?' she barked... I booted-up A:M and she was over my shoulder... 'WHY DO YOU USE BETA SOFTWARE?' she asked spotting the red BETA on the splash, thinking I was using some new crazy stolen app... 'I am a beta tester for the software' I replied calmly. 'HOW LONG HAS THIS Animation Master BEEN AROUND?' She demanded, knowing Maya has been around since 1998... 'Oh- only about 1989 or so...we are on version 15, going on 16'. She proceeded to 'pull' the project from me and gave it to a team of 4 Maya animators... last I heard, they are still working on it- 2 going on 3 weeks. lol... ignorance.... the very worst of all weaknesses in character...

little update... here´s a new testrender of the bee-scene... much better, but still some issues with the grass in the area of the bees wing etc... i will render at least the grass in the foreground seperately, so i´ll have no problems with that anymore... and a little update on the animation... just animated the bee-scene and some additional seconds... the timing when she lets the bird fly isn´t right though, got to be a bit faster... animtests.mov

thanks.. i´ve got a few ideas on the DOF which i´m going to try today... let´s se how it works out. i´m using the squetch-rig, david has made it so easy to install that it´s no more effort in time than tsm2 anymore.

thanks... here´s a testrender of the short scene with the bee and the flowers... not happy with the look of the DOF yet...

much better now! great job. what about a horse for her to ride ?

something seems wrong with her mouth... besides that the lips are propably a bit too full, i can´t figure out where the splines are going at the mouth corners...

awesome... this has become really impressive.

to be honest: i can´t really draw... that´s why i don´t draw my characters first and use rotoscopes... i just start with a spline and see where it goes from there... i really can´t give you that much advice on modeling, just start as simple as possible and then put in the splines that are really nescessary...

thanks... technocrane i love that thing...

thanks... @ rob: yeah, it´s got to get a lot smoother... i watched some "how to do a catwalk" tutorials on youtube for the walk, but it´s kinda hard to figure out the extremes on those... thanks for the advice...

it´s a company that makes plug-ins for after-effects, premiere, and final cut too (i think)... i could make the waterfall with sprites in a:m and get almost the same efect, but it´s rendering much much faster if i do it in post.

i´ve made my first female character lately ( can´t believe it took me years to finally model a woman ), and i wanted to let her sing, somehow i always wanted to model a girl and see her sing.. so i took one of my favorite minnie riperton songs and started animating. it´s just a short break from my "alive in the attic" project, which is all dark and spooky, and this one is bright and sunny... the only intention i have with this project is that it should look beautiful and light, and of course to learn stuff i didn´t know before. so far i´ve learned tons of stuff from it, i´m sure there´s more to come. i´m pretty proud of my rendertimes on this one... i´ve always had issues to make the rendertimes of well lit outdoor-scenes with grass and trees suitable for animation, but now i´m down to 6 minutes per frame in 1280x720 on my macbook, so the big 8core mac should be able to render a frame in 4 minutes or so. i´m still hoping that fake AO for mac will come soon, it surely will look better with some sort of AO... i´m using smart SSAO in aftereffects with the help of the depth-map, but that doesn´t do too much... here´s the main character, a final quality testrender, and some first anmation-tests... there are a few seconds missing in the animation-test vid, it will be filled with a shot of flowers and bees, which i already got from previous projects. i still got some issues with the hair - when the character is moving fast, i can´t get rid of the stretching... i´ve already tried to decrease the number of control-points, with no result worth mentioning. the collision-detection doesn´t work as precise as i want it to be, i´ve build an extra-dense mesh around the characters shoulder/neck/torso area like in matts tutorial, but there´s still some of the hair hanging in the shoulder as you can see sometimes ... i also have to work on the walkcycle, it doesn´t look completely right yet... also there´s some weird knee backwards-bending/popping sometimes in the chor, even though it looks fine in the action. there also will be a waterfall in the background, i will composite that one in later with trapcode particular in after effects. i hope you´ll like it.. waterfalltest.mov animtests.mov

if the camera stays in place and the fog image matches the the camera view, then it should fit. another way to darken the tunnel area could be the use of negative lights... this way you can "suck" the light out of the tunnel... not sure though if it´s enough to ged rid of the fog...