TGD: animation film project/practice

[droidoz]

Hey, your models are really cool, they all look quite professional. The animation is also pretty good. The walkcycle seems a bit of because the legs are to rigid and stiff. Maybe if you make em bend a little more after each step this would be over. The mech jumps very far compared to the anticipation and its velocity. It looks like he has a jetpack. This is not very realistic, but if your just going for a cool animation it is just fine.
Hope this helped you.

[nuclearbum]

Droidoz - thanks for the reply! yeah, i think my eyeball estimation of the parabolic arch was a little off with the timing, so i'm gonna go back and do a quick computation to see what a more accurate timing /height would be for the jump so it's not floating as much.



so for today's post i'll be going over a little about the facial animation method and tool being used. personally this is the awesome part of animation, the problem solving involved, though it might be a bit technical ;)

Here's Dalses in different emotional states (i hope). each state (other than the neutral state) is composed of many small morphs. so all of them are blended to create a general state. unfortunately she doesn't have many mouth states so these mainly just show eye and eyebrow changes with the small amount of mouth states i have available (like 4, smlie, open, drop bottom lip, pout).
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/%7Etespirit/3d_stuff/production/expressions.jpg

as mentioned above many small morph targets were sued to create the full emotional state. these means that i have a lot of targets to deal with, so i've been writing up a max srcipt to simplify the process of dealing with many targets without having to create new complex targets.

so what i wanted was a mixing board to create new emotions, update them, and even delete them if you don't have a use for it anymore. The board captures the current state of all the morph targets and then makes what i call a mixed target that can be adjusted as if it was a single morph target. when adjusting the single mixed target, the script actually goes through and changes the morph values of the small morphs, which is the key component to this mixing board as opposed to just capturing a new morph target.

the board allows for ranomization of the smaller targets based on a user defined weight (which can be changed anytime and interactively). This means that all those small morphs can still be used with little time cost from you. The concept came to me after reading about how some animations will make 70 to 90 morph targets and then at the end only use like 10 of them. this method can now add a small variation to each time you use a target to hopefully make it look like you made an infinite amount of states. and the main key is that it's fast, just turn on randomization, and then interactively change the seed and weight value to get something that you like. you can also go really crazy and have it just randomize all the targets and go through and see if anything cool is genereated :)

and as a bonus, the tool also can link "left" and "right" targets by just turning on and off the link check box :). right now you can set variables to tell it how to link two targets, though one day i'll make an interface that will let you know if you are linking the targets correctly or not. so the tool is still in works since now that i got the functionality to work i need to come up with a method for saving the data to file and quite possibly allowing the data of the tool to be key framed instead of the morph channels.

here's a little preview of the functionality of the randomizer of the tool, from subttle differences to more apparent as the randomize weight increases.
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/%7Etespirit/3d_stuff/production/MM_demo_lr.jpg
the boxes next to the pictures show the actual morph targets value changes. also the script supports blending of mixed targets, though in creating a new mixed target, only the morph targets are controlled, not the mixed targets.

again, c&c on anything and also let me know if you have any questions about the tool being developed. I'lll keep posting stuff, new or revisions.

later!

ps: i got a new mouse! it no longer double clickes 75% of the time i do a single click! yay!

[yeoj3d]

I love the hair on the furry creature. Good modeling on the girl and mech. Nice stuff.

[droidoz]

Hey, is the morpher script for available for max, I'd love to be a betatester :D, it looks great.

[Kizza]

It's looking quite impressive. I have two ideas I thought I'd suggest. You might have already thought of these.

Firstly, when you smile or make an "ARGGGH" face the tendons (I think?) in your neck become more pronounced and move a bit. Because you have the neck and some of the upper torso modelled you could incorporate these into your morphs, if your character every does mouth expression that would cause these tendons to move noticably.

Secondly, when the woman, Dalses, walks 'cause she's unbalanced by the wings one might assume she'd hunch forwards more (unless they are light as a feather, which does make sense). Another alternative is that she might flap her wings just a little as she walks, to counteract their backwards pull.

Some ideas for ya.

[gustavogf]

Hey, that seens pretty great for facial expressions. Will you make this script available to us someday?

Cheers

[Bao2]

I like the camera movement when the mech touch ground.
Don't forget add image blur in the girl's final render. I think
the feathers look better if folding at start and some unfolding
when she fist her hands.
I like very much the hair of wiffy and I don't understand why
you don't use the plugin with the girl's hair ?.
Looks very well already. I rated excellent this thread. :)

[Tom W.]

wOW, loving you'r work partner :D

[nuclearbum]

thanks guys for the replies!!

Animation stuff:
I read the suggestions, and their's some good stuff there :) the neck tendons is something i haven't thought of, but now i'll make sure to add it. the wings... the wings... the bane of that model. i'm experimenting with a better controller and a better connection between the bone and the feathers. cuz i agree that having the wings flap durring the walk cycle would make it look better and more balanced.

The mech jump, i keep getting weird results when i do the physics of it that it should stay in the air longer... though i'm just using a simple rule based on the max height of the jump and standard 9.8 m/s² gravitational acceleration (0 = maxheight - .5*9.8t²; solve for t). i'll get a render with a size reference point, hopefully that'll give some answers to the mystery :).


and just for you guys, here's a couple demo/scale shots.

Dalses and Wiffy just chilling it while they wait for me to actually do something.
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/%7Etespirit/3d_stuff/stills/sdandw02.jpg

She's very protective of her ride
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/%7Etespirit/3d_stuff/stills/sdandm01.jpg


Morph Manager/mixer script info:
the software, it's still got some issues and the fact that it doesn't save (i need to make some type of plug-in modifier for that) makes it not too useful yet, though if any of you guys are into max scripting or just wanna see if it works, here's the current testing version of it:
Morph Mixer v0.92 (http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/%7Etespirit/cgtalk/MorphMixer%20v0.92%20rollout.ms)
I don't have any gaurentee that it'll work on your models and not crash since i haven't got to testing it on multiple models and such. Oh, and if you do feel adventerous and wanna add to it, just send me a copy of it so that we don't reinvent the wheel or something like that :)
to install this, just run it as a script and then go into customize interface and under "Category" pick TES Tools and it should be there. you can either hot key it or put it on a tool bar.
and i'll definately post it around when i get the final version running.


and my personal status:
welp, the school quarter has started, and i'm pretty much getting my butt kicked in terms of work load. i don't know how much i'll get done this quarter, but as the past shows the more stressed at school i get the more i tend to work on this stuff to get my mind off things.

[droidoz]

Hey, thanks for posting the morpherscript. Somehow it keeps giving me a strange syntax error when I start it up, I guess I'll just wait for the final version, but thanx anyway!
Your images look pretty cool. I hope you'll have more spare time soon, I'd like to see some new stuff around here!:)

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