Animation: Dinosaur <pic> <mpeg>

[SimonReeves]

nice job :) the dino is animated great


i like the one on the leesh myself

[Geckopunk83]

sweeeeeet

only one question tho..with the first vid...why does the cage (im guessin thats what it is) dissapear into thin air at the very end of the clip? *David Copperfield*:p

[psilipsycho]

Very cool! Dinosaurs still rock.

[Wegg]

Originally posted by Geckopunk83
sweeeeeet

only one question tho..with the first vid...why does the cage (im guessin thats what it is) dissapear into thin air at the very end of the clip? *David Copperfield*:p


That would be. . . . uhh. . . well. . . .

oops.

[insanelight]

Very cool things here man! :buttrock:

[Neox]

what kinda dinosaur is that? btw cool work :)

[Wegg]

Its a young. . . slightly cartoonified Tenontosaur.

This is the origional model Joe did a few years back in AM. Probably a lot more accurate.

http://www.eggington.net/images/dinoscream.jpg

[3.14]

damn.... that's so good I don't know what to say

[amos_chid]

Woah Awesome works :buttrock:
How can i miss this thread before :p

[koon69]

Wicked animation!!! Why so many apps? Can you breakdown what each did? Why did you use Wings? Wouldnt it be better to stay in LW?

[Ultragames]

ok, downlaoded the first movie. The Air Conditioner, (or what ever) does not do anything. No dino popping out of it. Its just two Air Conditioners sitting on white, for 6 seconds.

[Wegg]

Animation Master was the application that the model was in when I started.

to

Lightwave allowed me to clean up the exported geometry, fix the holes and issues caused by hooks and 5 point patches.

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Wings3D allowed me to adjust the proportions and add in new details to compensate for the loss that happens with Sub-D surfaces.

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Lightwave for laying out the UV textures.

to

Photopaint to paint the UVs.

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Messiah:Animate is where I rigged and animated.

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Lightwave for lighting and rendering.

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After Effects for compositing.

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Commotion for "leish removal"

You can't really do it all in one program. . .

[Wegg]

ok, downlaoded the first movie. The Air Conditioner, (or what ever) does not do anything. No dino popping out of it. Its just two Air Conditioners sitting on white, for 6 seconds.

Care to elaborate? Platform. . . browser. . . movie viewer etc. It was encoded with TMPGEnc and I have tested it with Quicktime, Real, Media Player etc. MPEG1 is like. . . the most basic codec there is. Hell I'll bet people with Linux could even see it.

[ClingFree]

Sounds like it didn't download for you Ultragames. Try right clicking and save as if you are on a PC. Great videos Wegg. They are both very funny. It really doesn't get started until about 6 seconds into it on that first video.

[facial]

Nice tuff, Well down, Keep post the great works. :buttrock:

[BlueCougar]

Great work guys. Looked like your having fun. :beer:

[Gremlin]

really like the AC animation, great sense of weight and the fluidity of the lizard/dino's movement was superb!
Cheers!
:beer:

[manutara]

The only thing I would change to improve the second shot is to add a little camara movement...now is to dead. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

Maybe some more secondary action or follow through to the flesh:wip:

[JoBbE]

hi wegg, great anims!
one thing though.. I also don't understand why you still bothered to use a:m in that whole process.. isn't it much more complicated to make sure an a:m model imports correctly as polys than modeling that dino directly in wings or lw? or did hash improve the exporters? that would be kinda like a wonder, wouldn't it?

:surprised



anyways, great animations! :)

[Psycholink]

Very nice!
more more animation :D
:bounce: :bounce:

[feefunk]

Nice work William!


If I want to nitpick the first test, you should animate the front feet throughout the shot. Right now they are "locked" from the moment they touch the surface until the dino jumps, and they have that frozen"constrained" look to them.

If you can, try animating the individual fingers to add some weight.
The fingers should spread when the dino puts weight on the front legs. It's somewhat tedious at times to animate all the tiny bits, but it definitely adds to the illusion of weight.

The second test has a very nice pull/jump, well done. (although the guy seems to be too upright when he gets "yanked" forward... you can tell he's pretending. ;)


All in all, great work!

[nibo]

Very wel animated dude! :thumbsup:

[Neil]

I like the overall rendering of the first one. Lizard skin looks really nice.
Only to nitpick... there is a little surface violation when the inside mesh of the AC bulges through the bars on the outside.
I would try to tweak the eye a little more, the skin looks so good that the lack of highlites in the eyes brings it down.

[Matt Leishman]

Great work Wegg!!

Its good to see some Utah guys making a statement!

I used to be at Viewpoint, and now I'm at a small startup here in AF - Interact Mediaworks (our mother company is based in Indiana). We're small now, but its great.

Anyways, great work, and keep it up!!

[Wegg]

manutara: Good suggestions but. . . I banged this all out in less than a week so I really didn't have time to noodle in much secondary animation in the dino or the camera. But yes that probably would have made it better. . .

JoBbE: I enjoy using Animation Master and haven't had any problems exporting geometry from it. The Patches complement subD surfacing well with only a few minor tweeks. I think your underestimating the power of the spline side. . .

feefunk: Yea. . . the front feet might as well be bricks for how much control I put into them. But. . . time was a big factor. They tried to get the guy to be pulled by a real rope but he insisted he could "act" it better. Wish I had been there. Bit of rope. . . 4X4. . .

Neil: Try as you might. . . your not gunna get any specific highlights from a globally lit scene. I do agree on the mesh poking through on the bars though. My bad.

sithwarlord: Kinda hard not to miss Viewpoint goin down with all the job calls I have recieved these last few weeks. Good luck to you. I'd love to come check you guys out some time. . .

[Tellerve]

I liked them both, although I think I liked the AC best. On the leash one, I saw something that bugs me and that's the dinosaurs tail that comes slashing back and in my estimation would have hit the leash and probably sent the guy reeling off to one side. My suggestion would be to have the tail swoosh under the leash and thereby not have the possibility of it hitting the leash. But take that with a grain of salt as they are both better than I could do :)

Tellerve

[Raul-Reznek]

very nicely done :D
i love the deformation! :D

[Maya Ayanami]

wow. that character animation was fantastic.
the animation of the AC or whatever needs to improved. overall great work. I thought that dino moved very realistically in the first one.
but in the one with the leash you couldn't really get the sense that the dino was being held back. you know!:surprised

[Ultragames]

Right Click> Save Target As.

I did that. I have 5 seconds of nothing happening. It plays the same way in WMP, and Quicktime, and Real. ?????

[Ultragames]

Upon a fourth download. I finaly get all 14 seconds of play. Nice job.

[phoenix]

nice work dude:bounce:

[balistic]

Here's a cut-out from the color map I painted for the dinosaur, if anyone's interested:

http://www.bprince.com/DinoSkinColorSample.jpg

[Josephine]

Wow, amazing animation:applause:
Did you use video reference of a dog or can you just imagine all the movement?
Also, on the texture front, how do you get it to be seamless when the leg color is not joined?

[balistic]

Originally posted by Josephine
Wow, amazing animation:applause:
Did you use video reference of a dog or can you just imagine all the movement?
Also, on the texture front, how do you get it to be seamless when the leg color is not joined?

I don't think Wegg used any reference video. He's just a good animator, and he once had a huge pet iguana lizard, so that probably helped too :)

Regarding the textures, when you set up UV maps you can move the polygons wherever you need them to be in order to be able to paint most effectively. We decided that for this model it would be best to hide any potential seams in the texture inside the natural folds of the dinos skin, where there would be creases on a real animal. We figured there would be lots of bunching around the shoulders, so that's where Wegg sliced up the UVs. I then did all the painting in Corel Photopaint, making sure that I didn't include any high contrast details that would cross the seamed areas.

I haven't actually painted textures for too many realistic creatures, so it was fun to work on this one, even though I didn't have as much time as I would've liked. My arm sure got a workout drawing all those scales.

[Wegg]

It doesn't start for five or six seconds. Let it download all the way.

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