AM in Production

#21

I searched around the net for information about the game, and found some alpha screenshots of the game.

I wonder if you could talk a bit about how you moved the AM patch models to the Playstation poly models. Did you just export them to DXF or similar? Did you decipher the MDL and ACT (or PLY and MOT) files? How did you preserve texturing, decals, information like specular shine?

I’m thinking there should be more screenshots coming up - we’re getting really close to final on some levels, and the art is looking a LOT better… we’ve had a little trouble keeping the marketing machine happy, though - they want a constant stream of hi-res renders…

In regards to moving AM models into the PS2, we spent about a year and a half creating what we call a “filter chain” - it’s basically a set of applications which allow us to get objects into our engine from a number of different applications. The idea was to not tie the artists to one particular package for content creation. Even though we have this freedom, most people create objects either in AM or Maya - with AM being used for characters and world “objects” and Maya typically being used for levels. Now, when I say “Maya” what I’m really referring to is a set of tools that we’ve created to run inside of Maya - we don’t really use the “off the shelf” version (does anybody?).

Animations are exported from AM via a format called KFM. KFM’s are clumsy and don’t carry over a lot of things that we’d like - they tend to mess up some of the subtlety of the animations and they don’t carry over smartskinning - so for the future, we’re looking into some other ideas.

There are some exporters out there for AM that will allow you to bring UV information out of AM and into anything that can read that information - mostly, I’m referring to OBJ exporters that also export an MTL file. I’ve brought objects into Maya and LW with very little problem in the OBJ format - about all the work you have to do is reset the texture paths and you’re golden.

JoeW

#22

Thank you for posting this. The community and Hash needs more of this kind of stuff. Thank you too for taking the time to explain how you did the job.
My opinion about AM is slowly starting to rise.

#23

Originally posted by JoeW
This animation was created and rendered in 10.5 alpha, so we took advantage of the new surface sampling that Martin put in plus used porcelain with varying amounts of “Normal Weight”. Martin upped the surface tesselation to 4x4 in this iteration, and it makes a huge difference in how smooth, yet detailed a surface can look.
JoeW

I have been playing around with 10.5 and so I kind of know what you are talking about here, but what is the “surface sampling”? Is it a net render thing?

one thing that I think IS cool about porcelain is that you can put it on individual groups and vary the amount of “smoothing” you get from it by using the Normal Weight settings

I have found that the normal weight setting does nothing in the latest versions of 10.5. Are you using an older version? What is happening to this feature.

Thanks in advance for any answers. Oh, I like the movement on those leaves by the way. It was actually one of the first things that I noticed.

#24

I have been playing around with 10.5 and so I kind of know what you are talking about here, but what is the “surface sampling”? Is it a net render thing?

This is the way I was describing it - the actual idea here is “normal sampling”. The way that the original porcelain worked was that it would divide the patch into a 2X2 (4 quads) division, then use the normals of this division to calculate the shading across the surfaces. The problem with this was that it would positively KILL any detail you had - it would kind of smooth over ALL creasing - including modeled in details. We asked Martin to increase the number of samples to a 4X4 grid (16 polys per patch) - and this made a pretty big difference. The one thing that I can tell you is that the “old” settings for Porcelain are no longer valid - you may have to crank up your values to see an appreciable difference.

I have found that the normal weight setting does nothing in the latest versions of 10.5. Are you using an older version? What is happening to this feature.

This is strange - make sure that you are getting a value to show up under both the Material’s Attribute (in the actual Material) and also something under the Attribute under the shortcut on your group or model. I just tested Porcelain before I wrote this, and it seems to be working fine - but then again, I’m all too familiar with problems that show up on one machine but not on others when using AM (so I’m NOT calling you a liar :). I have noticed that the “old” stacking of materials doesn’t seem to work dependably in V10.5 (where the materials are applied in the order - top to bottom - that they appear in the PWS) - so before you give up on porcelain you might just strip everything off of your model except porcelain and make sure that there isn’t something overriding it.

Thanks in advance for any answers. Oh, I like the movement on those leaves by the way. It was actually one of the first things that I noticed.

Thanks for the compliment! I guess I’m kind of a lazy animator in some ways - all of the leaves were animated by manipulating one control bone. Each leaf had bones with constraints looking at the control bone with differing amounts of “Orient Like” and “Lag” applied - then I just “waggled” the control bone, and everything else followed…

BTW - There is a higher resolution QT movie here:

ftp://ftp.hash.com/users/joewllms/Samples/Tak_&_Power_of_Juju.mov

JoeW

#25

Originally posted by JoeW
[B] I guess I’m kind of a lazy animator in some ways - all of the leaves were animated by manipulating one control bone. Each leaf had bones with constraints looking at the control bone with differing amounts of “Orient Like” and “Lag” applied - then I just “waggled” the control bone, and everything else followed…

JoeW [/B]

That is not a “lazy animator.” That is a highly efficient animator. Well done, and a great tip!

#26

Originally posted by amsmf
That is not a “lazy animator.” That is a highly efficient animator. Well done, and a great tip!

I don’t know, have you seen Joe animate? Crashed out in his Power Puff Girls bean bag chair watching old “Kung Fu” episodes on tv. Calls every body “grasshopper” and keeps telling them “when you can grab this keyframe from my hand, it is time for you to leave.” I think the 100 hour workweeks are starting to get to him :stuck_out_tongue:

#27

Joe,

Just showed this short to one of my new artists who is a total Max-head. After watching it a bunch of times (Frame by Frame!)She said she’s gonna learn AM REAL fast now.

Excellent work as always. Avalanche has always been at the top of any animation pyramid, I sure wish you needed an Art guy here in So. Cal. :wink:

Thanks for sharing, and the game looks VERY interesting as I am a total game head!

  • patrick j. clarke
#28

I don’t know, have you seen Joe animate? Crashed out in his Power Puff Girls bean bag chair watching old “Kung Fu” episodes on tv. Calls every body “grasshopper” and keeps telling them “when you can grab this keyframe from my hand, it is time for you to leave.” I think the 100 hour workweeks are starting to get to him

Hey Nicco! You weren’t supposed to tell anyone!.. and here I had everyone thinking I was a hard workin’ guy :wink:

Just showed this short to one of my new artists who is a total Max-head. After watching it a bunch of times (Frame by Frame!)She said she’s gonna learn AM REAL fast now.

Excellent work as always. Avalanche has always been at the top of any animation pyramid, I sure wish you needed an Art guy here in So. Cal.

Thanks for sharing, and the game looks VERY interesting as I am a total game head!

Hey Patrick,

Heh - I can only imagine. We have a couple of Max-heads at Avalanche - and they all use AM in some capacity. Many of them start their sub-d models in AM and take them into MAX. The ones who HAVE animated in AM really hate going back to MAX…

Thanks for the compliments about Avalanche - we are pretty hard on each other (critically) when we create things. We used to kind of gather around some new piece that was done (whether it be painting, model, animation - whatever) and do some pretty - uh - “blunt” critiques. It was very much a learning process - and you knew that if the guys said it was good - you could believe them. Unfortunately, as we’ve grown, we’re finding less and less time to do this kind of thing…

If we ever need an Art guy in SoCal, I’ll definitely keep you in mind :slight_smile:

JoeW

#29

great piece! I’m interested that our requests about material settings have taken root in AM, work like this should convince Martin that we will use real enhancements in AM.

The other advantage of using post particles is the control I have over all aspects of how they appear - if they were incorporated into the image, and the art director said, “Hmmmm - I wonder if those particles shouldn’t be more blue…?” - I’d have to go back and re-render the scene.

I’m afraid the above doesn’t happen in animation only… nearly every area of visual or creative art has a director or leader who is prone to saying…
hmmm, I wonder if… (without quite realising the cost or manpower necessary)

#30

Originally posted by hoochoochoochoo
great piece! I’m interested that our requests about material settings have taken root in AM, work like this should convince Martin that we will use real enhancements in AM.

Well, there has been a big improvement in how older materials come over into the new versions - V9 and V9.5 pretty much thrashed what you’d created in V8.5 (in regards to materials). Of course (and unfortunately) custom shaders don’t come in worth a damn. I use the IFW Enhance AM shaders quite a bit, and I’ve had to rebuild my library a little at a time - it’s a pain in the butt…

I’m afraid the above doesn’t happen in animation only… nearly every area of visual or creative art has a director or leader who is prone to saying…
hmmm, I wonder if… (without quite realising the cost or manpower necessary).

You’ve got that right… if I could only recover the, oh, half-million hours I’ve spend re-doing something because some “art director” wanted to “do a little experiment just to see how it would look”… One of the things I can’t stand is wasting time…

JoeW

#31

very nice stuff.

#32

Originally posted by JoeW
I use the IFW Enhance AM shaders quite a bit, and I’ve had to rebuild my library a little at a time - it’s a pain in the butt…
JoeW

Yeah, my AMSimbiont and toonnation stuff were all totally thrashed when I moved my comic stuff to v9 and v10. I would love to do my renders in v10.5 for my comic stuff, but AMSimbiont isn’t working with it…hopefully that’s going to be fixed…

and don’t hate me…I’m an Art Dictator, er Director, and my guys love it when I suggest changes… :wink:

:smiley:

Just think, even worse is the guy with an MBA making art direction “suggestions”…YIKES!

  • pjc
#33

and don’t hate me…I’m an Art Dictator
it’s on the tip of my tongue PJ…:wink:

Just think, even worse is the guy with an MBA making art direction “suggestions”…YIKES!
I once had an English Literature PHD as my Art Dictator. What was your major PJ??
:beer: :beer: :beer:

#34

toonation materials don’t work?

That is disturbing. I was tempted by the porcelain thing and a possible end to creases, but losing my toonation materials would suck.

Is there a replacement for most of this stuff?

#35

It usually takes some time. Since v10.5 looks to be a winner, I would speculate that many will be updated after it’s officially released. It’s been that way over the years, where the folks working on plug-ins usually wait til things are pretty much set with A:M.

Kevin Sanderson
Farmington Hills, MI
USA
http://www.ksanderson.com
Voice Over Talent - Voice Overs
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#36

I think I remember Victor Navone reassuring people that those toon-nation shaders are in the works as we speek. In the mean-time, 10.5 can handle nice big speculars and comes with lambert and anisotropic shaders so it isn’t all that bad I suppose.

#37

What are lambert and anisotropic shaders? Whats the main reason that AM can handle nice big speculars?
Thanks.

#38

Originally posted by hoochoochoochoo
I once had an English Literature PHD as my Art Dictator. What was your major PJ??
:beer: :beer: :beer:

My favorite boss that was totally unqualified to direct us had a degree in zoology…wait, maybe he was perfectly educated for wrangling artists :smiley:

I have a BFA with specialization in Computer Art, minor in Art History.

Lambert and Anisotropic are different shading methods, kinda like Phong and Blinn.

I sure hope Andy gets to update the shaders! They are AWESOME!!

  • pjc
#39

. I think it would be nice if porcelain was just a setting under the Group attributes…

I think this is really a very great idea, do you agree that we should ask Hash about this?

#40

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