balancing on a boardwalk

#1

Hello folks!

Here’s an old character of mine trying to balance on a boardwalk, because that’s totally a normal thing to do. I’m making this for a website I work at as an animated collectible series (shameless plug: www.neonmob.com)

I’m trying to wrap this up in the next couple of weeks on the side and was wondering if you folks have any feed back before I start finalizing this.

Here’s a render that i’m fairly happy with, though I’m not sure if I’m getting a little carried away with the FOV. The trees are those dirt cheap built in 3ds max trees. I’ve been playing a little around with the xfrog trial, but I’m hoping I can get away with murder by just blurring the hell out of them :smiley: instead of having to learn procedural tree modeling. I looked at plant factory and speed tree, but their price is a little too steep for my budget.

And here’s an animation that will be looping. There’s no facial animation yet, so ignore that for now.

Thanks in advance!

#2

Very nice work, the only bit of the animation that looks off to me is when the foot first slips off. I don’t know why but it looks a little off. I’m doing work similar to this and looking at your work I have a question, how did you achieve the semi-random orientation and shape of the planks on the bridge? Are you using a plugin or did you do each manually by hand?

#3

Thanks for the feedback LitheriaRising!

My guess for the animation oddness is that the weighting isn’t accurate and that there might be too much easing on the acceleration change of the feet falling? Thus they kinda look like they are floating for a couple frames. I’ll give that a shot and see if it makes it look a bit better.

For the planks - No plugin, just the noise modifier to break up the parallel edges and a max script I wrote to randomly offset the planks. The script was something like:

fn randomOffset x y currentPos = (
	--reset the positions, so you can continually call the method till it looks good
	for obj in selection do (
		obj.pos = currentPos
	)
	for obj in selection do (
		local dimension = [obj.max.x - obj.min.x, 0, 0]
		local offset= [(random 0.0 1.0) * x, (random 0.0 1.0) * y, 0]
		obj.pos = dimension + offset+ currentPos
		currentPos = obj.pos
	)
)

-- First select the objects you want to randomize. Then call the method with 
-- some values till you are happy with the look.
randomOffset 2 1 [0, 0, 0]

The basic concept is that each plank is randomized from the position of the previous plank, so you don’t get the effect that the planks are just randomized in a bounding box. You should definitely play around with the script to get different effects and keep in mind the scale of the objects.

#4

My guess for the animation oddness is that the weighting isn’t accurate and that there might be too much easing on the acceleration change of the feet falling?

That’s what I’m thinking, the weight shift doesn’t seem right somehow. Thanks for the info on the planks, I’ve never delved into max-script before I should give it a try soon.