LW char animation demo thread

#101

Originally posted by plotz
On another note.
How about animating your characters.
One thing I’ve found odd about LW is the TCB splines.
How many people use TCB splines vs. Beziers?
I’m partial to beziers myself, just because that’s what I’ve come up using in other apps.
The beziers in LW are a bit weird at times though. Seems like they default to broken tangents.
Advantages/Disadvantages?
I like the precise in/out velocity control that beziers offer on a per keyframe basis.

I only use TCB splines.
The others splines are no good, try setting up something complex with non TCBs and zoom in on the spline. You see these odd tiny alternations … I bet that will give you some problems, quircky movements, or motion-blurr errors.
Btw, you can get the exact same result using TCBs that what you do with beziers, ect.
I don’t know if this has come up already, haven’t plowed through this entire thread.

#102

Originally posted by plotz
[B]On another note.

How about animating your characters.

One thing I’ve found odd about LW is the TCB splines.

How many people use TCB splines vs. Beziers?

I’m partial to beziers myself, just because that’s what I’ve come up using in other apps.

The beziers in LW are a bit weird at times though. Seems like they default to broken tangents.

Advantages/Disadvantages?

I like the precise in/out velocity control that beziers offer on a per keyframe basis. [/B]

I think bezier splines are great for motion editing and 2D artwork.
I prefer to add a point to a curve and then position that point. Its a simple process that requires less tweaking and thinking. I have found that the more I have to think about tools the less creative I am and the slower things go. The tweaking of control handles on bezier splines and deciding if I want them to be symmetrical or not etc etc drives me nuts. :slight_smile:

#103

You see these odd tiny alternations … I bet that will give you some problems, quircky movements, or motion-blurr errors.

Yes. I’ve found this to be the case…it’s pretty madening.

How do you get precise velocity control with TCB splines? Motion keyed with them, to me, seems to uniform and “perfect”.

I learned most of my animation skills in Softimage 3D, so I’m just used to beziers.

I guess I just find it easier to grab a handle and watch what’s happening to the curve, since my eye’s been trained to associate certian curve shapes to certian types of motion.

#104

Originally posted by plotz
[B]Yes. I’ve found this to be the case…it’s pretty madening.

How do you get precise velocity control with TCB splines? Motion keyed with them, to me, seems to uniform and “perfect”.

I learned most of my animation skills in Softimage 3D, so I’m just used to beziers.

I guess I just find it easier to grab a handle and watch what’s happening to the curve, since my eye’s been trained to associate certian curve shapes to certian types of motion. [/B]

For some motions I prefer bezier splines. You can switch between different types of splines in Lightwaves graph editor. I also associate certain curve shapes with certain types of motion.

#105

You can even change the curve type on a per keyframe baises, so you can have the ‘incomming curve’ tcb on frame 10 comming from frame 0 then the ‘incomming curve’ bezier on frame 20 comming from frame 10. It could be usefull I guess but ive never had to use it.

#106

Spline God,
Your arm was cool on the first page. Al one easy expression? Cool! Where can I learn how to set that up?

#107

Originally posted by tOd
Spline God,
Your arm was cool on the first page. Al one easy expression? Cool! Where can I learn how to set that up?

What I have available for free is located at:
http://www.splinegod.com/onlinetraining.htm
down at the bottom of the page. :slight_smile:
I also have some free rigs too.

#108

Mike’s stuff does indeed rock!

I would love to know how to set up muscle ik like that.
are these models for anything specific?

Mike how did you learn? was it in industry? experimentation?
any tips? like " jam bones into rigs and just trust god?"
the more tangible the advice the better.

thanks.

#109

now that i have something new to show i’ll add some of my stuff :slight_smile:

#110

Great work, Mike and User Delta. Here’s a link to a brief test animation in divx using inverse kinematics.
Link to Techno_Angel_avi

The skeleton was very basic… you can get some sophisticated movements out of a generic ‘stick figure’ rig.
Rob

#111

I’d love to hear your guys opnion on my rigging setup/script. I’ve posted other places but i usally dont’ get alot of feed back. I love rigging and it can be difficult to remeber to keep it simple cause it fun to try to push the limits of the software. The goal was to creat a simple system to rig and copy animation to other models and i’m pretty happy with the results. I ended up with some very similer to ACS but with with basic lw tools. The most fun was making a usable rig with no floating controlers. There are still some short coming I’d like to fix in future versions mainly with lookat/IK versus FK. Making an IK then swiching to FK is far easyer at this point. I don’t like the slider setup for fingers . I’d love a proxy to command plugin so when you can pick a selection set or somthig when picking a object.

you want to look at rigging 2

Steelronin rigging

Thanks for any input

#112

forgot the screen shot

the floating controls I do have are just part of the mesh so you can model them anyway you like. and after working with the rig for a few min I found i didn’t need the visual proxys any more and i just went in and set them to 100 disolve so all i saw was my mesh.

#113

Hi,

gotta say I love it, especially because it seems to become the most intuitive and natural (puppet-like) way to control a character.
It has some Character Studio style.
How far are You with it ?

Thanks,
Emmanuel

#114

this is awesome!

#115

Thanks guys Glad you like it. I got to really put the rig to alot more testing doing basic walk, and run animation. In doing so I found some problems and I have fixed them. so it has better Ik and motion mixer actors have been changed. Do to sliders and the fact you can’t have an object in two actors. This was leaving all the finger animation out of the main actor. I have also now included two script that can hide or show the proxy mesh buy effecting the desolve this alow the proxy mesh to be hidden but still be used as a selection. Still working on converting this to lscript as well hopefully some time soon.
Head to www.steelronin.com for the updated files.

Have fun

#116

Originally posted by Mike RB
[B]another example of a LW rig:

Simple muscle bone setup:

Complex muscle experiment:

[/B]

hi !
could u tell me do u use lightwave only?
your animation is very great!

#117

If the max posting size is 20,000 bytes, then how are these people uploading 500k files?

20,000 bytes is about 20k, right?

#118

Yes I use LW only, and those images are linked from an outside server, they are not attachments.

Mike

#119

Originally posted by adrencg
[B]If the max posting size is 20,000 bytes, then how are these people uploading 500k files?

20,000 bytes is about 20k, right? [/B]

but , i think u used messiah!
???

#120

You’re wrong