Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

What are you talking about?! this thread is life! Animation is life, or at least the only thing i think about. (yes friends have stoped asking me what i want to do cause i always say "animation".)

Anyway, Im back home again and i have dial up. I normally go to my friends house to mooch off there internet but my schedual has picked up a lot recently, but i still do a lot of animation, I just havent had time to break away from it. (that and gas prices scares me away from the six mile drive i have to take to get to high speed internet,yes im really cheep )

Anyhoo, I have done a lot of project recently. Tom from the catfish team met up in IRI and durring the finals he wanted his team logo. So i made, textured and riged a catfish for him. Its pretty good. I'll hopfully load it up later.

While going down to IRI i made this short animation in the car. Little ball and heart animation. Its not much but i wanted to see if I could do a Flash style animation with 3ds max. It is quicker to animate than a 3d human character and you can easily achieve a level of cuteness than you could with 3d characters. These characters are a seris of splines that are extruded ever so slightly.

I'm currently makeing a independence day space ship for my friend and compositing that into some earth renders i did. It was really fun making things for tom and my other friend. I found that i have gotten really good at unwrap textures. (well kinda good). But hey, my specialty is organic models, rigging, and animation, not mechanical space craft (im trying to hide the errors that im getting with this thing through compositing). If you need anything lets say for a safety video, or a promotional video that your doing. I can help ya out. Just PM me.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

I makeing some graphics for someone, Here is a frame of the idea that i have for the guy.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Is this thread dead again? Whats everyone working on? There hasn't been an update in a while...

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Well, I'm far to busy with school to get anything done right now. I'll go head long when the first season starts though. Hey when does the season start for animation I don't remember from last year.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

I here ya man. Between school and my job, I have little time for animation. The safety animation competition is just around the corner. They will officialy announce it in late October but its always good to get your characters started early cause of time crunch. The inronic thing about the safety animation is that the winning safety animation will get more exposer than the World champion AVA winner. Who knows who will see it? Heck, you could possibly get a job off the safety animation if it is phenominal.

Once again im mentoring the animation team. We meet once a week so there is not much we can get done. I keep forgetting how unfocused these little freshmen are. Its driving me crazy!

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

If it helps I have to train anyone who's going to help me on the animation. All our seniors I tought last year are leaving and all the softmores that are now juniors are taking over building for the robot. So we'll see how this comes out, I think I'm going to have to work on the simple side of things. Probably only one charictor max, and I'll probably steal the basic charictor from the one I did last year to skip all the pain of rebuilding them. anybody have any ideas on how to make chairctors or animate faster? I could use them, I had 3 people last year and it took me for flipping ever last year (my first year), and now I might end up with just the two of us for the saftey this year. Lol, I think I'm the only one in all of hawaii actually who's planning on making an animation, this'll be funny.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Heh, do I! Organic Modeling and Character animation is my thing man. Modeling for animation is a lot different and there are some key things you need to watch out for:

Joints I can tell you how many times i see characters that people skin and the joints pinch in where they bend. This is solved by two things. Slicing where the joint is so you have more polys to work with in that area. And useing the joint angle deform in the skin modifier or the skin morph deform modifier.

hands Hands are by far the wost thing that ive seen animated in a AVA entry (besides bad lip synching). People have a lot of fine control over hands. They make suddle movements. They are also the most complex thing on our body. If your going to make a person have hands, prepare to spend a lot of time on them. The alternative of hands with fingers is to do hands that looke like mittens. But you still have that opposible thumb to deal with.

Lip synch Please for the, love of god, and all things holy, spend time on lip synching! I have lost track in how many AVA animations ive seen with bad lip synch. Here are some key concepts that you MUST follow when lip synching.

1. Always make the visual que appear a frame or two before the sound. It is better to animate a frame or two before the sound. NEVER LATE!
2. The mouth should always close on the "M" "B" and "P" sounds. Again always hit this mark 1 or 2 frames before the sound.
3. Use curve editor. Get a dual screen so you can have curve editor on one monitor and your work on another
4. Think of how many movements your mouth can make. My average rig for a mouth has 12 morph targets. I have three for the upper lip, 3 for the lower lip, two for the jaw, 1 to make the mouth kiss (O shape), 2 for teeth, and one for the tonge.
5. Add style to the way your character talks. No bodys mouth moves the same way as someone elses when they speak. Thats why your have accents and such.
6. When speaking, the mouth normally just slurs through the words. As long as you hit your "M" "B" "P" "T" and "O" it looks fine.
7. watch it. It it doesnt look right. It ain't right.

Character Rigs As I say to my students DO NOT USE THE BIPED! Its an absolutly horible rig and you cant get any character out of it. Think about it, who in davy jones walks or runs the way a biped does? No one! Tweaking the biped is a disaster too. Make your own rig with bones. You'll learn more and it is far more customizable for different characters. If you need help, you have chiefdelphi.

Camera movement Im sorry but this is my other biggest pet peeve of all AVA entries. Why do people insist of haveing essessive camera movement? Think of a camera as a window to your world. It can be any window, a window from a house, or a window of a car. You see things by either walking past them (panning) or walking up to them (trucking). When in gods name do you walk up to something and walk a 360 around it just to examine it? Can you think of any movie that has a 360 camera movement like that? (besides matrix or any movie making fun of the matrix). Its so ridiculosly absurd that so many movies made fun of the matrix for doing that. Sure it may look cool if your doging bullets, but for showing an object, it just doent fit.

Camera movement is suppose to show the action, not become the action. Your camera should not have more than one direction it is traveling. Otherwise cut to a different camera.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Well, I'm definitely glad to see that the thread's not completely dead! I, too, am anxious about the safety video and have modeled our character already for it(sorry a secret, can't show you...)

Of course before that, I've been working hard on models and effects and scripting for a movie my friend and I are making(probably about 15 minutes long). You can check on some of the pictures etc. from here(http://blenderartists.org/forum/show...28#post955028), but here are my best ones...I'm going for photorealism, but will obviously not reach it. Although...after effects is my hero. I used Blender and Yafray combined for these:

My hover police car:



My hero's car...one of the only ones that still runs on gas(like in I-Robot)


And a building I'm working on for the background(Johns Lobster Barn).



And here are a couple quick fire tests on our bluescreen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQPOI6xUKso

And here's the hover car in motion without blue on the first one and with blue on the second one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpXGLlDu-Rw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv1V9ZrV4uQ

Any comments and crits would be GREATFULLY accepted on any of these ...let me know what you think, and I'm looking forward to seeing all of your safety videos!

We are filming this weekend by the way! Hopefully it will turn out okay!!

-Chris Folea(pronounced Fowliuh)
"Dreams are like rainbows...only idiots chase after them."
P.S. I can post wires too if anyone wants to see them!

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Well its nice to see that someone else has attempted compositing. What did you use for camera tracking? Boujou, shake, voodoo camera tracker, or montae?

The blue screen is fine, your not getting any color bleeding or that Blue outline that you sometimes get. That means you light your blue screen correctly good job. BUT, mess with the levels a little more in After effects. I can definatly tell that you were not in that scene and its been blue screened. Another thing i always see overlooked is lighting when fire is composited. Fire casts light, and therefor you should have a glow on you when you shoot your fireball.

Allright now for the compositing with the car:

Nice to see that you have attempted it but you absolutly have to pay attention to the lighting when you do compositing. Take mesurements on site. Know the time of the day, the angle of the sun, and the weather so you can make your objects casts shadows correctly. (the biggest give away of CGI, just watch any bad modern sci fi movie) Then know the hieght of the camera, the distance from the camera to various objects in the scene, and the relative measurements of the objects in the scene. ESPECIALLY measure the objects that you know your CGI character is going to cast shadows or lights on! This is so you can rebuild the scene in the 3d program set them to proxy object so they can act like shadow catchers. (I dont know blender but if used used 3ds max i could tell you). WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN AND THE SHOT THAT THE MEASUREMENTS ARE FROM!! It will save you a TON of headaches in the long run.

Couple things wrong with the composite. (yes i know its a test but treat your test like the real thing, because what you normally do in the test, you do in the actual project). The physics of the car is off. I know it hovers, but have it "skid" when it takes that sharp turn. That sudden momentum change is likely going to severly hurt the driver's neck.

You need to "dirty up" the CGI. In After effects, add a slight gausian blur (0.3 - 1.0) and some film grain (1.0 - 3.0) to the CG and it'll look that much better. Trust me, the point is that CG comes out crisp and clear. That is not the way the camera sees the world. That isn't how we see the world either. I always "dirty up" my animations now and it looks really professional.

Distance blur on the car would be nice. Other wises it looks like its growing and not moving. Also you need motion blur on it. The car should not look clear in the frame when you pause it. And since you are recording with a house hold camera (I assume you are) fake interlace in the CG. I know this sounds completely crazy, me telling you to destroy the quailty and clearness of the CG but smudging it will make it sink in to the footage.

Nice rotoscopeing on the mail box. Although you may want to decrease the mask by a pixel.

All around your doing great. Compositing is a very hard thing to accomplish. I see your one of the very few people in FIRST who keeps doing projects of their own over the summer. Keep it up and you'll produce something that will blow the pants off of everyone.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Thank you for your insight! I tried to dirty up the car a bit, but I failed at taht obviously:o
I'll go ahead and play aruond with it more this weekend. Shall be fun.

Also, I used not tracking software. I created an angle from edges to match up to the brick wall and rotoscoped the camera so it matched correctly every frame. It was a time consuming task, but doing stuff by hand sometimes gets better results than any software.

Also, thanks for the lighting suggestions. Those will be greatly used(the fire I really just wanted to see how well it would key though. Next I'll definitely add an orange glow :D )

Also, where can I find distance blur in after effects? Is that the same as motion blur in photoshop?

Also, with Yafray...I mostly used GI with the movie as the background. I guess it would be a better idea to use that at a minimum and set up my own lighting data?

Anyway, thank you VERY much for the suggestions. They will be taken in and used very well :D .

Thanks again!

-Chris Folea(pronounced Fowliuh)
"Dreams are like rainbows...only idiots chase after them."

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

MY GOD!! Camera tracking each frame?!! Dude! get your self a camera tracking program. Voodoo camera tracker is free. Use hand tracking great for tweaking, but leave the program to do the grunt work. Its nice to be motivated to do your own work, but lets try to be a little efficient next time. In the real world, its all about speed.

Distance blur i render out what called "Z-depth" in max. Mainly its a type of render that will make objects a set distance away from the camera completely black and things up close white. Then i import that into after effects and use that layer as a mask.

I make a new composition (Name it "shot [insert number or name] distance blur") and then import my normal footage of the CG (we will call this the beauty pass) and the Z-depth pass into the composition. Then i hide the Z-depth by clicking the eye on the layer. Then add the effect Channels>set matte to the Beauty pass. Choose the Z-depth as the layer, set change alpha channel to luminance, and invert layer. Now add a gausian blur to the whole thing and put the entire composition into your Final composition. This should over lap the other beauty pass in the final composition and you should have distance blur.

Normal scene with a imcomplete yoshi and some really bad mushrooms i just threw together.


Here is the Z-depth pass


Here is the final product. Some clean up to do with the purple mushroom. This can be eliminated by rendering the purple mushroom separately. Notice how i slightly blurred the scene and added film grain. Also the corners are slightly darker since cameras have a difficult time getting light to the corners of the frame.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

i agree, i always seem to get overwhelmed :p

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

Awesome...thank you for the quick tutorial!

I actually tested it to make sure that I could do it in blender...would this be correct? I did, of course, just throw out some primitives for now...I'll try it with more complex models when I'm not writing up my Eagle Scout Project 0_o...

Original:


Z-Depth:


Finished:


Thanks again for that tutorial! Also, which grain would you suggest using, considering there are several from which to choose within After Effects.

And one more thing, how would you come about doing motion blur? Yafray doesn't support motion blur, but I can't use the blender internal renderer because Yafray has a much more useable and realistic lighting system.

Thanks for all of your help again though!

-Chris Folea(pronounced Fowliuh)
"Life is like a box of chocolates...it doesn't last very long."

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

You got it dude! that kind of distance blur will dramatically cut down render. Now for motion blur.

The thing that is going to be moving in the screen should be renderd separatly so it can have its own layer that you can blur. Then its a matter of applying a directional blur and eyeballing it to make it look right.

I just use noise for film grain. Noise Noise. I really dont know what the other Noises do. Also sometimes if you want to take it further (it depends on the shot and what your trying to express) you can make the frame flicker, like its from an actual camera. Since you are recording with a off the shelf camera (im assumeing you didn't shell out $5,000 for a hvx camera) the camera will auto adjust the levels all the time. Causeing the frame to flicker a little.

Re: Off-season Projects in 3D Animation
 

When does the Safety Animation begin? I know it started Oct. 15th last year. Same time again this year?