i finally got a chance to post our visualization. some of my fellow teammates have been workin on it for a week, but i’ve been busy til today… Haha they’re hard workers
aight just visit our site and there should be a news item with.
Warning they are large. one is of vcd quality (352x240 1150 kbs video 224 audio).
The other is less (160x120 300 kbs video 32 kbs audio).
For enthusiasts, I’ll try to put a high quality xvid or divx copy on the server.
go ahead and reply your feedback. even if it’s negative or positive. I like to find out what we can do next year better or worse. I really dont mind, but we had nothing to do with the way it was judged. Keep that in mind.
Finally got to see the animation again. Do you remember if they played the whole thing at the Championships. Because I don’t remember seeing the beginning. It helped to tie it together. I thought I remember it starting with the clip of that Teacher/Engineer talking. Anyway I was pushing to see it again because I wanted to analyze it more. I dont know what took AD so long to post it.
The Animation:
It WAS nicely done. My only complaint is that the rules call for 30sec of animation. And for an award for “Student Animation”. I agree that with in that you can have video- As we did that too. But there was 30sec of actual animation going on in ours.
Did you model all the robot stuff (Like the Chain) or did you import it? The textures looked nice and the camera cutting was nice. The animation itself left something to be desired. I was told by a top animator/friend who worked on such movies as “Alien -resurrection” (he animated the alien swimming- check it out its real cool) - when they look at someones work (in his case its usually a demo reel of someone looking for a job)- they are more impressed if the person can hold their attention with a still or “locked down” camera than with a moving, panning camera. This is because a slew of mistakes or just plain lousy animation can be hidden by a moving camera. How does this apply to you. Well I don’t see any major motion happening with your robot. There is a slight movement here and there but the camera does 99% of it.
I’d say if you want to improve for next year work on actual animation over the summer and then add your camera move. Camera moves aren’t bad- just make it look good without it first then add the pan or tilt.
Oh and unless they change the rules- try using 3DStudio for the entire 30sec!
I think what autodesk wanted when they said we could use live video was something more of what we used in our 2001 animation, where we had our robot balancing the bridge and these 2 boxes of live video of our robot in action came flying down and landed behind it with our logo in the center (I wish I had a link, but the link on our site is broken). Again, congrats on the win 967, but these rules definately need to be looked at and changed over the summer.
Thank you for all your advice and comments about our thing…
To answer stevek’s question, yeah all modeling was done with 3ds max of the robot. I made the chain from splines and then created groups of 3 links and used path deform to animate it and shape it around the gears. It was a pain in the butt to manipulate because we had so many vertices and even our geforce4 with dual athlons choked easily. Thank you adaptive degradation…
once again i agree…we plan to work with 3ds max more so next year now that summer is coming up and we have 10 copies of the software. Thank you autodesk…
by the way, our thing and the rookie thing are up on autodesk’s website now. But you can still access it on ours.
Two Years Ago one of our animators modeled the chain. The problem was our fastest computer couldn’t handle it. It took 20min just to open the scene. Last year that same guy created an image map and learned how to accurately place and animate the map placed on a solid ring like object. Funny thing is I don’t think we barely saw the chain by the time he was done.
Any way. Nice JOB with it.
One technique I use for Ribbons and Ropes (and chains would work too) Is to model a straight object and use bones to shape and animate the object around a sprocket or wheel or what ever.
PS: If you have too many copies of MAX give me a call- wee have too many computers--
For us, we just modeled one section of a chain, applied “optimize” to reduce the polygons, then we used “array” to duplicate the model. Once the length satisfies us, we grouped all the chain sections together. Then we created a closed-end spline as a path and applied normalize spline. Once these are all set up, you can select the group and open the modifier list and select pathdeform (the normal one not the binding one). We changed a little bit parameters to make it look better.
In this year’s animation, our robot has 4 chains. front chains each have 55 models, separated by 1.4cm. for the back chains we have 70 models, and again separated by 1.4 cm. I forgot the number of polygons each link has, but I pretty darn sure that all 4 chains created little to no lagging for the computer while loading. The greatest lag problems was created by the 6 wheels and the sprokes. The wheels have high number of polygons because we want them to be smooth. The sprokes have raytracing on them. In fact, we even added raytrace on the extrusions until later we figure that we just need to add a reflection map and turn down the number.
We used two computers to do most of the modelling and rendering works. Both of them are 1.2 GHz with 1 GB of ram. So for us, modelling these chains are easy. I think everyone with 700 mhz and 128mb or above rams can easily model a detailed chain with raytrace and all those fancy stuff, because I made one using my sucky laptop. It’s the robot and the playing field that really cause a major problem. If I’m correct, we have 8-digit polygons. hehe, it’s crazy.
we did not use bones or anything because it sounds like there’s tons of work. I think that they way we use is the easiest to model and animate. And we can easily add high details to them.
Try using it.
Congratulation. I feel you did supply what they wanted in terms of showing an element of FIRST, but it is not clear until you watch it many times. Also more live footage or words are displayed then animation. I know in the rules it says they are ok and to a point they are, but the over balance is not good because you can do all of that with out even looking at the software you get for winning the competition.
