Ashley Posted December 4, 2010 Posted December 4, 2010 Character =/= humans only... A character can be anything. Unless your tutor instructed that you must do a human... Then in that case he isn't very good at his job. Are you using the graph editor because it really doesn't look like you are. For reference, where I work, there are some truly awesome animators. A walk cycle.. Can take 5-6 hours. This is in a professional environment Have you been reading the animators survival guide? I know a character doesn't have to be humans but we've now reached that point. We're a 1/3 of a way through the course already. Can't be animating characterful balls forever. We did need to do a human as the majority of our future work is going to be humans, or at least humanistic (or anthropomorphic) things. By the time we started doing humans we had done 200 hours of work. And yes, I am using the graph editor extensively. And yes, I have read it and many others. There are hundreds of different types of drunk walks depending on the person, the type of alcohol they've been drinking, their general mood, their level of drunkness etc.
Wesley Posted December 4, 2010 Posted December 4, 2010 A walk cycle is horrible to do for the fist time. A drunk walk cycle must be a nightmare. Have you done this pose to pose? That's how I'd get it done. Strong poses, and poses in between them, and then work on the in-betweens.
Cube Posted December 4, 2010 Posted December 4, 2010 I've got the perfect plan. 1) Get pissed. 2) Set up a camcorder at a similar angle to the one in Maya 3) Record yourself walking 4) Use the recording as a guideline for the animation.
Llama Juice Posted December 4, 2010 Posted December 4, 2010 ^This. Then while you're drinking you can honestly say "It's for research! I have to get drunk for school!" and you will be telling the truth.
Ashley Posted December 4, 2010 Posted December 4, 2010 I can research without getting drunk myself and as I said earlier there's no one way a drunk walks. Plus he's ill-drunk rather than merry/OTT-drunk.
Wesley Posted February 8, 2011 Posted February 8, 2011 This thread is dyyyying, what have people been doing?
nightwolf Posted February 8, 2011 Posted February 8, 2011 This thread is dyyyying, what have people been doing? Final year project work! I haven't had much chance to do anything else.
Tissue Town Posted February 8, 2011 Posted February 8, 2011 This thread is dyyyying, what have people been doing? Crunch period = no time to do work at home. Boo. Actually some of my work got leaked on youtube lol
Wesley Posted February 9, 2011 Posted February 9, 2011 Cool! What... er... project are you working on?
Colin Posted February 18, 2011 Author Posted February 18, 2011 Cool! What... er... project are you working on? He's all about the Lego games. I'm sure he doesn't mind me sharing. :wink: Ash told me he's recently moved on from TT as well by the way. Hope it's all going well up there man. Myself, 3d wise? Along with keeping a job that ticks me over money wise unrelated to all this, I've been working on things here and there... but I've only really kicked back into it since the New Year. Currently working on a car model for my portfolio, hopefully I'll be able to chuck a render up on here in a week or two if I keep working at it. Hope you're all doing well by the well.
Tissue Town Posted February 20, 2011 Posted February 20, 2011 He's all about the Lego games. I'm sure he doesn't mind me sharing. :wink: Ash told me he's recently moved on from TT as well by the way. Hope it's all going well up there man. Myself, 3d wise? Along with keeping a job that ticks me over money wise unrelated to all this, I've been working on things here and there... but I've only really kicked back into it since the New Year. Currently working on a car model for my portfolio, hopefully I'll be able to chuck a render up on here in a week or two if I keep working at it. Hope you're all doing well by the well. Ash has my bloody job man! Nah he's good. I'm gonna hang around for a bit and see what opportunity arises. PS. Your site is offline atm mate
Colin Posted March 6, 2011 Author Posted March 6, 2011 Ash has my bloody job man! Nah he's good. I'm gonna hang around for a bit and see what opportunity arises. PS. Your site is offline atm mate Did you both apply for that character position at OutSo then at the same time? Still in at TT then? Or working some other job in the area? (think I may of misunderstood your post, ha) And yes, took my site down the other week. Going to try and just reboot my online site with totally fresh new content leading up to the summer, then start applying again. That's my timescale anyway. New content is going to work out like this hopefully:- Car Model FPS weapon (high poly + bake etc) A new Modular Apartment Building (I know I had one before, but upon reflection it's not good enough to land a job) Sculpted Statue or Water Fountain asset Anyway, car model progress is here below. Still got a lot to add and tidy up (wing-mirror, window rubber edges, etc) and also model a medium interior (which I've just started over the last couple of days).
Wesley Posted March 6, 2011 Posted March 6, 2011 Hey that's pretty swish! You might want to check out The Fountain DVDs at Eat3D if you're wanting to do something along those lines, really nice tutorials. Also check out this guys stuff for inspiration on the apartment stuff, he's got one and he's just landed a job at Crytek. http://scotthomer.co.uk/?p=248
Colin Posted March 6, 2011 Author Posted March 6, 2011 (edited) Hey that's pretty swish! You might want to check out The Fountain DVDs at Eat3D if you're wanting to do something along those lines, really nice tutorials. Also check out this guys stuff for inspiration on the apartment stuff, he's got one and he's just landed a job at Crytek. http://scotthomer.co.uk/?p=248 Cheers, still got a fair bit to be getting on with though. I already have those DVD's, yes. I don't think I'll go anywhere near the scale they attempt in them though, but I'll most likely give the HP one a quick skim-through before starting that project as a sculpting refresh. Something more like this hopefully. http://www.medicinal-waste.co.uk/chillalex/fountain.htm I know of that kid and his work as well, he's a year or two below me when I was on my Uni course. His work is very good, and an ideal measurement of what it takes to land a junior position these days. Well done to him I admit. Edited March 22, 2011 by Colin
Colin Posted March 22, 2011 Author Posted March 22, 2011 Decided I'm finished with this model for now. Ended up correcting a few little issues I had with the front of the vehicle, and made the decision to just leave a faint silhouette of the interior through the glass after speaking to a friend. I'm not 100% happy with the indicator on the side of the vehicle, and if I were to go back I'd put some sort of transparency map for the glass instead of it being all one depth. The render and lighting could also use some work. Rendering in Vray with a HDRI instead of MR (which it currently is) might be something I'd like to look into if I went back to it...but I'm done for now. Progress and moving onto something else.
Tissue Town Posted March 23, 2011 Posted March 23, 2011 That's good mate, what kind of job are you after, more cg orientated?
nightwolf Posted March 30, 2011 Posted March 30, 2011 Looking good Colin, I tempted to give vray a bash soon, see how it compares to mental ray. So far so good, ended up handing in my animation in 3dsmax (bit of practise from the 11 second club.), now back to the final year project, which is now nowhere near as nice looking as I'd hoped.
Colin Posted April 3, 2011 Author Posted April 3, 2011 That's good mate, what kind of job are you after, more cg orientated? Sorry for the slow reply, been abroad for the past week or so on a much needed break. Thanks for the kind words both of you. I'm still aiming for a game art related position, but if I can show a few examples of nice renders (ie, a car render) in the portfolio to interest arch viz and CG companies then that's more potential possibilities for a job. Re-viewing this work that I've not seen for a few weeks makes me notice all the things I wasn't at all happy with.
nightwolf Posted April 4, 2011 Posted April 4, 2011 Sorry for the slow reply, been abroad for the past week or so on a much needed break. Thanks for the kind words both of you. I'm still aiming for a game art related position, but if I can show a few examples of nice renders (ie, a car render) in the portfolio to interest arch viz and CG companies then that's more potential possibilities for a job. Re-viewing this work that I've not seen for a few weeks makes me notice all the things I wasn't at all happy with. I hate when that happens, I'm stupidly critical of my work so I try not to go back to my work too much filled with the desire to scrap it. I would like to go back to my bumper cars though, the lighting is awful, the poor things were when I first started out: Oh how I used to light my scenes is terrible, . I imagine I'll say that about the work I'm doing now in a few years! Hopefully I get this job with Jagex, they seemed quite receptive for me to try a hand at environment modelling if I wanted to further myself with them, given their now moving to consoles too!
Ashley Posted April 6, 2011 Posted April 6, 2011 Annoyingly vague question! Ages ago (or at least it feels like it) when I was learning I came across a method of essentially drawing an object by doing connected points which, when closed, forms a shaped plane. Anyone know what its called and which tool I need? I've completely forgotten. Oh, for Maya btw. Cheers people
Wesley Posted April 6, 2011 Posted April 6, 2011 I don't know what it'd be in Maya but in Max that's just drawing a spline and then setting a bevel or whatever. Erm... was it in this thread? I remember you posting a picture. So I've just finished The Fountain DVD by Eat3D (I'd highly recommend it). Max viewport. Marmoset. I also completed the Wilton Anime armour for Henry VIII; for a client at work. Marmoset. It was a 3D scan, which I painted in zBrush, retopologised in TopoGun, unwrapped in Headus and then put together in Max. I'm planning to do it again in my spare time because there were a few details that didn't come out, and it's also 30,000 tris and could be a lot better. I allllso finished a gun a work for a client but I can't find a picture. Anyway, recently just finished modelling a cartoon pirate ship. The sails were changed after feedback from PolyCount though. Also! For a low-poly thing there was a challenge to create an F-Zero character/vehicle/environment. 500 tris and a 128*128 map for each. I've done the vehicle and character but not the environment yet.
Ashley Posted April 6, 2011 Posted April 6, 2011 Cheers. I'll have a look back over this thread, see if I can find something. That all looks really sweet. A cartoon pirate ship would be perfect for my next project
Wesley Posted April 9, 2011 Posted April 9, 2011 Has anyone been playing with the new Autodesk suite? I'm a tad disappointed with the Nitrous display in Max. Gives me lots of horrible little errors, I've switched back to HAL DirectX 9.0. Apart from that it's damn impressive! After struggling to even navigate the viewport in that fountain scene I'm able to wiz round and edit with ease.
Ashley Posted April 13, 2011 Posted April 13, 2011 My mentor sent me info on how to do a South Park style approach but maybe I'm having a blonde moment because I keep getting lost, even when breaking it down into sentences! You can do South Park style by simply creating textures with alpha channels. The textures can be say 1024x 1024 square textures which you apply to square single poly planes. You create a plane for each body part, ie Torso, Head, Left & Right arms & legs and hands. You add the correct textures to the planes and because you have alpha channels and you have blackened the non used parts of the textured shapes ie the space around a leg for example. In Photoshop you select the black space part of the texture, add mask channel and invert the channel so the leg shaped silhouette of the alpha channel you want visible is white and the non wanted space is black. When you render the plane with the texture on it, the space will dissapear as by magic. I'm fine until he starts talking about alpha channels. Not because I don't know what alpha channels are (I do), it just seems like there's something missing. Is it words or my brain? Plus I've already begun modelling one character (here - basic first try with no hands although I've since added them) but if I am understanding him correctly I need to just do plain squares then model with the texturing in photoshop (as it were)?
Wesley Posted April 13, 2011 Posted April 13, 2011 Yeah basically he's summing up a South Park style animation... So draw your 2D character in Photoshop, split the character into his body, head and limbs. Then give each part it's own image, and the unused part will be the alpha channel (and paint it black to avoid halo-ing). Then create planes in 3D for each piece, having the same ratio as the image, apply the texture and then animate the planes. Heck of a different direction than making a full 3D character with rigging, etc. though.
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