Okay

I understand that Winkie crowds might be "animated Hair". Since there are no Winkies yet and I have not been involved and have no idea on how to use the SVN "yet" I did a simple test using thom. I made 3 sets of tgas of thom doing the same action from 3 different angles. I made 3 hair materials each using a different series as the animate hair sequence. I applied the hair tp a single patch and adjusted the density to have one hair per patch. Anyway here is the results

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I think there is 20 thoms and only 20 patches ..Is this helpful ?

Try varying the length and thickness.

I think it is a pretty cool idea, John. You just need different animated sequences for each crowd person--but if you have to set-up and render all of those sequences, is it faster than just putting the model in the scene?
Of course if you were using this for VFX, and those hairs were sequences created from actors, then I think that you have got a powerful technique for compositing live action within a 3D environment--especially if doing a camera move through that environment!

Brilliant John! I'm already stealing your idea -- I had no idea how I'd do a crowd of about 100. After using hair to create a city I should have thought of this. Thanks!

Rusty

Isn't this what flocking is for?

Cool effect, I hadn't realised you can use an animated sequence as a hair image.

First
This wasn't my idea for the crowd but I had done this before so was asked to help. I did not vary anything on this but it would be easy to change height and width and to some degree color. Yes we could do this with models and say flocking but this way we have 20 patches with a hair and it would otherwise require a lot of models and the winkies will look somewhat similar. Actually another way to carry this further would be to use a crowd scene as I have here and use that as the single hair thus 20 moving models on one patch. This was a first test of the idea since we do not have a winkie model yet.

Thanks for investigating this, John!

I think this will serve our purposes very well. Now we need to get a generic Winkie made.

The thom that is mostly facing the camera looks like he's digging in his heels. Is that the pose or an odd angle he was rendered from?

What sort of render times did this incur? What if you bumped the crowd up to about 100 thoms?

I have a shot planned that has hundreds of winkies in it. I'm thinking that if we had about 5 or 6 variations of motion distributed among the crowd it would hide the repetition for the brief shots we're talking about.

The render times were not bad ...the pose/odd angle is probably my camera angle..it would have to be similar to the view of the real camera in the final scene since hair basic faces foward. I'll try to get some data together but this will be a busy weekend with guests and family. I also wanted to vary the size and a few other tweaks. Glad to help.

No immediate rush on this. We first need the Winkie and the landscape they'll be in and the main characters will have to be set up and animated in the shot before hand too.

Thanks!

Okay I made a few new sequences with actions then put 10 if each into the chor for a totl of thirty...randomly rescaled some...so there are 30 thoms doing 1 of 3 actions for 30 frames at about 22 secs per frame atvga size on a pent 4 1.7 process with 1/2 gig of memory


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just notice one jumping hair on left thats from moving it without doing so at the beinning of the chor so he hops

You could also try to animate the direction of the hair slightly to give it a little more randomness to the actions.

Here's an example of varying position and direction.

John it's time to put is tests into the real movie so I have 2 questions for you.

Are you still interested in doing this?

If not would you be willing to help me in doing this?

I have 6 actions created of winkies standing in a crowds I or we can creat targas of these action that are mainly ment to be front view as crowds in different scene. But if rendered from the back thye should work fine. I am currently working on a test right now and I have this committed to SVN so do you have SVN? Do you have skype if so my skype name is PF_Mark if you want to talk directly.

Mark

I have install the SVN but have not used it yet partially becuase I have my hard drives are pretty full: I been sorting through and and trying to get some space. I can help but for the next 2-3 weeks I wil be working weird hours 1:30 to 10:30 pm..I am a technical support person that will be getting some additional training...so I will have limiited time in the morning to help. Send me a email and let me know exactly what you want me to do to help.

John

Ok seeing that we would like to wrap this up quickly as possible if you do not mind I try this with some help I will post my questions and problems here and everyone can benifit if they want to try something like this.

1st problem I have run into is getting my image to be displayed without distrotion I f tried setting most setting that sound like they would bend or curve the hair to 0%. See screen crab i have a image of back of winike both hands up teh hair is bending or curving the image and croping there hands and legs

You have to make sure the length and thickness of the hair has the same ratio as the image size. Possibly add more cps to the hair guide. Make sure all variations are set to 0% and make sure you don't have kinkiness set anywhere.

if not needed turn off gravity in chor also

Kinkines I am not at my system right now but I remember that being 100% so I should change that to 0%?

The ratio is wrong I just guessed at that so I fix that

I only have one cp in the hair so I play with that too.

Thanks for the help it gives me a direction to go which helps alot!

Ok thanks

John I am trying to recreat this affect with winkies and I am having trouble setting the time range and getting my animated sequence to animate as hair. What ver was this test done on? can you post a screen shot of emitters settting I have a sequence that is 123 frames long and I want to to start at a time frame and repeat Right now I am am playing witht eh crop and range but I can not get my test renders to show movement

I could not find the original so tried to recreate. I did this in v15c the project file and the 2 alpha sequences of thom are inlcuded. The density was .002 and height and width 100cm

Let me know if this helps or what else you might need


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I rendered the thom sequences from different angles to get this. this was only two seqences

Thanks I am working in 14 now I can get the sequence to render in shaded but not final? I am trying to loop these targas and have the action repeat. I have a crop and an range field so I can control when the sequence start and ends but I have not found how to make it loop?. I think I will upgrade and try agian maybe V15 will work better?attached are same seting one shaded and one final rendered shaded crowd animated final crowd is still?

To get it to repeat - You may need to make your action contain the repeat, eg frame 0-n of the action shows frames 0-n of the animation sequence, frames n+1, 2n shows frames 0-n of the animation, etc - rather than setting a repeat count for the action in the chor.

Or you may need to drag your action into the chor m times (m being the number of repeats)

Or you may need to set the frame numbers directly in the chor and not use an action at all -

I haven't tried any of the above out - but I think? I remember having problems with making animated tga sequences repeat (not using hair) - so my GUESS is that hair animated sequences might? have a similar problem - or they may not have a problem at all...

An "action" on an image sequence? I'm not sure how you mean that in this context...Right now there isn't an action involved with the hair.

An action was created to animate the waving Winkie, but he has now been rendered (waving) to a series of targas that we apply as an image to the hair material. Our hope was that the hair could keep cycling thru the movie rather than play it once and stop.



After some experimenting Mark and I have ascertained that one way to get hair images to loop is to keyframe (in the chor) cycling values for the "frame" parameter of the hair emitter.

there must be a more automatic way, but i forget exactly how it is done with plain decals so I may be wrong.

Quick note on break at work...that was a final render.. never tried to loop it but sounds like your on the right path


wil look later

after10pm

johnl3d

Ok I got it to loop in chr and it renders out in shaded render but not in final render I going to try more tommorow night.

Great Mark not sure why you were having issue with final render. I got stuck with some overtime tonight so had no energy to do any research.

I have treid in v13 and v14 to have it shown in final render can you please try it in v15 please what I have been doing is repeating the animated sequence lopping it by setting keframes in teh chr for the images see screen crab.

tried you method and it worked for animating..in 15

Mark, it looks like the alpha channel scheme won't work. My plan was to turn the emitter transparent so we could render just the hair but that turns the hair transparent too. And I find Shaded mode won't make a proper alpha channel in any event.

So now I'm thinking of rendering them with a green background and green screening them in.

For now, proceed with getting the other hair emitters animated and arranged and I'll test out the details of the green compositing






In Final render mode it kept cycling and didn't stop after the first cycle?

Or... probably simpler... when we get to final rendering we could just make longer image sequences for the hair so they don't have to loop.

Well if John is sure it final renders and loops in V15 then I just get V15 seeing this is going to be rendered in V15 anyways and I need V15 for SO that the easiest fix?

did it repeat after final rendering the problem we are experincing is that it repeats when I do a shaded render but it only plays once then stops when I do a final render. This is with nothing changed in chr I just render shaded and it repeats 3 times like i keyframed and then All I do is render again with no changes and select final and it animates once then stops and does not repeat the other 2 times.

OK upgraded to V 15.0d and it still will not repeat when I final render it so I have decided to just create targas that will play for the full lenght I require. There problem fixed and I move onto the next issue which is what is going on with the ground during final render? So I just need to create these targas and setup hte hair affect then test it out.

Yes, figure out the problem with the set. That's one we don't have a work-around for.

Ok I am having some problems and I have a question about how you work the hair.

1) I have a model that has a hair material added to it and I have controls in the model that I can change in oblects folder of PWS

I have these models into a chr and if I show more drives I can open these same controls in the chr short cut. Now I finding that some of these setting are not the same value show would or could this cause the hair to not behave as my other tests?

Which way should I set these controls should I set them in the model it self or in the chr?

what is happening is the animted image is jerking (too fast) then it shlould be

Were the animated decals for the hair rendered at the same FPS as the chor?

What kind of controls do you have? What are they for?

Both 24 fps

I found the problem I think/hope I worked on this over several days and I had not done this before. I creted a model and then in the chr added the hair material and when I was having trouble I asked Robert for help he expermented and said it worked for him and that he added he hair to the model in the model window not the chr so I did that but I keeped or should I say forgot about the material I added in the chr. THis I believe created a conflict and Before I left on vacation I deleted the shortcut to model in chr and re-appiled them in chr and the animated sequence worked when I scrubbed through it. I left my system rendering a final render of this scene. When I get home on Aug 11th I will find out if it worked.

Thanks for the reply Mark and john I let you know how it turned out then.