Group participation! (or not)

UPDATE
Change Your Pants!

Features so cool you will have to change your pants.

Featured feature: Newton Physics

See post below!
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This is a series of animations designed to not only promote A:M's amazing features but ALSO to be hysterically funny and to become popular VIRAL VIDEOS to sweep the internet and make us all famous... for... uh... 5 minutes at least.

I need help with this. No details on how this would work but samples of the "effects" are crucial. For example the perfect cloth settings. Those could be used for the torus segment. The SSS series would need the perfect materials and lighting to be effective. The modeling and animation can be considered "separate" from those elements.

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Change Your Pants!

Features so cool you will have to change your pants.

Featured feature: Cloth

Title: The Torus of Heck!
Starring: Thom
(get it? Circle of hell... torus of heck... okay fine. Shut up. I thought it was funny.)

Sample animation

Thom walks onto a black stage. A sign indicates a cloth demo for the new AM will be starting. Thom checks his watch. He sees a single chair on a stage and walks to it and sits down. Suddenly a large spot light shines on Thom and he puts up his hand to shade his eyes looking for the source of the light. Hearing a noise he looks up and sees a large torus attached to a rod rotate into view from offscreen directly above his head. While still looking up a large square of "silky" cloth falls down and drapes elegantly over the torus. The cloth hangs down far enough so that Thom's head is hidden from view. Thom lifts up a side of the cloth with his hand and peers out from under the cloth.

Loud machine noises and chain clanking and then a large heavy steal ball attached to a chain drops from above and falls through the torus and the cloth. The cloth is pushed through the torus (as in all those cloth demos we use to see a million times) and drapes gracefully over Thom, completely covering him. Meanwhile The ball and chain recoils from the initial drop and on the second bounce the chain breaks and the ball bounces on the edge of the torus attached to the rod causing it too bounce dangerously and the ball falls through the torus knocking Thom on the head and bouncing off camera (crashing noises in the distance).

Thom is dazed and confused. The torus and connecting rod are still bouncing when the rod breaks off and the torus falls onto Thom completely trapping him around the arms. Thom, confused and panicked gets off the stool and starts to run around still encased in the cloth and the torus with a piece of the rod attached, knocks over the demo sign and spills the plastic letters onto the floor. Finally Thom collapses onto the floor. Simultaneausly as if rehersed, several "characters" from the AM cd (rabbit and shaggy?) come out with a stretcher, place Thom on it and carry him off screen while another character comes out and sweeps up the plastic sign letters and another sets up the sign for the next demo. This last bit happens very quickly.

Fade to black and tagline...

Change Your Pants!

Features so cool you will need to change your pants...

-----------------------------

Change Your Pants!

Features so cool you will have to change your pants.

Featured feature: SSS (sub surface scattering)

Title: SSSsssss!
Starring: Thom

(remember that old horror movie with the same title? People turning into snakes? Guy's skin peels and he turns into a cobra at the end? Has nothing to do with sub surface scattering but I always make that "ssssss" snake noise and think of that movie when I read about it.)


Thom walks up to a Hash A:M demo booth and sees a sign on a table for Sub Surface Scattering samples. As Thom walks along the table there are small fancy "perfume" spray bottles with calligraphy labeled cards attached with string, like from Alice in Wonderland. Each bottle has a different color liquid inside and is labeled with different materials; Milk, chiken1, chicken2, skin, jade, etc.

As Thom walks along the table he sprays each one on himself and is magically transformed into that material. Each time he changes Thom reacts and looks at his arms admiring the effect.

The last bottle is not a spray bottle but a small bottle with a rubber stopper and has a label that just says "Drink Me". Thom pulls the stopper and drinks it and is instantly transformed into a sexy woman in a tight dress with BEAUTIFUL SSS skin. Thom turns around several times admiring his new girlish figure then giggles and runs off.

ALTERNATE ENDING:

The last bottle is labeled "chicken 3". He sprays it on himself and is instantly covered in feathers. Someone pops up from under the counter and quickly places a sign on the table that says "Hash A:M Hair and Feathers Demo."

Fade to black and tagline...

Change Your Pants!

Features so cool you will need to change your pants...

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-vern

You can actually do that kind of stuff with AM....amazing




Click to view attachment


sorry this is just pants

I'm BAAAACK!

Okay, change of plans. Decided to go with the cool (and fairly easy) Newton Physics Demo animation first.

This is VERY rough. It is very rough. Lots of changes and additions planned. After he gets hit by the wall... uh... well other things will happen. The curtain will also be done with cloth, the end titles will be done with the font wizard and the letters will get knocked off using physics as well for each screen or sign board. I plan to pan across as if the credits were a series of sings already set up and have some object fly in and knock some of the plastic letters off.

Right now most of this is from earlier renderings which is why the curtain and wall can't be seen. I FINALLY FINALLY figured out how to do the physics stuff, very cool very easy once you get the hang of it.

Click to view attachment

-vern

Very nice Vern! Nice animation also

Yea thats good ,I lik,e the way the text is done aswell ,very umm very
edit I don't think ive seen any animation like this from you before ,its very good ,you should do more animating

Nice project!

Very nice Vern.

Don't forget to throw the link to 'www.hash.com' up there somewhere.
As an alternate 'www.animationmaster.com' would do the trick as well.
Maybe both! (one at the beginning and one at the end)

Nice work Vern

GREAT syuff, Vern...where's the URL?

Okay guys... come on! Of course there will be a URL for Hash... sheesh. I plan to do the text in AM with the font wizard. I whacked those titles out in photoshop and pasted the images into the QT movie. I will probably have the url on it's own screen at the end or... whatever. It will be there.

-vern

Sorry- I hadn't seen Rodney asked the same Q... HEY RODNEY--- www.animationmaster.com does not work for me... is that a registered URL for A:M?

www.animationmaster.com does not... open... it doesn't mean it isn't actually registered but it doesn't seem to be working at the maoment. I've never heard of it before so I had planned to just use www.hash.com.

-vern

I used http://www.animationmaster.com/ for many years but see that it doesn't connect right now.
Suffice it to say, it was less troublesome in my day job than http://www.hash.com
Both URLs delivered you to Hash Inc's front page.

If Hash Inc has dropped the URL I assure you someone will snatch it up.
The use of the word 'master' with animation on the web these days is considerable.

Hash still owns it. It does expire in March of next year though. It could be that the DNS got "discombobulated" during all the recent changes at Hash.

-vern

Got the physics... now for the cloth curtains...

Click to view attachment

Does anyone know how I could keep the "wrinkles" at the start? The Shape of the curtains? They have that wavy pattern but when I simulate the cloth just flattens out. Do I need a chain of bones?


-vern

A chain of dynamic bones for each pleat would give you greater control. Just create one curtain with a pose which runs through the following states: open left(-100) - closed(0) - open right(100) and then use two copies in your action/choreography. I think that cloth is unneccesary for this scenario.

You could add extra splines to the back of those parts of the curtain that aren't part of the simulation. (Leave those splines out of the group that gets the Simcloth material)

That should control and keep them in place.
If you animate those splines slightly the simulation should factor in the animated splines and improve the effect. (I'll test this and see if such things still work well in Simcloth)

Tried that but they don't move at all. They are "stuck" in place. That is how I keep the curtain from "falling". There are a series of points at the top not in the cloth group.

I think I figured it out though. Right now I have a series of bones for alternation columns to "collapse" the curtain. I need to add another set of bones between those and use them to keep "the shape" of the curtain.

-vern

www.animationmaster.com live again.

this is a bit odd.

animationmaster.com gets through now

but...

www.animationmaster.com takes me to Google

Perhaps something locked in cache on my end?

Nope, not at your end. I have exactly the same experience.

It could take more time to propagate through all the name servers.

-vern

Right now I am using one model twice in the chor but I may switch to just one model so I can decal the curtain. I definately want to use cloth. I want that "realistic" cloth and I think it would be fun to have OTHER cool features included in the video that focuses on a specific one. I think if I use another set of bones for the column of splines bound to the one TOP bone it will help keep the curtain in shape. I also need to play with the material settings for stiffness etc.

I am quite pleased it worked this well on the first try. Amazing how a fast clean well working computer with plenty of ram can totally change your experience with AM... and the PC I have now is still 2 or 3 years old... it cost me a case of beer. (thank you hubukai!).

I am working now on the letters falling off the sign board. During my physics research I learned about that cool "pivot" connection joint. I can set up a few of the letters to have breakable joints so they detach from the board while others just sort of move or shift. Still... ton of work with all the letters. I will probably use a text editor again to quickly set up the physics in the chor or model.

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More edits on the "script". I plan to have the sign in front of the curtain when Thom approaches the "stage". He then goes behind the curtain to get on the stool. Another cool display for cloth as Thom pushes the cloth to go behind the curtain. Then the curtain opens to reveal Thom on an empty stage to an unseen audience with a spot light on him. The wall is lowered from overhead with chains (I have the chains already from a previous version) with some klunky noisy machine sounds.. the wall wobbles slightly before falling. I'm going to add in audience reaction like oohs and ahs and applause as each thing happens. The stuff that happens next is pretty much straight forward physics falling and bouncing. I'm collecting a bunch of odds and ends props from the Extras CD... and have these things fall on him.

There's a final scene after the credits that I may include if I feel really ambitious. It involves another character model (well associated with Newton Physics tests. ) and some minor dialog I can produce myself. No physics in that scene just straight forward character animation.

-vern

Holy crap!

Okay... so... it all starts with a new computer right? It's faster works real nice. AM is fast and fun to use again. So I start playing with physics... then cloth... What's next? Now I'm learning expressions of all things. Of all the features in AM that frighten the heck out of me it is expressions. Scary math stuff. Weird long paths to object properties. No debugger.

I need to add more bones and more splines to my curtain model. The problem is the animation I already set up that "collapses" the curtain. I couldn't think of an easy way to do this with constraints. When you pull a curtain open, imagine it is on evenly spaced hooks or rings at the top, when you pull it open, the first hoop moves till it "hits" the second, then both move the same way till they hit the third one etc etc. Can this be done with a constraint? I don't think so.

So, I created this very very very simple expression for each bone of the curtain in an on/off pose (this expression is for bone4. bone5 moves before bone4. The collapse starts at bone6 down to bone2):



Click to view attachment

In this cheesy example each bone is 10cm apart. All this does is check if the the previous bone's Y translation is > than 5 from it's original translation, which is always 0. As soon as that bone hits the "5" mark, which is half the distance to the next bone, then that bone starts to move but subtracting 5cm so they maintain the new COLLAPSED distance.

THIS WORKS FANTASTICALLY! On the first try! I was shocked. I was sure it wouldn't work in the chor. I thought the world space would cause problems... something would go wrong. I'm so happy I don't have to key frame that dang curtain again. I can put in as many bones as needed and just paste the expression and change the bone name.

This is COOL! It could be used for telescoping robot effects, legs, arms, antennas etc.

I think I could even add in the "back" translation. So the folding effect is also handled by the expression. The curtain starts out flat then as it collapses the alternating bones will automatically move back to create the folding effect.

-vern

My expressions work. Both the left to right and the z to go front to back to create the folds. Only one bone needs to be keyed to collapse the curtain. Still need to tweak those. Right now the curtain is still "flat" to start. I think if I offset every other bone and let the cloth settle more before starting the movement the folds might hold better.

Click to view attachment

-vern

now that looked good!

From discussions in another thread I worked up a new curtain rig:

Click to view attachment

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I have a new storyboard now for the final animation. Ties all the elements together. I don't know if these should be "scenes" or "shots". Basically these are broken down into what I do in separate choreographies. Each scene is a chor:

Scene 1:

Thom walks up to sign for "Dynamics Demo". reads the sign and looks to his right at a stage with a large red curtain (stool is behind the curtain). Next to the stool is another letter board sign with "Dynamics Demo" on it and an arrow pointing to the curtain. He walks towards the stage. Cut to scene 2.

Scene 2:
Thom is on stage and reads the sign. He walks to the curtain and cautiously lifts it to look inside which is very dark. He goes inside. cut to scene 3.

Scene 3:
Thom is behind the curtain and it is dark. He walks towards the stool and sits down. Cut to scene 4.

Scene 4:
View is now outside the curtain looking at the stage. The lights dim and the stage lights go up. The curtains open dramatically and a spot light appears to reveal a surprised and confused thom sitting alone on the stool on an otherwise empty stage (except for the sign in front and to stage left). After the curtains open there is an audible "ooh" and a smattering of applause from the audience. Thom looks around in confusion. Next there is the rumbling of chains and machinery as a large brick wall suspended from chains and supports, is lowered from overhead behind Thom. Thom is very confused and curious moving side to side and craning his neck around to see what is going on behind him. Another louder response from the unseen crowd and louder applause. The crowd is abuzz with expectation.

The wall slowly settles onto the stage and the chains and supports are pulled back up. The wall is wobbling precariously as the crowd grows silent in expectation. Then the wall begins to tip forward and the crowd gasps. Thom is unaware of what is happening as he tries to look into the audience shielding his eyes from the bright spot light. The wall slowly falls and crashes onto Thom's head, knocking the sign over and scattering the plastic letters while the bricks scatter on the floor. Suddenly a huge cheer rises from the audience as the shocked Thom rubs his head and turns to look behind him.

The crowd grows silent once more as machinery is heard over head. Thom slumps down on his seat and looks around nervously when suddenly a whole pile of miscellaneous objects start to fall in a steady stream onto Thom's head eventually knocking him off the stool onto the stage floor to be covered by a pile of stuff. Cheers and applause from the crowd and the curtains close.

The End

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Most of the work will actually be animating Thom. the physics stuff is really a piece of cake by comparison. All the objects falling involves just using those cool plugins for adding objects to a choreography and simulating. The real creative work is animating Thom. The character "acting". To save effort I plan to "roughly" animate thom and run the simulation to gauge when stuff "hits" him and then animate Thom based on those keys and re-simulate. That is how I did the initial test of the wall landing on Thom. I ran the sim without any Thom animation then animated Thom based on the wall hitting him. I may add some physics to Thom's head and body, using one of those child/parent newton bone groups, to show some sort of dynamic impact from the objects falling on him. Have to see how that goes.

I'm keeping an optional "after the credits scene" a secret for now. Both as a surprise and just in case I can't pull it off. It doesn't involve any serious dynamics. It is mostly character acting and some short dialog which will involve some lip syncing.

I'm on a bit of a work break right now and will be working on this all next week. I told Martin I'd like to have it done in time for use at the NYC Comic Con.

-vern

Very impressive Vern.

Another update resulting from a question in the Newton Physics forum area:

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=289057

The letter board sign concept is SOLVED! Wicked cool!

Click to view attachment

All the major "physics" challenges have been resolved; cloth curtain, falling bricks, letter board sign. I'm good to go. The rest should be cake now... yeah right, final last words.

-vern

That turned out amazingly good Vern.

Okay... now I'm just goofing off.

Click to view attachment

It's just too much fun. A couple of tests were really funny. On one some of the letters get knocked out right away and then nothing happens as the sign slowly wobbles to a stop and the at the very end one letter drops off... unfortunately in my excitement of experimenting I didn't save that one.

p.s. I have a big round base that is real heavy so the sign won't fall over but it wobbles and rotates. I filled the base with sand but it makes such a mess on my key board, should I use cement or gravel?

-vern

Okay, BIG changes to the sign set up.

Click to view attachment

Having the whole sign as a single breakable/explode object... bad idea. I split it up into 3 models:

Pedestal - Dynamic Object
Sign Board - Dynamic Object
Letters - Breakable/Explode Object

I drag the pedestal, which is the base and the post to hold the sign, into a chor. Line it up on the groud. Next I drag in the sign board. I line it up on the top of the post of the pedestal but I offset it ever so slightly in the x axis. In the chor I create a dynamic "joint" to the pedestal model, the "child/parent" as the pivot. I reduce the amount of "play" on the pivot joint and tighten up the damping so it doesn't swing loosely.

Next I drag in the letters model and line it up on the slots of the sign board. That's it. When the cube object hits the back of the sign board it "comes loose" a little bit without causing the base to swing wildly all in one piece.

This is a FANTASTIC set up. Gives me much more variety for what I can do with it. I can easily push the letters in tighter to the board, or further out. I can change the friction of the board or the letters to make them "stick" a little more without changing the behavior of the whole sign.

I plan to experiment with motion blur. I think that should take it up a notch even if it is slow to render.

-vern

That looks good Vern its even got a bit of spring/bounce to it

very promising results, Vern! Keep Newtoning!

By the way I don't think I mentioned this, I went with two pegs for each letter made them flat-ish and added an extra "slot" in the sign board. I made the slots for the letters much thinner so they aren't as noticeable and made the pegs a darker color. Eventually I will create a sign board with a series of evenly spaced slots so I can build the signs as needed for the credits using the same sign board model. The current model has two sets just for the test sign text. I will need to have more versatility for the real credits.

I also noticed that "real" sign boards don't have lower case letters. At least none I could find. I decided to heck with reality and created my sign using upper and lower case. It was tricky getting the posts or pegs for the letters to fall exactly at the half way point. If the slots are evenly spaced on the board then the lower case letters have to have posts half way between the top and bottom of the capital letters. I also had to add in "connectors" for the "i" and the "j" for the dots... purely for "realism". Up close it would seem strange that the dots over the i and j were just magically floating or connected.

Woohooo!

Came up with an easier way to add the letters for the sign.

Instead of creating a model with all the text for each sign, I use that choreography plug in that places one model multiple times in a chor at regular intervals for use with newton. So it puts in copies of the same model, one for each letter of the text for that sign, but I can just select each copy and change the shortcut to whichever letter it needs to be. Then adjust position. This is way easier than building a model for each set of letters. If I were building in a model I would import each letter from another model but would still need to switch to bones mode and move each bone holding down control to move the points yadda yadda yadda. By creating in the chor it's easier to adjust the letter positions just moving the model bone. Each letter will have a singe pose to change the thickness of the pegs.

-vern

Woohoo! This is cool.

I needed a way to see how the letters are reacting with the board during a physics simulation. But with the board shifting and moving it's hard to see exactly. I added a new orthogonal camera zoomed in on the right side of the sign board to focus on the letters. I added a translate to and orient like constraint to the camera and BINGO!

Click to view attachment

Camera stays perfectly aligned to the sign board. I can see exactly how the letters behave with different settings and positions.

In this sample I see imediately that if the letters are TOO close to the board they pop out right away because of the force of the board hitting them and the transfer of energy. If I have them stick out more they don't fall out so quickly.

Newton physics is amazing. I am sure it isn't "exactly" like the real world but some of the results I get are so close to reality it's uncanny.

-vern

Great shot keep up the great tinkering

I have another thing I'm working on. At the end of this after or during the credits there will be a character sweeping up the mess. It should be a fairly simple and straight forward animation. However it is the broom "action" I am focused on.

I am using on of those big wide "shop" brooms. I could go with very simple and just have it brush across the floor and not bother animating the "bristles" (just a "box" mesh with a "bristle" texture, no hair). However I think it would be fun to have some kind of warping movement in the broom bristles. I could just use a simple action and hand animate a pose as the bristles bend back and forth but I would like to simplify this and use an expression to control this behavior. So if the broom is moving "forward" the bristles bend back (pose?) and if the broom is moving back the bristles bend forward or return to a neutral position.

Any thoughts on this? Is this possible with an expression? Would it be a matter of checking the amount of forward motion away from a neutral position and add a percentage value to a pose? It would be really cool if this broom behavior could be "automated". It could be included with a broom model so that any time it is used the broom would behave like a broom without having to key frame it. Like if the broom is pushed "down" onto the floor it would automatically "bend". If it's moved back and forth it changes it's bend to match the motion.

-vern

Ha!

5 minutes looking at this after posting and the silly answer becomes obvious. No need for an expression. Lag on an aim at and/or translate constraint combo. As the broom moves another bone will follow along slightly behind causing the bristles to "bend" in the opposite direction of the broom. If the broom is lifted up the bristles automatically return to normal. Pushed down and forward they bend back until the broom stops.

This should work well enough for my needs.

-vern

Aha! Completely automatic broom bristle action! Woohooo! I'm so happy.

Click to view attachment

-vern

The cleanup crew. Just can't find any decent work since those LOTR movies ended...

Click to view attachment

-vern

Troll sweeping letters:

Click to view attachment

I've decided to animate the brush bristles by hand. I don't like how the "automated" constraint is working. I want more control. Obviously the letters are too big, will need to fix that, dang Troll is smaller than Thom! There will be much more stuff for him to sweep up... all the stuff that falls on Thom in the previous scene, beach balls, traffic cones, telephones, as many props as I can handle from the first Extras CD.


Mr. Troll has some of dialog at the end (hopefully). A bit of grumbling about false accusations and always being blamed for falling walls, not getting a role in LOTR or Harry Potter because he wouldn't sleep with the director etc.

-vern

Vern,

Glad to see you back to your A-muse-ing self.

Myron

Change of plans. To save time I'm going with ALL CAPS FOR THE SIGN BOARDS. AS SUPPORT FOR THIS DECISION ALL POSTS IN THE VERNS WORLD FORUM SHOULD BE TYPED IN ALL CAPS AND....

Just kidding, no need to type in all caps. The reason I decided to go this way is that the original "comp" or animatic I did used all caps and it wasn't that bad. Plus it gives it a real feel to it... and... well okay! It's a lot less work. All the letters are exactly the same size. the little tabs or pegs are always in the same place top and bottom, shifted left or right. This will make creating the signs easier since I won't have to deal with lower case letters not being "centered". AND I WON'T HAVE TO CREATE THE LOWER CASE ALPHABET.

So here's my latest sign from the last credit scene (need to tweak the "tightening" poses some more to keep some letters stuck to the board). I also added some motion blur which looks pretty good. I plan to thicken up that dang post under the sign... keep forgetting to do that.

Click to view attachment

I also created a completely new sign board model. It has grooves evenly spaced over the whole surface (holy freaking COW! 65 Newton_ groups for that sucker all done by hand... but it's worth it) So now sign assembly is a freaking piece of cake. I can assemble the letters in the chor fairly quickly and just line them up with the grooves. Setting the poses will be a bit of pain though. I did do a time comparison. I created another entire "sign" text from scratch in a model. I just kept thinking it would be faster... it isn't. Making individual letters and importing to a chor is WAY faster. That is a definite. Managing all those groups (over 100 for even a small sign) and all the bones etc etc... <sigh>.

-vern

looks very convincing.

Woohoo!

This is turning out pretty good.

This sample is not complete. I just sort of rearranged things without resimulating the cloth or physics. This won't be the final timing of the sequence, just wanted to see how things looked with a slightly better render; shadows, motion blur. The motion blur is subtle and I only used 4 passes. That is NOT the hi res logo I need. Don't have that yet. I stole this one from the Hash home page. It will work in a pinch.

Click to view attachment

-vern

Thats good Vern you got it working a treat,well done

AWESOME!!!!

Very impressive Vern!

Man! This is just... so much FUN! I love cloth, I love newton physics. You set stuff up and it just works. It's looking so good and moving along so quickly I think I might actually pull this off. I really have to consider render time but it shouldn't be too bad. I am also thinking of rendering in a wide screen format. 4x3 seems so passé.

This is still a preliminary test for the cloth deflector on Thom walking through the curtain. Works perfectly so no worries. I will probably increase the "resolution" of the deflector for the final but I'm thrilled with the results so far. Can't wait to get the hi res logo. That will look sweet!

Click to view attachment

-vern