i was assigned to this task, looked at the choreography and was a bit surprised...

almost everything seems to be done already, lipsync, body movements.... only thing missing are facial expressions...

am i supposed do do them? i should be doing them in the chor, right?

what about the sounds like lighting up the match and puffing on the pipe? i could offer my help here too, i´ve a pretty good tube microphone and could record the sounds by myself...

What you are seeing in the chor are the "extremes" or, as we call them "keyframes" (I know, the term keyframe can be confusing). There is a lot of stuff that happens around these "extreme" keyframes. For example, all the body parts of a person almost never move at the same time. The hips, torso, arms, hands, fingers, head, eyes, etc all move at different times. Also you can add other actions between the existing keyframes if you like.

Until you get very comfortable with the rigs (they are pretty complex) and with animating in a chor which has several overloaded actions, it might be a good idea to keep the existing keyframes and just add all the secondary motion. You can, of course, move keyframes around in order to offset the motion of the body parts. Later, after you have animated several choreographies, and you feel very comfortable with animating, you may feel the need to make more radical changes, but please don't move the camera.


That's cool that you want to do Foly work. I'm not sure how Martin wants to handle foly on this project, but I'm pretty sure we need to get all the animation in a sequence finalized and approved before any foly work takes place.

If you would enjoy doing them, go ahead - you're supposed to be having fun. Animations gain SO much from sound effects. (Don't get distracted though.)

that´s what i wanted to know, if i´m allowed to make some changes... one more question: the over all length of the scene is not to be changed, right? i mean if i´d think that i need a few frames longer pause here or there to transport some facial expressions or something.... i don´t know yet if i´ll feel the need of doing this, but if, can i?

i´m used to animate with the squetchrig, so i won´t have that much problems with it i think...

anything else i need to know before i get started?

martin: i´ll definately have fun doing this, so i´ll go for it... if you need anything else to be recorded yet just tell....

If you are comfortable with the squetch rig and are comfortable animating in complex chors, then all we ask is that you try to follow the script.
The purpose of the "keyframing" stage is just to ensure consistent quality animation and to give you someplace to start.

As far as length, I don't think anyone has gone through everything and calculated the lengths of all the scenes so make sure the movie fits within a certain length. So the scene lengths are not cast in stone. However, Be Careful when extending the time! I know from experience it is waaay too easy to think I have to extend the shot for several seconds when I could have actually done something more powerful by using less time.

The final renders will almost certainly be edited when the movie is cut together. The shorter your scene is - the better chance you have of not having anything cut

just wanted to say i´m on it, just animated for 2 hours and wanted to render it, but i have some issues:

when i´m trying to render on my mac the scene in shaded mode a:m crashes at frame 10....
when i´m trying to render with my pc version i get an error-message: "Failed Init Bound render Info"...

has anyone an idea what´s going on???

Upload the project to svn and someone will take a look at it.

i´ll try something first, maybe i can solve this problem by myself....

anyway, rendered it with other settings, final, 1pass, took 1 hour for 8 seconds, but no problem, started the renderig yesterday before i went to bed...
nothing finished yet, just a quick wip....

animated the first 8 seconds of captain bill, focused on the smoking part... tell me what you think so far....

Careful about changing the camera settings. We'd like to have the instances refer to the original camera so only the original needs to be changed to effect them all.

On the animation, I like the smoking part. The beginning is abit dark. But it looks like Bill is turning his head to the right. Is he looking at the ork? I think the ork is in front of him....you might want to check the previous sequence. On the head turn anyway, only his head seems to move but his chest would also move a little with a head turn.

Good first bit!

I think he is turning his head to look down at his pipe as he fishes it out of his pocket.

Sebastian, will you please upload your current progress to svn? The last activity on that chor is 8/19/08. Please try to upload some kind of progress at least every two weeks, even if you are not finished. Thanks

progress uploaded to svn... sorry, but i even had much less time left the last two weeks as i thought.... hope i´ll be able to make some more progress within the next two weeks...

Thanks. As long as you are plugging away at it, that's cool. I know you have a life

here´s a little update... sorry for taking so long, but my life is a bit complicated at the moment, had to throw my business-partner out, so i have a lot of xtra work to do, all the bureaucracy and stuff...
about the animation: still some tweaking to do, trots movement for example is stopping abrupt at the end, and orks comb is following a bit to slow the last few frames... i added additional 10 frames after orks question, it loooked a bit too hectically to switch the camera only one frame after he finished his sentence...
hope you like it...
i´ll be recording the sounds for lighting the match and puffin on the pipe this weekend.

cheers...

I wondering if you can afford to give you some more time and I thinking of having bill strike the match on the side of pipe? That's the thing that is striking to me is how is the match being light? Just a suggestion get official approve from MArtin or Holmes before doing this but I think it might add to this scene

Go ahead.

Great job. After you animate Bill striking the match against the pipe, move on the the next part.
That last bit, where they are walking into the cave, shouldn't take you more than a half hour. Then call it done.

Please upload what you have so far to svn

Thanks!

Nice work! I think the "Yes I suppose we can" could be more excited/thoughtful sounding. I might re-record it.

Hi Sebastian, nice work!
I really like facial animation on Bill when he lights his pipe, the puffing
looks great. I also like that you have given attention to eye movement,
witch is the main objective of the audience(way more important than lipsync).
One thing maybe, after Ork speaks(the short OrK's animation works well, by the way),
slow Bill's turn towards Trot has great effect, but when he turns back it gets a little slow
and more linear. Lively done so far!

Michel

thanks michel.... glad you like it.... about the headturn at the end: i was thinking that something doesn´t seem to be completely right, too... maybe i´ll add a short pause before he turns back, so the headturn will get a little faster....

recorded the sounds this aftenoon, before i was going to add them to the chor i wanted to move all keyframes from 03.12 - end to 06.12 - end to add 3 seconds before the pipe-puffing for the lighting of the match... and i´m so loosing my mind over this, please help!!!!! i´ve tried it for two hours now, but a:m won´t move all the keyframes.... sometimes only the facial expressions of one character are moved, sometimes the keyframes of another character not at all, i don´t get it... i´ve tried to select a character first in hope i could move the keyframes of each character seperately, but nothing seems to work out for me, it always ends in a mess where nothing fits anymore.... is there a trick i don´t know about? this has always worked for me on my own projects, but i´ve never had more than one character in a chor and i didn´t use different folders for facial expressions and stuff...

commit to svn and I'll take a look at it.

it is commited....

There are some keys in the user properties folder that don't drag off the first frame.....such as show eye targets. Try moving all the actions, but don't select the keys in the first frame.

aaaaahhhhemmm, what??? i didn´t select the keys in the first frame anyway... i´m not sure if i understand correctly what you´re saying

You're trying to move all the actions forward no? You can't select all the "red boxes" and move them in one go. You'll have to go into each action and move it separately. Some actions will need you to go into the keyframes and move them......then you don't select the first keyframes.

the actions are not my problem ken, it´s not that big of a deal to put them in place after i moved all the choreography actions.... i was trying to move all the stuff with the "move keyframes" command from the menuetab...
do i really have to move it all by hand???

Then I don't know what you mean. Maybe Holmes does. A picture might help if he doesn't.

ok, i´ll try to explain it more detailed.... i was using the "move keyframes" command from the menue-bar. then i put in my values, in this case it was move from "00:03:12 - 00:56:18" to "00:06:12 - 00:59:18", and i thought a:m would move ALL the keyframes after 00:03:11 three seconds forward.... i think that´s what it´s supposed to do... if the actions wouldn´t have been moved that wouldn´t have been a problem, i mean actions can be placed easily somewhere else.... but it just didn´t move all the keyframes animated in the chor, and THAT is my problem. i´ll try to move it all by hand tonight, let´s see, maybe it´s not that elaborating as i think...
but thanks for your help anyway....

ok, did it by hand, i´ll be able to post some progress tomorrow....

I moved the frames for you Sebastian. Next time you try it, be sure to activate the Key "Translations", "Scaling", "Rotations", "Constraints", "Pose" and "Other " buttons at the bottom left of the program window.
It might be different on a Mac ... I've never used AM in a Mac.
I committed the Chor to SVN. Be sure you "Update" before you work in the chor again.

Oh .... crap. I was working on it and didn't see your last post. If you have trouble, let me know and I'll fix it again.

yeah sorry about bothering you with this... but thanks for the tip with the buttons, i didn´t know that...
anyway, here´s the almost final version, i´ll do some final tweaks tonight, but then i´d call it done...

ready for the next assignment

forgot the attachment, i was out yesterday, still a little dizzy

Congratulations, Sebastian! Looks good.

awesome. nice job.

thanks guys.... just did the last changes and wanted to upload to svn.... the audio files were no problem, but when i tried to upload the chor, i got the following error-message:

Operation ist fehlgeschlagen: svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: The version resource does not correspond to the resource within the transaction. Either the requested version resource is out of date (needs to be updated), or the requested version resource is newer than the transaction root (restart the commit).
svn: CHECKOUT of '/movie/so/!svn/ver/1195/active/data/Act%20II/Seq01-Ork/Sc02/2_01_02.cho': 409 Conflict (http://project.hash.com)

tried and tried it again, but i always got the same error...
i attached the chor, maybe someone of you is able to commit it successfully... any idea what´s going on?

Okay, Sebastian, rename your copy (to keep it safe), and do an SVN Update - the .cho should be put back on your computer. Let me know if that works out for you?

hanks martin... yes, i guess so... did you upload the one i attached the post before? is it the one i downloaded now then?

Yes.