I will be starting this sequence shortly - but before I do -

Holmes: I notice that Bumpy man seems to have been rigged with an early version of the literig - shall I try to correct? - or are you still working on rigging him? I didn't want to conflict with you if you are still in process.

I also will probably texture him as well at some point.

I also notice that the proxy house is referenced in the chor. If I switch it to reference the real house, with the real house assemble action, I noticed that the placement of the house is in the middle of the road - I assume I should just work with the proxy house for now ?

Nancy I just uploaded an updated Bumpy Man to svn. Please have your way with him.

Regarding the house being in the middle of the road ... hopefully Chris can answer that. Otherwise you will probably have to open the action and delete the channels for the main model's Model bone. I haven't looked at the action, but I'm guessing that will fix the placement issue.

As you know, there isn't anyone standing behind the curtain. There isn't anyone standing by to fix issues. If *we* don't fix them, they probably won't get fixed.

Thanks Holmes. It will be fun to animate Bumpy with your new literig. I can change the default arms to be IK off, and Face controls to be 0 - if you'd like? Don't know if that's what you intended.

re: Bumpy house - I will fiddle with the real house placement to be off the road - to approximate where the proxy house is currently situated - My guess is that Chris might be a goner (along with some missing textures for house) - but I will try to contact.

I am also thinking of giving Bumpy Boy a "Renaissance Candy Mannish" look to go with the quaintly crafted dialog and exuberant "shakesperean" interpretation by Ken (eg: Goodness me! applesauce and twinkly pop tarts or ...something like that) - The Bumpster seems to reference flowers, finger foods, and smelly winds alot.

As you say, there's no one behind the curtain anymore to rein in my rogue-ish, loose cannon, out-of-control ways.

Yes, please. Sorry about that. I just didn't catch it.

Have your way with Bumpy Boy. Can't wait to see what you come up with.

Awesome Nancy. I just saw the hippogyraf scene from TWO on the Hash home page- you did an excellent job animating him (it?) to my voice track. Can't wait to see how Bumpy man comes along.

Also, if you need something rerecorded, let me know!

Done with this scene.

I didn't do any texturing for Bumpy Boy, as I noticed Holmes called his texturing status done and that Holmes was fiddling with him.

Sorry for the large file size - it's 1.5 minutes long.

EDIT:re-started this on 5/1/09

That's a big chunk of scene! I like your reaction shots.

My goodness, Bumpyman does go on.

I'm doing the next sequence and I've a 25 second monologue left to do. Not tempting. I hope these aren't the first to be cut as they're a pain.

Anyway, good work Nancy.

Hey Ken and Nancy, if you don't want to animate some bit of monologue and the story still makes sense without it, then just cut it out of the chor so I know not to render it.


Wonderful job Nancy! It looks great.

Grrrrrrrrrrr....in the words of the great Yogi Berra - "it's deja vu ...all over again "



Now ya tell me.

Holmes - I was looking at what you changed already for 2_06_01 - and things I notice in the few short hours between when I uploaded - right off the bat:

1) the bumpymans house doesn't sit on the landscape - it appears to be floating (look at frame 122, 1007, 1827, etc for example) - I hadn't noticed this before. Not sure if the landscape changed or the house? Perhaps it was always like this?

2) It appears that the keyframes/channels for Bumpymans Eye Master have been deleted from his chor2. There does appear to be empty channels for Eye Master in his face3 chor. There is something screwy going on. His eye movement had been deliberately animated with Eye Master.

3) Camera work has changed - some I like better - some I don't

4) Bumpy probably needs more light? (compared to other characters) - he seems to be in shadow in some frames, camera angles.

5) I noticed that rendering is set to go to frame 2270 - I only animated up to frame 2241

EDIT: screen capture of frame 2240 uploaded to show floating, light, eye direction missing

I think I fixed the floating house issue, at least I hope I did.
I'll try to track down the missing Eye Master issue on Bumpy man
I'm rendering to 2270 to give me some leeway for dissolves/fades when I edit the scenes together.

Rendering these Bumpy Man scenes are really challenging for some reason. After a bunch of trial and error (which probably resulted in Bumpy Mans eyes getting messed up somehow) I've chopped up the renders into foreground, background, and characters only, and composite them back together in editing.

Looking good Nancy!!!!

Good Job!!

George

OK Nancy I got your Bumpy Man eye action from the chor you uploaded and applied it to Bumpy Man in the current chor as as a separate action. The project/chor is comitted to svn so please take a look at it when you have a chance.

As far as the camera angles go. We can play with those, but not quite yet
I'm actually in the process of rendering this scene. Once it's done, I'll let you know (will probably take a couple of days) and then I would like you to adjust the camera angels you would like to make better in the current chor.

Please don't change the *timing* of the keyframes for the major cuts - it doesn't matter for the camera drifts. If you change the timing of the major cuts, it will add a new layer of complexity of trying to figure out exactly how the changes have affected the already rendered frames from the shots before and after the shot(s) you changed. For example, if there's a shot from frame 357-462. If you don't change those times, all I have to do is re-render frames 357-462.

But if you change the times, like, if you move the keyframes so the shot is now goes from frames 325-457, that will change the previous shot too. So, if I re-rendered the shots you changed, there is a good chance something is going to get wonky.

So to sum up, please feel free to change the camera angles Between any Hard Cuts (where keyframes are 1 frame apart). But please Do Not move the keyframe positions in the *Timeline* of the hard cuts. Hope that makes sense.

I'll let you know when all three render passes are done, so you can do your thing.

Oops. I moved the camera keyframes a few frames (14 I think) in my shot as I felt Woot was answering too fast and a pause was required. So, it only effects the camera keys after that shot.

I haven't started rendering your chor yet Ken, so you can do whatever you want with the camera. Of course, as Nancy knows, I have an irresistible urge to mess with the camera on all scenes I touch. So once you let me know you've finished your current scene, I'll open it up and do one more shaded render ( and mess with the camera, I'm sure) and then I'll commit it. Once I commit it, you can open it up and take a look. If you see some camera angles you want to change back, shoot me an email as soon as possible so I won't start rendering it right away. Once I get your message, you can change the camera back to what you had originally After you do that, I won't touch the camera again unless I have to in order to hide some technical issue. Then I'll start rendering.

I caught that. Have you forgotten that Woot spelled backwards is Trot? Or maybe it's Toom spelled upside down? I forget.

Hey Nancy, on my last commit to svn, I said I "finished animating 2_06_01" - but I lied...
I actually finished animating 2_06_06, but I mis-typed it. Thought I should let you know

I did commit 2_06_01 as well, but that was for rendering purposes. I think I finally got the bumpy man set to render in a reasonable amount of time. It was taking 2-4 hours per frame - and that was with EVERYTHING set Inactive except the characters and the lights. Now the character-only frames seem to be taking less than 5 minutes each to render. Yippee!

I think it was a combination of factors that all conspired together. Here's what I did. Well, actually I did a bunch of things, but here's what finally worked.
The Bumpy Man landscape was huge, and only a small fraction of it was ever seen by the camera, so i deleted all the unnecessary patches. Even though the landscape was inactive, the gigantic size of it still seems to have made an impact ... somehow.
Bumpy Man had a cell turb displacement material applied to him ( I did that). I changed it to a Bump material.
The lighting action had a sun light that was casting ray traced shadows. I changed it to a huge klieg with Z-Buffered shadows.
One other thing I did early on - I think this one was necessary just to render the darn landscape - I removed the grass and snow hair from all patches that were not within a small radius of the action. There was never hair covering the entire model, but I cut it down a lot more, lowered the density a bit and made really big hairs with image maps which are pretty tall to hide all the bald patches.

Ugh. Ugh. UGH. I just took a look.

Putting the eye master animation in a separate action makes it all but impossible to tweak/change. I don't know about you - but changing stuff in an action does not show up readily, easily in the chor on my PC - I have to go thru all sorts of incantations - banging on space bars, hitting the enter key, and then waiting an interminable amount of time (as A:M acts as if frozen) to see it finally register (if ever) in the chor window. Thats why I hate having dialog in separate actions as well. It takes forever to see the changes in the chor. Sometimes I have to close A:M and reopen for it to register.

The eye movement was partially based on camera/framing, and where characters are located relative to each other, as well as emotion, dialog. It will be impossible to tweak in this state (if necessary). It would have to be redone probably.

Perhaps it's best to use the original chor that I uploaded even with it's less than perfect camera work? Seems like the IBL, lighting changes, camera changes would be easier to add back in, rather than having to redo animation, and fix these newly introduced problems.

Perhaps, maybe it's easier to import a stripped of camera, lights CHOREOGRAPHY version of what I did into your base chor containing your changed camera, lighting. Would that work better for you?

This stuff is too touchy. If it ain't broke .... Don't touchy. Please.

Other stuff:

I notice that there are now a zillion phantom rotoscope folders (ok, more like 12) that show up in the project under the chor folder.

I also notice that the project is asking for currently non-existent proxy models (trot, bumpy, bill). I assume you are making those.

ps. I always thought going overboard on modeling landscaping, props, buildings was going to be a problem, for render times and memory load - that Bumpy house (beautiful as it is) has individually modeled tiles on the roof - seems extravagently unnecessary, wasteful. Same with some of those trees that seem to have individually modeled leaves. And decals usually render way faster than most materials, and using displacement ? YIKES!!! I never use ray tracing shadows for animation. But as I am fond of saying, I am a lazy twit. 1-2 minute max per frame is about all I can stomach for animation render times. 5 is great if ya got yourself a render farm.

pps - I also realize you're doing a helluva lot of stuff - and stuff is gonna get broke no matter what. Been there - done that - I'm still doing that,

That sounds like what I went through until I decided to save it out as an action.


It was broken. It wouldn't even render. Then when it rendered, it was clear it wasn't going to do so in this life time. 2_06_04 and 2_06_05 gave me trouble too, but at least they rendered within a human time frame, even if I did have to break them up. It should now render in a decent amount of time. So do whatever you want to it. I'm not going to touch it any more.


Your welcome.

Me neither.

However - I took a look at Bumpyman model in text editor - it seemed to be the source of the phantom rotoscope folders - I deleted the containers in model and uploaded to svn.

OK I lied. I touched.

I took your chor which had your camera changes, landscape changes, lighting changes etc and deleted the character & path animation.

I took my chor and deleted camera, lighting, landscape etc - leaving just character animation and path

I imported my character animation only chor into your camera, landscape chor. - Appears to look as expected, EYE master is in correct chor

I don't like how the the camera is at frames 1822 - 1879 as remnants of scarecrow obscure the animation - so you can fix that unless that's what you intended. All the other camera stuff is fine (and better).

I uploading to svn - I think this should work. You should check it out.

EDIT: I just realized I didn't include the proxy models in the project - I wasn't understanding why/how they were there, so you'll probably have to redo that.