United3dArtists Archive

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 20 Jan 2011, 19:08

Hey, I got a nice job making a new TV advert! I hope I will not need a help, but I hope if I will, I can get some here :) Iam rather modeler than animator, so I dont have that much experiences.

It shall be remake of this awesome state of art but very old advert:

here is the man almost done:

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 20 Jan 2011, 21:21

i would like to know opinion of experienced animators on rigging... how would you build a skeleton in MoStu? I need whole movement incl. hands, fingers and talking, maybe nose movement.

so... body, seperate legs with joins set to main body bone, hands as subskeleton and fingers? and mouth and nose?

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 20 Jan 2011, 23:27

I will assume you saw this tutorial written by Frank?

http://www.frankladner.com/mostu/"

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 21 Jan 2011, 11:37

thanks, I did... also designdevil video tutorial on youtube. I quite get how MoStu works. What I need is more practical experiences than teoretical.

DesignDevil · Post by **DesignDevil** » 21 Jan 2011, 14:13

Hi bitkar,

if you want i can send you the model (including skeleton) of my "magican" character. I have rigged him in MoStu but for the most parts the objects are directly connected - not really weightpainted.

For all others (including you) here the description:

I used a different technic to rig this character as discriped in the tutorial videos. Why? Well, i found out that the "T-Bone" is a very cool bone which gives a lot of control for the body.

The main skeleton is the body including the legs. The root is the hip and the legs are created like in the tutorial video (attached joint). As you can see, all bones are T-Bones !!! Why this - well, this gives me total control of rotating the body, the head, the legs, the feet etc.

Attached to the main skeleton are 2 sub skeletons each for one arm (the third sub-skeleton is for the eyes). Here i also used T-Bones.

Now i made a sub-skeleton for the hand himself. It is just one bone and the bone is the "Poses Holder". That means here i store the hand poses. How this works - i explain in the next post.

DesignDevil · Post by **DesignDevil** » 21 Jan 2011, 14:28

Now comes the "hard work" part. You can see in the attached image that i use a sub-skeleton structure for each part of each finger of each hand. In my case the character has 2 fingers and a thumb and every finger has 3 parts. That means from the BASE of a hand i have 9 sub skeletons.

Well that sounds crazy but it works better as to use just bones. I don't need the blender to control the hand poses, i just click on the BASE skeleton and directly choose a hand pose.

Let me try to explain this.

I try'd many times to create a hand rig where i control the fingers with the blender but it never works very well. Most of the time the fingers are scrumbled or rolled to whereever but i got never the pose that i want. Or i could control the rig with the blender (i.e i created more inbetween poses) but in the final animation the fingers are jumping around etc.

With this setup above i got what i want. Straight forward hand poses. Quick made and also quick animated. The bad side: You have a lot of skeletons which you have to select to create keyframes. A lot of mouse click actions. But - for the "normal workflow" it is acceptable. Because you animate at first the character. Things like hand poses are the last things to animate.

Conclusion: for me this setup works very well. And remember: More work on the start is less work if you animate.

DesignDevil · Post by **DesignDevil** » 21 Jan 2011, 14:40

At last i would say that i also use my Visual Selector PlugIn to select the joints that i want to move (animate). I also have thrue this a direct link to the hand poses etc.

I wish you and all the other animators out there a lot of fun and good luck. Let the world move

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 21 Jan 2011, 14:57

thank you very much for sharing experiences. Well... using T-bones looks pretty cool. I will try to use them. For fingers - I will keep them simple. No need to animate 3 parts of fingers. I thnk I will have to use weight painting anyway, coz my character is made of plasticine. So its one object - a monolith (eyes and bow-tie are seperate). He will bend a lot.

any idea how to make him grab some other object in hand? I mean is it possible to keyframe, that the object will be atached for a while to hand or something? anyone solved that problem? Or I will have to just match that motion? maybe attaching, rendering portion of anim and then detaching?

ok, so lets sum it. I will make legs with joints joined into body bone as in DesignDevils tutorial. Using mostly T-bones (legs and body, arms too just every human bone that is able to twist). Arms will be subskeletons of body. Hand will be subskeleton of arm. and fingers will be subskeletons of hand.

What about head? subskeleton of body? and head will have subskeleton that will make him move his mouth, maybe another for nose?

this gets pretty complicated :D

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 21 Jan 2011, 17:00

one q: about poses - everytime i use poses, doubleclick them, it will restore to default position (place). But when I walked the character away from the starting place, is there a way to use poses and mix them with maintaining the objects location? or I need to position the object to proper place everytime I use poses? (which will make it usable only for subskeletons, i think)

DesignDevil · Post by **DesignDevil** » 21 Jan 2011, 18:14

Well, the Poses function stores also the position of the skeleton in the world or - more exactly - the relative position to his parent object.

There are many ways what you can do.

- Use the puppet stick method. That means you create a skeleton (just one bone) and all other skeletons, sub-skeletons etc. are a child of them. You can "move" the whole character with the puppet stick bone and you can pose the character because the poses are relative to the puppet stick.

- You can create a simple object, i.e. a cube, and add the skeleton as a child of them. Make the cube invisible. With him you can "move" the character and the poses stays intact.

The "pro" on the second method is that you have more control over rotation and moving the whole character instead to the puppet stick method. Especialy that you can type in values is a good feature. ( i have a tutorial about this on my site -> MOTION STUDIO TRICK 01 )

Is it also possible to move the character WITH poses directly. The method uses the Mark / Register options from MoStu. You should watch the MoStu training videos from caligari about this ( see here ) or you read frank's tutorial.

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 23 Jan 2011, 18:12

a scene with that two buddies. The rainbow was requested, it will appear at the end after eating the vitamines :D

iam already playing with riging and animating... its a lot of fun but veery hard and time consuming :) I hope designdevil will be a proud teacher :)

froo · Post by **froo** » 23 Jan 2011, 18:34

Very nice bitkar!

DesignDevil · Post by **DesignDevil** » 23 Jan 2011, 19:05

Looks very well so far.

And yes, animating is a hard work and time consuming in all points starting from rigging

Everyone who try this knows why studios needs years to make a complete movie - and they have 100s of people all experts on their part.

We try do do all by ourself, modeling, rigging, animating, rendering ... in conclusion - hard work.

Anyhow, i wish you enough energy and good luck.

Don't forget to create backups every time you change the work

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 23 Jan 2011, 19:37

thanks ! iam used to make "versions" just saving scene "as" with number, truespace changes the number everytime automatically, thats great ;)

well riging is maybe done... iam still not sure about the Tbones. On one side its great but on the other it twists the bones more than normal bones do, coz the third point of the Tbone is not moving with the bone but its moving as another IK joint, cousing the twisting. But it can be fixed easily. anyway MoStu is awesome "toy" :) its really capable of making nice poses and natural looking movement.

DesignDevil · Post by **DesignDevil** » 23 Jan 2011, 19:59

Well, using T-Bones is not a "you have to use it" - it was just a idea for a better control of twisting bones. You dan also twist the normal bones but without any reference (just with the twist slider), except your eyes.

To use T-Bones was easier for me in my case. It is not the final solution. You have to try what works better for you (or good enough).

marcel · Post by **marcel** » 23 Jan 2011, 20:35

DesignDevil wrote:Looks very well so far.
And yes, animating is a hard work and time consuming in all points starting from rigging
Everyone who try this knows why studios needs years to make a complete movie - and they have 100s of people all experts on their part.
We try do do all by ourself, modeling, rigging, animating, rendering ... in conclusion - hard work.
Anyhow, i wish you enough energy and good luck.
Don't forget to create backups every time you change the work

you can add "create a story, sound, music, special effect, post process, video editing" to the list when you work alone on a project of movie. That is a good experience to learn a lot of things. This may discourage but freedom of personal creation is enormous, compared to a big professional team in which you will have a defined role and often repetitive. The ideal to start is to try alone, then start with a small team of 3 or 4 people who know each other well and are complementary (ex: a writer, a modeler, an animator and a musician). Hollywood or freedom is the choice.

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 23 Jan 2011, 20:45

I totaly agree with marcel. Its a challange and I like to do all of this.
btw: in this procect I will not make audio. Profesional actor will dub it and sound masters will make sounds. So my job is the visual part only.
learning how to walk.. like a child, from the first steps :D
DesignDevil: using Tbones is great after all. I have some nonTbones there and they twist also alot. So its really better to use tbones. thanks, you were right and I followed your advise, so i was right too :D

btw: i know there are mistakes. its just test

LeonRegis · Post by **LeonRegis** » 23 Jan 2011, 22:13

Bitkar the video isn't showing because you just need to put the video code ( that group of letters and maybe numbers after the ''v='' ) between the youtube script like this

Code: Select all

[youtube]fivipVRkSYg[/youtube]

HTH

btw I like the walk, it's a good start, I never reached something close to that =(

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 23 Jan 2011, 22:21

thanks, iam used to that in other phpbb forums you put whole link ;) now it should work (the original old advert video too, take a look its nice piece of art)

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 05 Feb 2011, 17:32

a new version.. new budies and plasticine look.

what do you think?

bitkar · Post by **bitkar** » 08 Feb 2011, 19:10

project is dead due to comunication problems with customer :-/

good is that she will pay for the work done so far.

another good thing is the experience I gained ;)

Tommy · Post by **Tommy** » 08 Feb 2011, 19:23

Really, really sad to hear!!! It was really nice to read your thread and the oppurtunity to make a living on 3D animation. Keep on, despite this trouble!!!!!!

marcel · Post by **marcel** » 08 Feb 2011, 23:08

With time we learn to live without being frustrated by the cancellation of a project. Especially when we have nothing to prove. For those who start, it's harder. What i say is remember the positive aspects and analyzes the failures to make them strengths for the future.

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