Stwert-Crash Control Battle
 

Well... not sure how much time I'll have before the end of the year, but my goal is to have a complete rendered animation, 10-20 seconds long, that includes modelling (obviously), texturing (UV mapping?:eek:), rigging (I'll keep it simple for this reason), dynamics (rubs hands together), and proper lighting.

My idea is as follows: The protagonist will begin in a comfortable situation, a crisis will arise, tension will increase, and a humorous conclusion will result. I hope that's original, and looking forward to getting going on this.

Good luck to Dango! My only chance in this battle is that he's been away from Maya for a bit. :p

No pressure!

You have a whole 12 days less Christmas, Christmas eve, and new years day (if you celebrate those holidays).

So, no problem that is still 9 days.

Wait, any Christmas shopping or Christmas parties? Well maybe you lose another 2 or 3 days.

No worries, that still leaves you 6 days.

No pressure! God created the world in that many days and rested on the next. But all you guys will have to do is - put together a story, develop a couple character concepts, model, UV unwrap, texture, rig, animate, light, and render something. Cake!

Sounds like you need to add something like building, staining, and vanishing bookshelf and then writing a small 4000 page nova describing the inner most feelings of all the characters in the animation to put on the bookshelf before the end of the year as well.

Sorry, I just could not resist poking a little fun at you.

Good luck guys!

Oh, and I would be partial to a deep beechnut stain on that bookshelf.

Sounds good Stwert!

If we're both not quite finished by the end of the year and are wanting to take them a bit further I'll be open to extending the time limit a bit, we're making up the rules after all! lol

And as ctbram mentioned, there may be a few lost days due to shopping and parties etc, so we can just see how it goes.

Not ever done any animation really so you've probably got a better chance than you think! Haha

Good luck!

Don't laugh too hard ctbram, I just wrote a 50,000 word novel in november (nanowrimo.org).

Just finished all the rendering for the group project I was doing (~48 hrs straight :ninja:) so my computer is taking a much needed (well, probably not) break and I'll hopefully get a good start this evening.

My comment was meant to be tongue in cheek (just trying to be funny).

I have followed both of your guys projects on this site and I am sure you will both put something really nice together. I know the deadline is flexible with the holidays and all.

BTW speaking of that Merry Christmas and gook luck. I need to start working on some original stuff. As you know I tend to specialize in just working from tutorials.

I think I have learned about all I can from those and I am gonna start looking for some material to start modeling some of my own stuff. Or texturing some of my old stuff.

I like hard surface stuff and I think I am going to work on some futuristic vehicle stuff shortly.

Yeah, I know you were joking... I forgot to put an emoticon after my nanowrimo plug :p I should really put a bookshelf together on of these evenings ;)

Good luck with your own creative ventures! I've been doing quite a few tutorials lately too, and I'm feeling like I would learn the most if I alternate tutorials with my own attempts. Too much of the former and I won't really assimilate the stuff I'm theoretically learning, and too much of the latter and I'll stumble around blindly.

Okay, a start... part of a cartoony car. Did some other random props and stuff, but I'm wondering why I decided to model a city. Oh well.

Cool! I like the style you've got going on there!
A city, good luck....lol
I wouldn't worry about finishing on time, I have a feeling I'll be asking you if you want to extend it by a week or two when it comes closer to the time.
We'll both get better results if we do that anyway.

But for now, looking good, keep it up mate!

Not a spectacular update, but I've been working a little bit on various things here. This is an odd looking device, but its purpose will hopefully come clear in due course. I added a custom attribute to drive the gears with an expression (not very complex, but I was proud of my first expression nonetheless ;))
Anyways, hopefully more updates soon.

Looks interesting! I'm guessing that you'll be using more dynamics than I will be as I have zero experience with them.
You've got my curiosity going on what this will end up being!

Ok, time is getting shorter before Christmas, so I felt I should block out the rest of my protagonist. Still a ton to do on this guy, but here he is so far. Pretty rough and dorky looking, haha, but I'm hoping the rigging and animation will give him quite a bit of character. Probably not much will happen from now till after christmas cause I still gotta work tomorrow and then there's stuff going on all the time.

Just to show I haven't quit yet! Little update. I've changed my idea somewhat for a more reasonable animation. Christmas has been spent mostly with family and friends, so despite thinking that I'd do more maya over holidays, I'll probably spend more time after this weekend. I think I'm okay to let this continue on for a while after I go back to work. What do you think of a January 30th deadline, Dango?

Sounds good to me Stwert!
It'll give us both a bit of time to get something decent together.
Liking what I'm seeing from you so far, interesting!

I realized a while ago that I jumped headfirst into this with only a vague idea of where I was going, which may work for some people, but I think I really ended up mostly spinning my wheels. So today I completely storyboarded the whole animation and now I have something concrete to follow.

Here's the location of the short so far. No city anymore. I'm going to have to do a rigging tutorial or two before I get the car and robot guy properly rigged. If there's anything I learned from a previous short animation, it's that an improperly rigged character makes the animation wayyy painful. But my goal for tonight is to accurately recreate an electron micrograph with pencil and paper.

Okay, finally an update (sorry for the long delay :blush:)
Here's my rigged vehicle (and textured with blinns :p). Got some main controls and a few custom attributes for animating things like the button. Still had some frustration with the rigging, but I got to a point where I'm reasonably okay to start animating with it. Does anyone know how to rotate different subsets of geometry at two different pivot points? Simply speaking, could I animate (using set driven keys probably) where the pivot point is? Rigging that robot thing is next.

you could possibly do a set driven key on the pivot point? i dont know how you would do that though, i dont see any option for objects unless you made a custom attribute then linked it via expressions to the pivot point and then used set driven keys on that custom attribute

i dunno how that would work though...

you could just set another control curve to pivot the object at a different point the same way you did it for the first.

so like... if you did a parent constraint on one control curve then do a parent constraint with another curve then you get two constraints showing up in the channel box for the object that's constrained.
then you can just key those (or use set driven keys or expressions)
probably a messy way to do it though... i dunno... no one seems to talk about good practice anywhere when it comes to rigging...

Thanks for the ideas Chirone...
If I understand you correctly, one problem is that you can't parent constrain something to two different curves (curves being the 'parent' or master).

I looked for attributes that change the pivot point, but in the list of keyable attributes, all I could find were things like 'rotate pivot translate x' or 'scale pivot y' which I have no idea what they do. I tested them and got very odd behaviour. As usual, my search in the maya help turned up no help. I'll keep playing around with different things, and maybe do some more rigging tutorials after the challenge is done.

if that were true then that would make it impossible to do what i'm doing for my transformer :D

i'll post a screen shot of what i mean when i get back home...

Oh... do you mean key the parent constraint to different parents at different times? On one, off on the other, then switch?

well you can parent constrain the same object to two different curves (unlike normal parenting) and in the channel box there becomes a new input, one of those inputs is related to the parent constraint which has under it the two constraints that oyu just made
and they have weights, so you can just key those weights

That's interesting, cause when I tried to do that, it came up with the error 'Object is already constrained' but I'll give it a shot when I get home.

Alright, I thought I was finished rigging the car, but thanks to Chirone's help, I spent some more time on it and got it to a much better point.

I don't know where the error came from before, because I was quite easily able to add two parent constraints to the same geometry. Then I used driven keys to switch the weights from one point of rotation to the other based on a custom attribute for my main control. Very nice :)

I also fixed up my idling control so it now idles away when I turn on my idling boolean attribute. (I wanted the car to move up and down very slightly) No manual animation for that, just added an expression based on the sine of the time. The extent of the motion needs tweaking, (it's going like a jackhammer) but it works.

Thanks again, Chirone!

Sounding interesting Stwert, I'm looking forward to seeing the finished short!

I've not really used expressions in mine, apart from two which was in the rigging stage, one for a knee lock so his knee doesn't go haywire when using a foot roll, and one for a forearm twist. I know that we're supposed to use them for this so hope that counts! lol

I've also gone slightly over the length limit now, mostly because I added a little title and end sequence bit to make it a little more "video" and not so much "clip", hope that's ok....

Keep it up mate, hope you get all you want done by the end of the month!

Small update. Getting going on rigging my robot guy. Added blink attribute and some other stuff. Was hoping to finish rigging it tonight, but spent more time tweaking the model, even though it's not a polished entity. Ah well, I'm not letting it bother me too much. What's the point of having a hobby that stresses you out, right? :p

I'll have some animation soon, I promise :D

And the fully rigged bot. Actually, not quite fully, got a couple attributes to reconnect, but pretty much there. Reasonably happy with how it turned out. Let's see if it holds up under animation conditions! Cause it doesn't matter how much fun I had rigging it, if it isn't easy to animate with, it's pointless! :p

If you haven't noticed yet, I work better under the shadow of a deadline. I envy you dango... haha.

Nice, I guess you didn't really have to do any weight painting as he's a robot, did you use a Rigid bind?

Hope he's good and animation friendly for you!

Mostly just used parent constraints for the bones to the parts, but I did use smooth bind on the springy base part, and had to do a bit of tweaking.

I thought I was done the rigging, but I added a couple more controls and ensured that I could scale both the car and robot rigs so that they'd fit in the scene. Finally I created character sets for them both, so I should be onto the animating finally!

Been busy with an evening composition course that I registered in. Looks interesting and promising so far.

On a somewhat related note, marking menus are awesome. I made this one to quickly get to all those little windows and editors that somehow take forever to find in the Window menu > General, or no wait... animation... Big time saver!

Here's the assembled scene... sorta. I was going to do an ambient occlusion render, but it came out black inside the enclosed space. Anyone know of a quick way to do amb occ inside a room? I don't suppose adding a light would help? Probably not, since I tried that. Anyway, just wanted to quickly post the idea.

Yeah, texturing is still kind of a grey area for me....

Hahahahhaa....:p

K, going to bed now.

Nice to see some progress Stwert, looks interesting.

Not tried doing an AO inside a room before, so not sure how you could do that, hope someone replies with an answer as I'd be interested to know too.

Hope you've got your animating hat on mate, not long to go now....lol

Good luck!

i guessing you've put the walls, floor and roof in the render layer you're doing an AO pass on, so the reason why it would be all black is because you've closed the room off so the walls, floor and ceiling have occluded the light from getting in

if you put in windows or remove the roof or a wall then everthing will show up

of course if you haven't then i dont know what you've done wrong! :D

Yeah, everything's on the AO layer, and there's no windows, so I guess it makes sense that it would be black. I was just wondering if there was a simple way to get around that. I'll just remove the room from the layer and add a couple planes for a quick setup. Thanks for the help.

i'm not sure but i wonder if overriding the render stats in the attributes editor of the roof is going to work

if you make not cast shadows or something... not sure if that works with AO passes

Cool, I'll give that a shot sometime Chirone... but right now I got a problem. Didn't see it until I started trying to animate. I can move around my different controls, but as soon as I move the master control, they all snap back to default. I think it has to do with the parent constraints I've got set up. I'll fiddle with those.

The really weird thing is when I open up the file, the robot is in a totally different position, with a variety of the channels on the master curve zeroed out. Moved to two different spots/orientation when I opened the file twice. I was really hoping to get going on the animation. Any ideas? I'll keep working with the constraints.

Okay, I got it... it was a simple matter of deleting the parent constraints. It seems they aren't necessary and were obviously doing more harm than good. Arg, and I thought I knew something about rigging after all that. I guess I'll have to do more... as with everything.

Ok, on to the animating, fingers crossed!

We're rolling now! Got ~14 seconds of animation done... not tweaked or really much secondary animation, but more than just blocking out.

Had another surprise when my hand controls (controlling the ikHandles) stopped working, but found it after a bit of looking. The ikHandles had their own translates that were being keyed. Removed those attributes from the character set, and it was back to normal.

sounds like rigging is bigger than we both thought :p

yeah, not sure, i havent had enough time recently (had to sidetrack into finishing a well overdue over and just over a year old wedding video) to play with my rig that has parent constraints

sounds like you're having fun!

In the shower this morning, I suddenly realized what the problem was... I had the master curve actually a parent of all the other controls, as well as parent constraints on them.... doubly parented? I did the constraints first, then realized I wanted it as an actual hierarchy. Guess I forgot to delete the constraints.

Haha, do you get roped into filming everything too? "Hey, can you film this event and edit it, and make a bunch of copies? Cool thanks!"

Yeah, animating is fun, when everything's working :)

Making progress... I don't have a nice youtube clip yet, just moving through my storyboards. Done over 20 seconds of animation.

Something I found out the hard way: be careful when using normalized animation curves. Things can go really funky when you set keys using character sets when the curves are normalized.

Here's a screeshot of one point. The moment of truth.