Maybe I should just buy some clay and a good camera...

[jwalt]

I keep coming up with stuff that looks like claymation, not that there's anything wrong with claymation. The intent here was a conversation on a Greek fishing boat which was interrupted with the nearby surfacing of an Italian submarine. I came "close." I thought the boat needed to move with the gentle ocean swells, but I came up with a hurricane. Any insights into how much movement is too much movement?



Thanks in advance.

[Armageddon]

You need a better gif converter. And you need to learn how to animate properly instead of going frame by frame. Frame by frame doesn't work well for 3D, you need to tween between the animations. Are those guys even rigged?

[Ghost]

Apart from what Armageddon already said, I don't think that the movement is too much, it's just way to jerky. It should be a gentle, barely noticeable swaying as long as the characters sit, and the harsh movement should happen when they get up.

I actually like the overall look, it's rough but it has some charme. If you did that in actual claymation it would stand out a lot. There's an old sidescrolling shooter that was done in claymation, and it's awesome!
[imgzoom]http://images.jayisgames.com/platypus.jpg[/imgzoom]

[Anian]

Also, have you noticed in movies and such, that people in a submarine stand...well they couldn't do that if the submarine was coming out of the water at the angle you made. It's very much a controlled ascend, while yours is more of a bottle full of air jumping out of the water.

[jwalt]

@ Ghost  Thanks. I believe some of the jerky motion is also covered by Armageddon's tweening commment. I think you are also correct in that the boat's motion was too much for the existing weather conditions.

@ Armageddon  Thanks. These are all sPatch models, without bones or rigging. I rendered in Bryce 7, using origin handles for pivot points. Bryce does offer keyframe animation, but I've yet to get it to work (my shortcoming, not Bryce's). Why Bryce and sPatch? Because I have them at least partially under control. Would welcome a suggestion regarding a gif converter?

     Edit: Thanks, also, for your other suggestions. In other words, I should maybe leave out the sub's bridge crew, looksouts, and gun crew?    I did give Gimp a try for the gif file. I messed up the delay time, and I couldn't get Gimp to let me change it? Here it is, slightly accelerated, from Gimp:




@ Anian. Also thanks.

[Armageddon]

I would highly suggest getting 3Ds Max, the student version is free if you punch in some false information.

As for gifs I always render out each frame in Max and put them together in GIMP, never have color bleeding close to what you have. Also you are starting on a really large scale, character models and full vehicles. You need to practice a lot more which is why I suggest Max, there are limitless amounts of tutorials on every subject. Make stuff like this to start out maybe.

[jwalt]

@ Armageddon

Your suggestion about Gimp to make the gif files seems a good one. I thank you for it. Regarding where to start, I submit:


I modeled this in sPatch, and rendered in Bryce, using Bryce's keyframe animation to move it around.

[Ghost]

Blender is also rather good, and if I remember correctly TrueSpace is freeware now that Caligary is defunct. I had good fun with that program.

Also, the ice tea looks good; much less bleeding!

[frenzykitty]

I wonder if animating frame-by-frame as opposed to tweening is how Aardman achieve that claymation look on some of their 3D productions?

[awakening]

I don't think you can really say "oh this looks kind of like claymation" and then decide that you should do claymation instead.
Claymation is much harder than 3D animation in that you can't do previews and change things around before doing your final render.
You do it and take photos.

Plus, you still need a solid understanding of the way animation works before diving into claymation - don't assume it's a cop out, because it isn't.
It's really hard.

[Anian]

You can tween, then just remove frames. Animation is usually done by having 12 frames per second instead of the usual 24fps, but those frames are duplicated so it's still 24 in the end - first and second frame are frame1, third and fourth frame are frame2 etc.

[cat]

... which is called "on twos" if you want to look that up.

[jwalt]

@Ghost

I have a number of modeling software programs on this system, including a free, late edition of TrueSpace. It has the same problem, for me, that most of the other programs have; I get lost in all the buttons/features. Here is a screen capture of TrueSpace, with the much simpler sPatch modeler interface inside:



sPatch continues to run quite well in Windows 7 and has to have the easiest learning curve of any program out there.

[Tosek]

I am new to AGS, but have some serious experiences with doing 3D. Nowadays I can absolutely recommend Blender 2.67. There are so much great tutorials out there (just check Agenzasbrothers) and the programm itself is awesome powerful and absolutely compareable to 3D max, cinema 4d etc. And it is getting more and more features every day. Just think about the new freestyle renderer (=render engine which is specialized to render out toon style graphics).

I agree that learning such a tool is a lot of work, but it is not that hard as it seems.

regards
Tosek

[jwalt]

Armageddon's and Tosek's comments had me up late looking at a couple of the modelers I have on this system that "do bones." All I got was a headache, so I pulled one of the models from the boat into Bryce, used Bryce's "origin handles," and made some 8 frame walkcycles:



I think these look usable. I have more doubts about the sideview:



I've appreciated all the feedback, and I would welcome comments about these walkcycles, particularly the side one. I already know the height should vary, and I need to move the camera closer, and I need to figure out why he's moonwalking. I didn't use the imagezoom tags, since these are fairly big anyway. Regarding the model, I know it could have been better, but the more I work with the fellow, the more I kind of like him just the way he is.

[dactylopus]

It looks like the side view is playing backwards.  Try reversing it to see if it looks more natural.  A little bounce on each step will go a long way.

The style is interesting, and with some practice you should get much better at the process.

Good work so far.

[frenzykitty]

It's definitely getting there, I can just seen when the front cycle switches over to the mirror image, because of some shading on the chest that is not symmetrical. And I also agree that the side (and to a lesser extent the front and back) walkcycles look backwards. Try reversing them (as dactylopus has already suggested).

I'd give it another 2 weeks of practice and then I think you'll have something a lot more polished.

Also, i don't think moving the camera would achieve the change in height you refer to (known as head bob) - perhaps look at some reference footage and use that as a frame-by-frame reference.

[jwalt]

@Dactylopus and Frenzykitty

I should probably use a smaller font in this true confession... The image I was relying on for the walkcycle, which was one posted on the forum elsewhere, was walking to the right. I started out with the character walking left, so I flipped the walkcycle image. That would have been okay, only I still went left to right on setting it up, so the natural result was moonwalking. That will be our little secret. Don't tell anyone else, okay?

I enrolled the dude in an aerobics class, which corrected a size issue between front and side views, but seems to have introduced a slight hitch in his get-along. I gave him some new clothing.



I also decided to try generating some quarter views, since I was lugging the camera all around, anyway.



I notice an issue with the left knee, and I should probably have killed the shadows in Bryce. I'm not showing the front and rear walkcycles, but they display a shadow which might be hard to explain if the little guy ever winds up in an actual AGS game.

@Armageddon

You have no idea how much work your Gimp suggestion has already saved me. Thanks for the prod in that direction.

[Anian]

On the character with the gray t-shirt, you seem to have some problems with un-welded vertices on the torso. There are sharp lines, which usually indicates that the surface cannot be smoothed out properly, which usually means that two or more vertices maybe are in the same place, but are not actually connected/welded into one single vertex -> so the software thinks it's two different surfaces with sharp edges.
You have the same issue on the sides of the torso of red shirt guy.

The gray guy has a smooth animation, but as dactylopus pointed out, seems to be walking backwards, while the red shirt guy has a twitch while walking, you should probably smooth that out.

I haven't actually dabbled in Daz software (the makers of Bryce), but I think Daz Studio (which is also free) seems like a quick and easy thing to learn to make walking animations, bones, figure models etc. (much of the stuff is already made you just have to do slight adjustments).
And I know you want to do stuff now (was that way myself), but Blender really has a very big number of tutorials for everything you want to do.

[jwalt]

A question for all you folks wanting to ship me off to Blender Summer School: I've got Blender 2.64a on this system. Is there any way to change the interface background color from that dark, dark gray, that effectively blots out the menu items, to something more readable?

Additionally, I have Anim8or on this system. It seems like it would also provide some of the tools I'm being told I need. Any opinions about Anim8or? It looks like it may be out of development in view of the dates I'm seeing on the website.

@Anian

The majority of the character is made up of deformed spheres, so there are numerous unwelded points. sPatch could have spun up a better body shape, but I was just playing around. I still think he has his own charm, but it looks like I may be the only one who thinks so.

@Dactylopus and Frenzykitty

I knew I could count on you guys to keep my moonwalking secret. You both have such honest looking avatars.

Edit:

@Everyone

I've loaded this thread up with so many images that, based on what I'm seeing, it is becoming a pain to load. I will keep this in mind for the future. It may just be my connection, but if it isn't, I'm sorry. I'll not post any more images in this thread.