RobK
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Posts posted by RobK
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Hi everyone.
Hapy Xmas and all the best for New Year.
I picked up a cheap Fujitsu ST 5112 tablet for sketching out things on the go.
Bargain prices now.
EIM and A7 both have the same problem - will only support 1 3d view. The rest will not update. Put A7 into software mode to fix this, but EIM does not have this so still broken.
Tablet runs Vista Business - already tried the compatibity modes.
Would prefer to run XP tablet, but can be tricky to sort / license.
Any ideas - thanks Rob.
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Hi Tomas, Igors
I bought Encage a while ago. Initially had a problem in 7 with encage and copy protection. The Igors kindly gave me the new rsc file which sorted this out.
Have now switched to PC and have the same problem.
Would it be possible to have the rsc file to make encage function with 7 PC.
Thanks, Rob.
PS have already asked on the old email link - no reply, but may be out of date.
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Hi, has anyone got the old Amorphium PC installer. Seem to have my password just not the installer. Must have deleted the old download in an untidy moment.
Still find it useful for the odd, odd thing.
Thanks, Rob.
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Ola Rob,
From Matt:
“lol
There never was a Linux installer. There was a Solaris installer, but I do not have that version and it was specific to a 10-year old version of the Solaris operating system.
Mattâ€
Thanks
Tom
Thanks Tom, Matt,
just thought I would enquire - still see it on some of the older websites / adverts.
Can I follow it up with another obscure question. Has anyone got any version of EIAS successfuly running under Wine - I noticed that Lightwave 6.xx (?.7) is listed so I am assuming there is a way of getting dongle recognition going.
When I try I can get everything installed, but I cannot get anything to launch as far as trying to find the dongle.
Might this be a processor thing - the little potable I would like to run things on has an i386 compatable VIA chip I think.
Would be useful - opens up a lot of cheap hardware / software options, particularly for portable stuff away from home. Obviously I'm not going to render anything serious with this setup, but its an easy way to play with rig setups etc.
Thanks, Rob.
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Does anyone have the old EIAS (3 or 4 I think) Unix / Linux Installer. For various obscure reasons I would love to try and run this with Ubuntu.
Thanks, Rob.
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Hey Rob,
Wow! I thought I was good at writing the long books. Greatly appreciate your insight on this. Question, do you have 2 parts for the legs meaning if the camera where on either side of the model do you have a left and right leg? I noticed there was a toe that was higher than the other but didn't know if that was just one object or 2.
As to your shadow and line crawling I've seen this in the past but haven't rendered anything recently with v8. That is part of the reason I posted the question I used a sphere with EIAS v4 and back then the term was faking it. I had better results rendering without shadows, compositing the foreground object with an expanded drop shadow creating an outline effect (BTW animated outlines in AE generate some odd noise).
Thanks for your input and your shader recommendations. I will try to render my current model and post some of my test. I'd still welcome any tips or advice on modeling rendering.
I was cruising the EIAS3d on Vimeo and found these clips that lend shed some light on the possibilities.
tolerable crawling outline
The robot portfolio piece is from:
Any information on the space ship would make sense. I guess Rob described well formed geometry that the render can detect easier will help.
My apologies for not using names on the creators of these pieces, I know I've seen them around for a long time.
Hi,
my little creature has two legs - I'm shooting for stylised cutout type character but I want to try animation with Jurassic Park Raptor real world weight and camera moves.
I imagine a combination of camera mapping and illumination lists that tie lights to specific objects and move with the animation would tidy up the shadows and allow alot more to be done in camera. Again probably good for a character walking in one direction without lots of rotation that make the shadows look in the wrong place.
Other possibility - if you can get your animation out of EI and in to Carrara - Carrara's NPR shader is very flexible. You can set it to give a nice sketchy/line effect that looks good in animation and comes out with a good quality alpha. Lots of shading possibilities depending on the brushes you choose. Also you can purchase Vectorstyle 2 which outputs rather good swf and illustrator files with that flat shaded look. Just not enough info out there to make me want try rigging anything complex in Carrara. You can pick up C7 for about a fiver off ebay - magazine freebies, but you get the pro version without the baggage.
Attached - couple of bits from an old project still in development hell. R2 style robot made in EIM for outline shading only really. Black background from Animator, white background a more sketchy feel done in Carrara7. Overall project was to generate an animated outline that could be layered over an old blueprint paper type so that I could play with interaction of 2d and 3d shapes - finish some day.
Regards, Rob.
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Hi Guys,
I'm working on a piece that requires 2D (comic frame by frame other artist) and 2d cell (3d - me) and regular 3D backgrounds (me). I was wondering if any of you have animated something similar to this:
Animatrix -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exEO94Nflng&feature=related
or
(disregard the sound track)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83O79Iq8jRc&feature=more_related
I have the DVDs for this series and my understanding was that XSI was one of the main3d apps with 2d cell rendering used.
Or the Gorillaz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw8PpYBiDsc
(guitar closeups and drummer)
If you have animated something similar, my question is for modeling and rendering. On the modeling front is it safer to model a character like SouthPark / paper cutouts? Or is it fine to model the full 3d element with volume whereas the 2d cell shader and outline assists in the look. How much of the look is in post? ( I know I saw a sketch robot in the gallery that has blue print turn into 3d with 2d cell, curious about the techniques used in that one)
In some cases it seems like an after effects 3d layer composite.
In the animatrix case my question is the cell "look" that the 3d objects cast in the beginning of the pyramid down to the street level and in the second clip the camera flythrough of in the begining showing the army and the robots (the robots cell / phong looking shader with outline on).
What additional shaders if any are recommended for EI, or what plugins do you all recommend that may ease producing this kind of effect?
I'm sure you all have busy schedules but any tips are very much appreciated.
Best regards!
Hi,
like the Animatrix stuff. Although some of the more gruesome stuff slightly nausea inducing despite animation. The one when the girl goes to find her cat and they find a glitch that allows them to play in zero G is rather charming.
Been playing with hand drawn look for a while now. The observations below may not be a solution but might cut down the leg work.
If you look at older Dysney stuff the characters are actually coloured alot flatter than you think, at least to my eye, and the shadow lines / areas move much less realistically than you think once you analyse it. At the same time there is great control over the lines and silhouette. This kind of economy of style gives a beautiful final result.
This is where 3d cell look really falls down. The shadow areas are far too smooth and realistic crawling backwards and forwards across the surface of your model / character. Also you have almost no control over any line, again autodrawn lines crawl backwards and forwards and appear and dissapear in a way that you just wouldn't draw it. The human brain is extremely good at pattern recognition and picks this kind of thing up instantly.
In the UK Bob the Builder and Fireman Sam have just gone fully 3D/CGI. If I ask my work colleagues who have young children and have nothing do with computers what they like, I often get ' the old stuff is good but the new stuff is rubbish.' When you try and draw out what is rubbish about it, it is all the things that CGI is good (and bad) at - crisp clean colours, smooth movement, lack of real texture, repeating texture, lack of finger prints and bent bits of animation clay, bright lighting, dramatic cinematic camera angles.
So, cell look is a tough sell.
I find characters brought in from any SSD modeler like Silo really disappointing. You can control the flat cell look but virtually nothing else, the shadows and lines bounce about. You can try baking the shadows onto your model in some way then animating it. Despite seeming unrealistic this actually gets you alot closer to the original 2D look but obviously really falls apart if your model turns around or you rotate the camera alot; and you still really have no line control. You can get some control over lines if you carefully break your model along the lines where an illustrator might draw them ask Camera to shade these edges, but this works quite badly with SSD type models.
NPR shaders - in my experience this works for print only. With every frame the texture is redrawn significantly different, so in animation it just boils. This really jumps out.
One solution I have found with mechanical characters. Build them in EIM, in simple wireframe mode you get an idea of where Camera will shade the edges. Try and do very little cutting, this just seems to add extra loops which get shaded - try and build as much from artful primitives as possible. Add fake npr lighting with textures or other shaders to stop boiling. Animate like you are telling a story in an old platform game - little camera or in camera rotations. Render an edges layer and a texture layer if possible, then comp.
Textures for lines and shading - hmm, actually rather difficult. Draw something in Anime Studio Pro, colour it with a nice real world texture and animate over a scanned paper background and everything looks rather crisp and gorgeous. Now try and repeat this process in Animator and you spend a very large amount of time just trying to get those textures mapped and right. Also, in my experience all the crispness rapidly falls apart too close or too far away from your model limiting the value of doing it in 3d in the first place, because you have to lock down the camera alot.
Painting high res hand drawn look texture maps in something like Carrara or Bodypaint can work quite well, but again works best for shots where the camera positions are relatively locked.
Another solutions is to use a style that is hand drawn ish - gives that feel without trying to be too accurate, but is internally consistent to itself. The little character on the attachment is a first shot at dino/monstery type thing that my son might scribble on a bit of old lined paper (no eyes yet I,m afraid). I'm trying to give the feel of hand drawn while using Animators strengths. There is a base shape with a paper texture made entirely from shaders. The scribbles are all wobbly lines drawn in Illustrator, export in eps, output from EIM as wires and then shading broken by applying something like Eroded. The advantage of this setup from my experience is that it gives a much crisper render that remains over a very considerable range of camera angles/positions. Also shaders are very flexible.
This little character seems to animate well with bones, everything staying in registration, although you have to be a bit careful how EIM puts out the geometry. Less successful with deformer type rigs.
Sorry so long.
Hope some of this helps - sorry if any falls in to the sucking eggs category.
All the above just experience and opinion about the difficulties with process, not a slag off of EI, which I rather like by the way. If you have solutions, love to hear them.
Building my little monster to test some rigging and animation ideas - rather inspired by the rig interfaces in Pepe's TD showreel over on CGTalk.
Regards, Rob.
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Hi,
Thanks Richard, I might try and contact him one more time, some of the older tutorials still looked interesting.
Thanks Tom for taking the time and fixing the downloads. Looking forward to 9 with interest.
Hey Felix ... I can see you at the back of the class ... did you throw something. Come on now be honest.
Regards, Rob.
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Look at this video:
I think that EI users need a really good riiging tutorial, becouse I don't know if some of the things that the animator is able to do with this character are achie¡vable with EIAS tools, like when he puts the hand of the character push the head and then the head moves with the hand with just a single click, etc... Take a look, it's pretty cool.
From someone who spends alot of time trying to make simple objects move in complicated ways I would have to agree.
With the death of various old websites there is almost no current rig stuff out there for Animator. Luckily I managed to download quite a bit of what was available. Also, notably 3DNY took my money and sent nothing before it closed its doors - anyone here involved in that, shame on you.
I kind of thought, perhaps wrongly, that everything was going into the render and that Animator was becoming part of the pipeline to camera from other animation apps, or that the focus was on stills from hard body objects like architecture. Animation tools in Animator are beautiful to use but have been relatively static for a while.
I don't want to start a conversation along the lines of if you don't do this I'm leaving because that's just a good way to embarrass yourself, but it is worth noting that modern rigging doesn't really happen without a well documented scripting language and or node based control. Without the ability to set up arbitrary links between objects you can't really set up a modern rig interface.
I got hold of some training stuff from Alonzo - excellent. Made a lot of stuff click into place, particularly using XP to build quick rig interfaces.
At the risk of completely hijacking this thread and being stoned out of the forum, I think that your pricing model is upside down. It is worth noting that at whatever price you set your software I'm going to grumble about it. Why, because I want everything better, brighter, cheaper and I want it like yesterday, oh and it needs to help save the planet as well. It is worth noting however, that I handed over about 90 bucks to Alonzo without blinking and regarded the cdr I got in return as very good value. Why, because like most people I view purchasing things that help me learn very differently from purchasing things.
I'm not suggesting that you set up Animator Foundation, but personally I would drastically reduce the software prices and start generating a lot of paid for educational materials, shader presets, base models, ready rigs and lots more.
Anyway apologies for hijacking. At the end of the day software isn't religion ... it is er ... more important than that ... er sorry ... might have that the wrong way round !
Genuinely interested to hear your opinion ...
One last thing. I do actually live in the kind of UK village that US films like to portray where the elves bring packets of information every other Thursday if you bribe them with magic gingerbread. So, streaming video of any kind as an educational tool feels like asking your pet goldfish for help with algebra homework. Please can we just have some downloadable quicktime vids as well.
Regards, Rob.
hey what was that ... did one of you throw something ...
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Ola Rob,
Send me the project, let me take a look :)
Thanks
Tom
Thanks for the offer Tom.
Decided to take a slightly different approach - maybe play with it again in the distant future.
Regards, Rob.
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Hi everyone,
having some problems texture maps.
I'm making some small 2d monsters in a hand drawn style - like a childs drawing of dinosaurs.
Process
Outlines start in illustrator.
Use EIM to generate a nice single layer billboard type polymesh.
Into silo to generate UVs - using recreate UVs per polygon as this seems to paint really well in Carrara.
Into Carrara 7 - using as a cheap painting solution - paints very nicely.
Out to Animator using fbx ver 6.
Into Animator and select use UVs and normalise. Everything OK except texture map only aligns when x and y co-ords set to .5.
Renders well except that polygon outlines can be seen faintly.
Example - I have a small spiky creature painted green overall and then in a separate photoshop layer generated within Carrara I paint on orange spots and orange spike tips etc. When rendered each orange polygon is outlined by a faint line of green showing through from underneath. Tried lots of different settings - no solution.
Anyone else tried this / got a magic cure - Carrara 7 being free is a very cost effective painting solution so would be nice to solve.
In the attached file I have turned off blur and anti-alias to make it stand out a bit more.
Thanks in advance, Rob.
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Hola RobK
You can try with type Ink and Density 50 for sample.... will made a similar effect without anim texture.
Thank you
Hi,
thanks for the help - need to play around a bit more but that is looking more useful.
Regards, Rob.
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Hi everyone,
I have a character rendered mainly with outlines to give the effect of a drawn blueprint.
I have added some shading using the NPR Lite shader set to give a light pointillism mainly responding to the diffuse light. The effect is a light stippling of white dots that softens the hard outlines and gives an impression of depth.
However the texture 'boils' even when I set the light to match object movement.
Is there a way to stop this and effectively bake the shading.
Thanks, Rob.
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Hi everyone,
working my way through the Deformer Rig DVD from Alonzo - fantastic.
Animator is a real joy to rig in.
I'm a recent convert to DVDs having used training books for years. But Alonzo's DVDs just take so much of the pain out of learning this stuff.
I would really love to see Alonzo's DVDs adopted and released formally along side a DVD of Ians excellent tutorials - if everyone involved is willing of course.
In terms of income generation this is the sort of stuff I would be willing to pay for month after month - look at VTC and Gnomon.
Weirdly I've always thought that a bit of a paradox exists with software - in that people, myself included, will argue about the value of an upgrade endlessly, but are happy to fork out large amounts for quality training materials on a regular basis. This seems to me a good business model - it is working very well for Blender.
Regards, Rob.
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It would be really nice if shaders could just see the vertex colours in any strength map of an object.
Then you could just create some really nice complex shader effects without having to go outside and paint maps or re-import models with vertex colours.
This would be fatasic for complex organic shapes with a single skin and it would be a large step in the direction of Modo where you can effectively paint with procedurals.
For me this would be a big must buy feature.
Regards, Rob.
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Hi everyone,
what is the best strategy for rendering large images with plugins like Placer on a single processor machine of modest means.
Time is not a problem, but I am trying to avoid RAM limits with Placer by breaking up the image.
I am using Placer to add fur to a rat (not very original but it is what I need to get done at the moment).
Thanks, Rob.
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Hi,
just purchased Encage - cannot get it running. Just get a copy protection warning.
Tried reinstall dongle drivers and main app - no change.
Using 7.0.1 and Mac 10.4 .11.
EITG no help.
I'm afraid this time its make or break for me on this one. Any help appreciated.
Regards, Rob.
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another way is to command-option click(on a mac) on the top-most object in the hierarchy's check box in the project window and then it and it's children will turn off...if you control-option click it will turn off everything below the object you clicked on, regardless of parent child relationships...
or those commands may be vice-versa...
Thanks guys,
thats been really helpful.
Regards, Rob.
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Ola Rob,
Do you want a Foreground layer with Alpha, then your 3d, then your Background (having alpha or not in the background)? all in your Camera viewport?
Thanksss
Tom
Hi Tom,
sorry to be greedy but ideally I want multiple foreground layers (+ alpha) and multiple background layers (+/-alpha) that I can view all together in the Camera viewport. I have a complex scene derived from 2d and 3d sources to layer up so that it gives an exaggerated depth of field. It is a cartoon / illustrative environment rather than photo real. Being able to switch all the layers on and off would be very helpful.
Thanks, Rob.
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Hi,
if I have stacked a whole lot of foreground and background layers in the cameras Roto/Comp list is there any way to show all of them simultaneously in the 3D viewport so I can see my whole scene briefly.
Regards, Rob.
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I believe you're right, Mark. I had the same question a few weeks ago and that proved to be the correct solution.
Thanks everyone - I knew it would be in there somewhere.
Regards, Rob.
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Hi,
is there a way to reduce the size of bones in the 3d vew port - not their overall lenght just the way they view in order to reduce scene clutter.
I haven't found a way yet that doesn't functionally alter them.
I'm working my way through one of Alonzo's excellent training DVD's - it is probably in their somewhere, just haven't got to it yet.
Regards, Rob.
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Ola RobK,
What do you expect my friend? Render time visibility or faster feedback on EIAS viewports?
Thanksss
Tom
Hi everyone.
Sorry, I don't think I explained fully what I'm after. I want to turn off visibilty in the working view port for characters with complex parts and rigs - so that I can work on one character at a time and also speed up view port feedback.
Thanks, Rob.
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Hi,
how do I control the visibility of a large number of objects. I have tried loading all objects with inherit visibility turned on and then parenting to a null and then turning off the visibility of the null. This method does not seem to work.
Regards, Rob.
Old Modelling Toys
in EIAS General Forum
Posted
HI everyone,
I still like to use Modeller and Amorphium from time to time.
On the PC Amorphium died after Vista - but appears to run really well in Microsofts free VPC with XP as guest OS.
Modeller starts to have drawing errors (rulers, mouse etc) with Vista onwards. The old 3DTK Modeller runs well in VPC but I can't get modeller 5 to see the dongle from inside VPC - any ideas.
Also any ideas if this works with VPC running inside a Mac running Parallels.
Nice to use the old toys once in a while. Also it is sometimes useful just to get a nice fac out the other end.
Regards, Rob.