By the way it's looking like another 12 hours remain on the render.
So I've been thinking. This shrink-wrapped skin technique. I think it's been both a success and a failure. It's a success in the fact that it works and the results speak for themselves. And the potential for growth and such is unrivaled compared to traditional rigging.
On the other hand, the skinning process is incredibly tedious and slow. It is a new step not needed by traditional rigging a...
2017-09-16 19:34:59 +0000 UTC
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So... The animation is done rendering. I fixed the hair problem before I rendered the hair.. And that's good. But the problem is the hair was bad when I rendered Naomi's pass. And my fears are confirmed.. When she talks, the shadows of her hair flop around on her forehead.
So I am going to render a new pass fixing just the area around her head. If I were to re-render the whole pass it would take another 4 days or so. But if I restrict the rendering to just a...
2017-09-16 01:53:05 +0000 UTC
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So... I just finished the first render pass... The slowest one. Naomi's body.
Then I started the hair pass. And this is when I noticed something wrong. It seems when I simmed her hair simulation the hair wasn't tracking her head.. It was tracking her jaw(!). So every time she talked, her hair moved around. Can't believe I never noticed this before.
I am re-simming the hair now, which will be good.. But the render pass of Naomy's body still has shadows ...
2017-09-13 17:41:01 +0000 UTC
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Rendering has begun! Â Yayyy!
2017-09-09 05:20:07 +0000 UTC
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Great news, the skin simming is all done and the pieces are all put together. I could start rendering now but there are about 20 or so frames that need manual adjustments... Cleaning up some glitches. I'll keep you updated.
2017-09-08 04:51:15 +0000 UTC
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Two more body parts skinned. Two more remain!!
2017-09-03 13:39:11 +0000 UTC
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This will be renamed in the future. Thank you for supporting me as I make these animations!!!
2017-09-01 00:22:59 +0000 UTC
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One more body part skinned. Four left! :D
2017-08-31 04:02:48 +0000 UTC
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Howdy! I now have six bodyparts complete as far as skin goes. I think I have five left.. And hopefully I got the hardest ones done already.
Also note I will be posting a paid creation at the end of this month, counting towards a future animation as a continue to work towards getting caught up. Thank you all for your support and incredible patience!!
2017-08-29 18:48:35 +0000 UTC
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Hey everybody...
Been a long time. Well I've been having a hair-pulling time here. In the previous animation the shrink-wrapping process involved lots of manual adjusting of the skin to keep it hovering above the muscle. I knew that since this animation is roughly 4500 frames long, that would not be a good option. So I dug in to find a more automated solution to the process.
I found it. But it wasn't until I had tried five failed approaches
2017-08-24 21:28:35 +0000 UTC
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I am pleased to announce her muscle flexing animation is done.. Time to put her skin on!
2017-08-13 09:09:44 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone,
Sorry for the lack of updates. Just letting you know that Naomi's muscles are now moving with her skeleton and it looks fab. I just need to animate her flexes, shrink-wrap her skin on (no small step), and then render.
Stay tooned!
2017-08-07 06:18:36 +0000 UTC
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I've "activated" Naomi's muscles... That is they are now in the scene following her skeleton. It's pretty bad ass. There were a couple of "holes" appearing when joints rotated that I had to fix and that took most of the day yesterday. I'm in the process of re-animating her hands and fingers where they interact with her muscles.
I also made another teeny little technological advancement.. Unless I told you about this already? I don't remember.. But I ma...
2017-07-28 16:22:59 +0000 UTC
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Helloooo! Lots of news and such...
I just finished animating the camera movements, Naomi's eyes target and her eyelids.. As you may have read in the previous post I stumbled upon some new sorcery to allow me to automate the eyelids so they move along with the rotation of the eyes. Pretty slick and saved me hours.
In other news.... There was a video editor on sale this week on Steam. Vegas Movie Studio 14 Platinum. I picked it up because it was such a great b...
2017-07-24 03:21:56 +0000 UTC
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Using the principles I covered in the video tutorial I shared in my last post, I was able to automate the animation of Naomi's eyelids.. Way cool! That just shaved a bunch of hours off of my work.
2017-07-23 20:51:33 +0000 UTC
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I discovered a new rigging trick.. Honestly the difference between the final output will be almost negligible, but it will simplify the rigging process a teeny bit and give more accurate baking results. It's highly technical, but I made a quickie tutorial video for the general community to learn from. If you want to see it it's here:
https://vid.me/ohWjC
I will implement this new tech in Naomi for this current...
2017-07-21 19:43:04 +0000 UTC
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Just finished animating her fingers. I thought I could do both hands in one day but the animation is so bloody long.. Once the muscles are in place and flexes animated I will have to alter some of the finger animations. But it's all coming together!
2017-07-19 21:55:39 +0000 UTC
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Lip-synch animation is COMPLETE! Whoo-hah!
2017-07-17 17:28:22 +0000 UTC
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Lip-sync animation underway! I'm nearly one-quarter of the way done.. Whoo hoo!
2017-07-13 10:06:33 +0000 UTC
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Hair is all simmed! Here's Naomi looking like an airhead. Don't tell her I said that.
2017-07-12 01:21:13 +0000 UTC
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Holy Toledo! I just finished animation on her hands (not her fingers, but that's easy). The hands in this animation were especially complex because she is holding on to things and letting them go a few times.. Any time you do that it's a big deal. But anyway it's done now.. More to come!
2017-07-10 17:46:21 +0000 UTC
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I'm making really cool stuff here.. I'd love to show you bits of it but I don't want to spoil anything. Here's a checklist of what's left:
Transfer mocap data to body and clean-up: DONE
Animate Breathing: DONE
Sim hair
Animate Face
Animate hands/fingers
Bake joints
Animate flexes
Sim skin
Render
2017-07-06 15:46:32 +0000 UTC
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Happy 4th of July!
Hope you have a great day off! I'm not taking the day off though.. Muahahah! I'm making awesome progress!
2017-07-04 14:07:56 +0000 UTC
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That was annoying. It seems that somehow the animation got out of synch with the audio. Making the audio 97.1% of it's original length fixed the problem. Time-stretching the audio introduced choppy artifacts. So I had to then manually move every bit of the original sound to line up with the timing of the time-stretched version. Everything is back in synch at this point.
Now I can animate her breathing using the adjusted audio.
2017-07-02 23:41:30 +0000 UTC
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I just sent out retro requests for the latest donations (Thank you!).
If you had an arrangement with me and I didn't get your goods to you please send me a message!
2017-07-02 08:53:50 +0000 UTC
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Hey all! I have just finished cleaning up the motion capture data for Naomi's torso. Even though this animation is nearly 5000 frames long, I did this faster than last time thanks to some new techniques.. And it looks fabulous (that is it moves fabulously).
Sorry for the delay on sending out your retro requests.. I wanted to keep plowing through this until I reached this milestone so I can relax. I will now send out all of your retro orders.. If I miss you send me a mes...
2017-07-02 07:35:45 +0000 UTC
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Thank you for your support with my animations! I am getting the current animation done much faster than the last one! Should get caught up soon! Thanks again!
2017-07-01 02:28:19 +0000 UTC
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This is SOOO crazy! Turns out the importing of motion capture does not work correctly unless auto-key is turned on (facepalm). Since that is the case, the tool should turn that on before importing!
Anyway.. I've got it working great now and work can continue. The attached video clip is not Naomi's animation... I was just screwing around. :D
2017-06-29 23:00:09 +0000 UTC
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Hey all,
I have the sound all edited down and then recorded the motion capture synched to it. All looks great so far.
But I am having trouble successfully exporting this data to my 3D software. It worked for Naomi but Naomi 2 is giving me shit. I'll keep playing with it and let you know what's happening...
2017-06-29 11:07:06 +0000 UTC
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Welp... It's looking like this will be one of the longer animations I've made. Roughly 2.4 minutes. I'm hoping the mistakes I learned from making Naomi 1 will help me get this next one done faster!!
2017-06-28 03:16:20 +0000 UTC
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