Moho Forum

Hi there!

This is my first post here, been undercovered for a while, reading and reading... and reading some more.

I've seen some great works as well as tutorial, and I'm grateful with you guys for helping me indirectly. Am a Grey Kid fan.

Well, this is my very first animation done with Anime Studio Pro, and even though I know it's not great, it's an achievement to me, so fell free to comment, hate, advise, or anything you want.

Maya is one of 5 (main) character, of an animated mini series that I am producing with some friends. Actually its a social marketing campaign targeted to scholars, encouraging them to tolerate differences. Its going to be 10 episodes long with a duration of 10 min each. We've worked in live action shorts, documentaries and TV shows, but none of us has done animation before... well, real animation.

http://vimeo.com/2352069

I've been having problems rigging the character. I am binding layers to bones, but still don't know if this is the way to go. I'm afraid of getting too much distortion when moving the bones. And still don't know how to switch from one view to another, including its set of bones.

Any words of wisdom will be more than welcomed.

Thanks in advance for watching.

Kind regards,

For my taste you can relax the lipsinc a little. It streses me seeing the mouth moving so quick. Any single eye blink in 24 seconds? The rest is fine but not exciting. Camera looks a little strange in the middle.

When I can hear the voice I can make a better idea of what's the story, in thisc omputer I cannot.

I'm afraid of getting too much distortion when moving the bones.

Don't be afraid! just move them and correc the bad points with later point animation. Do it only when you're happy with the overall animation of bones. You'll be very satiesfied after that. Watch the bones video tutorial that is in SM webpage. I think it is from one forum member. It explains how to act to solve point motion after bone motion.

-G

First of all, thank you for your comments Genete.

Genete wrote:For my taste you can relax the lipsinc a little. It streses me seeing the mouth moving so quick.

You are right on that. I am using Papagayo's Spanish voice recognition, and took me several minutes to fix unaccurate word placement. Do you have any tip on making Papagayo "relax" for me. Should I avoid any single letters, like just leaving vowels and some consonants?

I imported an AS pre-defined mouth for testing purposes) and set the .DAT file for it, but when I tried to turn-of the mouth at the beginning when Maya is not saying a word, AS lost every single keyframe produced by the .DAT file. Is this normal?

Can Papagayo be set to 30 fps? Working at 24fps renders in movement artifacts when exporting from Vegas into 29.97fps (progressive).

Genete wrote:Any single eye blink in 24 seconds? The rest is fine but not exciting. Camera looks a little strange in the middle.

None! Am aware of this, and is going to be included in my next test. I think that I forgot to place a keyframe in the middle. It wasn't meant to pan Maya, that's layer translation for a later shot.

Genete wrote:When I can hear the voice I can make a better idea of what's the story, in thisc omputer I cannot.

Sorry I'm lost, aren't you hearing any sounds? There's indeed a soundtrack (voice+music), in Spanish thought.

Genete wrote:

I'm afraid of getting too much distortion when moving the bones.

Don't be afraid! just move them and correc the bad points with later point animation. Do it only when you're happy with the overall animation of bones. You'll be very satiesfied after that. Watch the bones video tutorial that is in SM webpage. I think it is from one forum member. It explains how to act to solve point motion after bone motion.

Do you know how can I achieve this kind of animation for the arms? I think they are using flexi-bonds, but when I do this, the distance between points is not respected and distorts the form of the arm. That is why I chose cut out (binding layers): http://dekku.blogspot.com/2008/10/mall- ... drive.html

Don't now yet if this tutorial you mention covers bones to all its extent. Do you recommend placing the main bone in any specific place? My main bone is at the chest, but I cannot move it without rotating the whole character, actually cannot move it at all, only when I use layer translation. I see here at this animation am telling you, that they rotate the chest without making the characters "spin". Any clues?

I'll definitely take a look at that tutorial.

Cool G! Thanks!

I only have used Papagayo a couple of times and finally had to tweak the phonemes in the real animation. I just opined about the feeling as a watcher of the movie.

Take a look to this thread.

viewtopic.php?t=7244

It as has a lot of tutorials and interesting links to tips that would make your life easier. I wanted to mention you the J Baker's bones tutorial. It is worth to watch it. My recommendation: use bones for rough movement. Don't loose time on very refine setup rigging. Just rig and animate. Then once you finish the animation add the point animation to correct the joints that went not correct. The results are more satisfying than try to find the perfect rig.

And now I've hear the voice. It is very well recorded and the message is praiseworthy.

Take more risks! try to draw her head in 3/4 right and 3/4 left, what about try a half head turn? And what about to change the camera view (playing with the camera allows you to change the point of view of the character without need to make it smoothly!). Just a cut camera movement and the sensation of be live comes around!

Watch some advertisements of that type. Even any advertisement that want to transmit a message. It is not only the voice message but the body language message, the camera director message, etc.

Good animation indeed.
-G

Thanks again Genete! I'll take all your recommendations.

Regarding the views, I am a skilled drawer (I draw like a kid), I am working as director and "animator" of this project. The person who illustrates is working on all the other different views. Will definitely try head turns!

This is a rough animatic we've done for this episode, if you like to watch it:
http://vimeo.com/2187254

Cheers,

Your character design is very very nice. It is appealing, which is worth a lot. With a bit more work on the movements it can be a first class spot. Genete already spotted out the weak parts.

slowtiger wrote:Your character design is very very nice. It is appealing, which is worth a lot. With a bit more work on the movements it can be a first class spot. Genete already spotted out the weak parts.

Hey Slowtiger! Thank you very much. This has been something we've been struggling to achieve. I'll keep you all posted on any news.

I have two questions and am wondering if you can show me some light:

1) how can I make the lip-synch less stressful as Genete says. I am not using point animation for this, its a DAT file from Papagayo. The problem is that when I try to change an image at the timeline, the info from the DAT file seems to be overruled.

2) I found this kind-of-tutorial, but its impossible for me to see how this guy makes the character's torso bone to be moved and to control the knees (its a youtube quality vid). If I am not wrong the master bone he creates always gets fixed in position, as it happens in my bone structures. Having IK respond like this would help me move my characters freely (not its limbs) without translating the layers position.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7t4GONE6r8 [00:06:43]

Thanks in advance!

As we already wrote in email:

1. You should be able to simply erase some keys in the lipsync timeline. Once the info from the DAT is imported, these are keys like any other keys and can be manipulated the same way.

Erasing some is one way to "calm down" the mouth.

A second option is to switch on interpolation of the switch layer, but this only works if you have prepared the different switch layers in a certain way. (they must be vector layers, and the number and sequence of points has to be identical in all layers. Normally this is done by creating one mouth, then multiply this layer and modify the points without erasing any.)

A third option would be to make the mouth positions less different. Watch yourself speaking in a mirror and see how little movement you actually perform!

2. I suppose what you want to know is the secret of "bone locking". In that video, the guy has selected each foot bone and locked it (checkbox on top of window). After that, you can grab the torso and move it, but the feet will stay on the ground. Note that you will only have that much movement left as the number of bones permit. If you want to move the foot again, you must unlock it. A search about "bone locking" will give you more information.


You should be able to move the bones (even the root bone) with the Translate Bone tool (T).