United3dArtists Archive

I got another small job to do these wings.. so.. I decided to start today. I have two weeks to model, rig, animate loops and render these. I wanted to do this in XSI Mod Tool, and render with Mach Studio Pro 2 - but I couldn't get it going on my home computer. SO! To my trusty old trueSpace to do them.. and.. let's see how I rig them in there....... and animate. Hmm...

So.. I have to do a Da Vinci one, one out of feathers (two textures and forms) and another either out of light or bat like. I hope it's out of light. They have to choose.

I used Clintons Cloth Bake script for the main form of the wings, then I vertex edited them with the soft selection tool.

Can't wait to see how it turns out.

Looking great!

Love the wing and it should be carried as a clothing item in the Men's shop imo.

A wood and cloth wing would be fun to have sold around the place.

I'm a little nervous on the rigging, but looking forward to it at the same time.


I dug through my archives (cause I had done a feather wing, or a couple of them in trueSpace 6.6 - I had the software baught when I was 17 years old! So.. yeah) and I found my old wings I made. Even the textures. Fortunately I had them burned to disc.. cause harddrives die and I would have lost all that info. I probably should get a blueray burner and burn to physical. It's so easy to trust the electromagnets, but.. at the same time nothing like burnt holes in plastic to last you a decade or two!

So.. Here is my wing from the year 2006.

Now, to modify it, make it unique, and update the textures and things, rig *ahem*. Can't believe I did this in TS6.6!

Looking good. Glad you are getting work too!

James: What goes with wings? Wide tie or narrow tie?

Cheap work! But.. better than teaching English or factory/farm work.



Last wing modeled, wahoo! Now to just model details on the first wing, and modify the second, and.. texture and UV (a little) and RIG.. Rig rig rig.. the big scary part.

I have to do a quick animatic of these though by Friday, according to the cheap contract I got to do them.

I love developing trueSpace.. oddly it's kinda fun. And.. it's fun making things in it. I just hope the rigging weights don't bite me in the butt. I need to think of a good workflow.

Finis wrote:Looking good. Glad you are getting work too!

James: What goes with wings? Wide tie or narrow tie?

String tie only!

Tested out rigging in trueSpace, and then animation. The rigs are very much like puppets, in real life, and can be hard to control without the right kind of IK handles and anchors. I'm still finetuning it.

The animation is also not quite as straight forward as one would expect. Things aren't set in like most typical rigging applications, as things wobble and are kind of.. flexible.

This animation is just a proof of concept, I need to study wing flaps a bit better and see how I can make it look good from a front facing camera. I also need to study the loops a bit better....

Slow progress today, but.. relatively fast. Rigging is fun to start, simple, but animating is harder. I didn't plan this rig very well.

I also still am getting vibrating bones on somethings..

Hmm.. finicky.

Dude, the wings a few posts back look Awesome. They're in my favorite color too! Done in 6.6 you say? even more kudos.

(I just saw what this thread's about. I never looked before cuz I thought this was abt Wings3D which I know nothing abt)

Hehe thanks. The clients didn't like the purple feathers, but they wanted Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.. So here is the update.

I tried to randomize it, according to a reference picture they sent me.

More shots of it.

Thanks to Clinton, I got a handle Jiggle.

But one thing I learnt, if you get really annoying re-evaluated keyframes that seem to "break" your rig and keyframes.. changes your handles to FK, high quality. This will fix this, and to be sure, use Clinton's Jiggle Scripts as an addition: solid keyframes all around! NICE!

IK, is inverse, so the evaluation is from the tip to the root. If you have joints with no angle, it will push and pull on it (creating a stretching bone, or jittery bones, as things get tight by the handle). FK is more solid, as it evauluates from the root to the tip. This eliminates all jittering and bone stretching. Logical! I know! But damn me if I knew it yesterday.

*puts down gun from head*

Here is a test animation.

I started to get into Blackmagic Design Fusion. It's free - well most of it is free.

It's also very fast. I prefer the nodes workflow in Blender, but this software renders very very very quickly. And.. it's very powerful.

I put motionblur on my things using YUV12 codecs and Avisynth MV scripts. It.. actually looks nice.


My animation still isn't great, trueSpace playback isn't awesome with rigs. But it's adequate. I'll get better by the end of this I'm sure.

So, I have to do 4 loops per wing, one each coming day, and then.. all good. All at different BPM.

Here Are the other wing updates, with final shaders and form.

Fully rigged, and.. yeah. Once you get the hang of how the IK handles work, and all.. rigging in trueSpace is actually quite the pleasure.

Simple, does the job. You can even edit morphs and geometry and UV's and all AFTER you've rigged it.

Enjoy!

Looking good. What is BPM?

I like Fusion. I learned compositing on version 5 which I think was the first true node based version of Fusion.

clintonman wrote:Looking good. What is BPM?

I like Fusion. I learned compositing on version 5 which I think was the first true node based version of Fusion.

Thank Clinton. Your jitter script is handy and has helped the animating I must admit!

BPM is beats per minute, a DJ musical measurement - to assist the VJ (Video Jockey). So.. I convert the beats per minute to frame intervals, so I know how long and for how many bars I do the loops.

The VJ software can modify this, but probably best to keep the framerate close to the BPM.

I am loving Fusion right now. It's just.. so fast at what it does - and I haven't even learnt the motiongraphics and 3D side of it yet! What a gem of a software.

Ryoker Wing Loops - Wing of Light

Here are 4 different loops for the wing flap so the VJ can map them onto the DJ. There is a bit of a jutter with the loops, as I didn’t line the wings up very well, I am sure the VJ will have similar issues, but it’s cool. Animated in trueSpace, rendered from trueSpace, composited and FX with Design Fusion 7, and Virtual Dub with Avisynth and MV tools scripts for motionblur (not the best).

Took me a lot of effort to put in an Alpha, as the game engine didn’t render out in alpha, and to add motionblur, I couldn’t do it to video with Alpha, but only in the YUV12 colorspace. So.. I had to put in Alpha AFTER I did the motionblur, then put in the glow afterwards.. but it took me a long time to figure that out.

This is great!

Yes, it does look great. Very good job Draise

Thank you guys, you both commenting really puts a grin on when I work.

I have one more day to deliver. I'm now rendering off. It's nice seeing a second pass by each frame, then do that by 4 passes, just takes like 2 to 4 seconds a frame - then the composite, a few seconds later. The rest is just manual labor (setup render, setup nodes, hit render, etc).

UPDATE

Finally delivered on time (3 days late) and.. got it done. They wanted a lot of changes and extra features so I worked overtime.

Oh well, I am happy with the result. I must say animation in trueSpace is fast. The click and drag anywhere to move said bones with custom anchors, or use the IK handles setup like traditional systems also.. is great.

The weighting in this is a bit strange - but it's also a pleasure figuring out.

The wobbly bones and things, once you know how to rig the way TS wants you to rig, it works fine. I have to try it out on more advanced rigs later on... hmm..

But.. I must say these are probably the best animations I've done in trueSpace so far. And.. I can see other animations being done with trueSpace for fun. Still more juice to squeeze out of it!

Funny that it's my freelance tool to earn cash.....

I also learnt a lot about BlackMagic's Design Fusion, the free version.. and I must say.. it HELD UP! Took everything I threw at it like a champ. Reliable, fast, and very efficient. The 3D side of it isn't so reliable (or I don't know what I was doing), so I'll probably stick to that in trueSpace or Blender - but for 2D compositing, lovely - maybe later 3D compositing.. but I like it. A lot.

So... I'll upload a "muestra" or showcase soon.

I did 4 wings, Davinci Style, Parrot Style, Light Wing, and Angel (copy of Parrot with different effect, shader and slightly different form and feathers). Each had 4 different loops.. so that was 16 different renders and composites. I did it all in 2 weeks from zero. The feather wing, fortunately.. I didn't have to re-model or make textures for the feathers from zero cause they were.. done by my 17 year old self ages ago.