United3dArtists Archive

Hi

Just Experimenting with Morphs on a default character. I created a few morphs, then recorded them to a track by keyframing (following the Morph section of the manual). On the first track I recorded the eyelids moving up and down, and the eye winking...I then right clicked animation panel where the track names are and selected "add track", then keyframed a morph I had made of the mouth opening and closing on the second track that I added. Seemed to record but when I scrub or hit play button, I only get the eyebrows moving (first track) but the mouth movements (second track) don't seem to be playing back. Checked my settings and seems ok to me, I can only make one track at a time the "current" track, but don't think that affects playback, only record.

**After eyebrow movements were already recorded, I also tried keyframing/recording the mouth movements inbetween the eyebrow movements on the "same" track but that didn't work either. Can TS record different morphs of the same character within the same track or onto separate tracks? I'm new at this so maybe I've got some settings wrong that I'm not aware of. Thanks!


Musikman

When you say "track" do you mean in the Morph panel or in the Animation Editor?

You can keyframe each morph track individually, but you need make the value for each one keyable using the Keying Panel. Once that is done you can select them in the Animation Editor and key the positions.

"Track" in the Animation Editor 4D window (same window as LE)

I believe I right clicked the record button in anim editor, then selected them/activated (the morphs) in the Attributes Browser first, as in the manual. I was able to record the morphs that way, it's just when I tried to add/keyframe another morph over the ones I already recorded (same track), or add more on a second (separate) anim track that I created, it would record the keyframes (I can see the second anim clip is there) but only play the keyframes I recorded the first time on the first track, not the ones I added. (sorry if this sounds confusing!)

In the animation tutorial in the manual (Advanced Workflow - Multiple Clips For Blending Actions) using the earth/sphere, I read something about "additive mode" needing to be on before recording. Maybe I didn't change that second track to additive prior to recording?

I'll try setting it up again and set it to additive first & see what happens.

Additive mode is for blending changes on the same track. For morphs each morph should be on it's own track and they should blend no probs. I'll have to check it later, only thing I can suggest at the moment is to make sure you have the right track selected when you create the keyframe.

When I did my morph animation for last month's gallery I had to enable recording of the different morphs.

Select your object with morph targets right-click the record button and select the morphs you want to record.

After that you can slide the individual morph sliders and record each one at any and every frame.

If it still doesn't make sense/doesn't work I can post a quick video.

Hi Robert

Thanks for the reply. I did enable all the morphs by right clicking the record button & selected the morphs in attributes panel. I followed the tutorial (even if it's not specifically for morphs) in the manual Chapter 9.3.3 called "Advanced Workflow - Multiple Clips for Blending Actions". Trying to apply that principle used with the globe as far as how the tracks were set up and added, & set up tracks similar way for a character head w/morphs added. This chapter at least showed me how to add tracks and some settings. I made a few morphs and this time I used different ones on different tracks & seemed to work ok.

Just when I begin I did have a problem where I wanted the face (head) in original shape at first keyframe so I set all the morphs to zero, then just recorded one keyframe in the original position, then began keyframing using the morphs for a few frames, but when done, I went back to the beginning the face was showing all the morphs at once instead of the original position of the head I recorded at keyframe 0. Getting close to figuring this out, has something to do probably with the morph panel & default pose vs edit mode. Getting better the more I work with it!

EDIT: I was able to fix problem where head showed all morphs at once when going back to keyframe 0. I had to record a keyframe of original position of head at keyframe 0 on all the tracks I added. This seems to be a workaround at least for now!


Thanks again, & feel free to post any experienced advice you may have, it's always appreciated!

Paul

Yeah, I didn't bother with separate tracks for each morph since the blending is an automatic feature with the morphs anyway.
So really all the morphs can be done on one track.

The separate tracks thing is useful for blending physics with hand keyed movements.
It is also helpful when you want to change certain movements and such independently while still keeping the whole.
Generally each animated part doesn't need its own track though.
It helps a lot though when you want to adjust timing and other complex things like moving fingers smoothly while moving the hands and body too.

What's cool is that you can create animation clips for distinct poses then drop them in or blend them as needed.

Robert, thanks for the good advice. I looked for your animation and could not find it, can you please post a link when you get a minute? I'd like to have a look at some of your work. I think I can learn alot from watching animations that more experienced users have done by trying to figure out how they achieved certain movements or fx. (Also like listening to the background music! ) Thanks!

Hi Jack,

If you don't mind, could you please give me a brief example of what you said about clips for distinct poses, & dropping them in as needed? Do you mean saving anim clips and using them for different models than the one they were created for? Is there a way to save morphs separately, or do I have to save them only as animation clips from the anim editor?

Regards,

Paul

Actually it won the monthly contest for April, 2009.

Was a prom invite video.

Here's the link:
http://caligari.com/Gallery/animations/ ... efault.asp"

It don't move! You must be mistaken about the part that this is an
"Animation" hahahahaha
Can you post it somewhere where we can view it?

Robert, for some reason when I tried to view your animation file I got a message "The Webpage Cannot Be found". Tried right click & couldn't download it that way either. Seems like the Calagari site was unavailable or down. I'll have to try again tomorrow to see if I can view it.

Hmm... been a while since I messed with it, Musikman. There's a couple of different ways. If I remember right you'd just save the clip to the library then load it back when you need it. Or put them on different tracks and blend them.

Also you can "save" poses by cutting and pasting the relevant keyframes to somewhere outside your animation target frame range. Then copy them back when you want to re-use that pose. Heidi is the one that told me about that technique.

Not sure how copying keyframes to a different object would work. Matrix keyframes should transfer ok, but unique value stuff probably wouldn't make much sense when copied.

Last time I did some animation I used a default character, so I just saved the animation clips. Was wondering if I saved as a scene if it would save everything & reload everything, the character/object and the animation clips along with it. Will have to try that. Normally when I just model something & don't save anything & close TS, it will save everything as I left it, but not true with animation tracks, they are lost if not saved before closing the program.

My original thought was if I could save just the morphs, then I could load the ones I want even if I apply them on a different character than originally created for. Then if they didn't match up quite exact, at least I'd have a starting point and could re-work them to fit the new character better.

Also you can "save" poses by cutting and pasting the relevant keyframes to somewhere outside your animation target frame range. Then copy them back when you want to re-use that pose.

Somewhere outside your animation target frame range? Where would you be referring to? A library?

Thanks!


Paul

I'll upload it to youtube real quick then put the video here in the forum with the linking thing.

Here it is on youtube.

Hey Robert, very cool, I can see why it won the contest! The mouth and eye movements were very good, did you use a separate program (video editor) to match the voiceover to the morphs, I'm assuming that's how you did it? Like the cutscene too, I am only now learning now how backgrounds/textures & moving water are created, very inventive how you turned water into words, well done!

Paul

I just mean put the "stored" poses (keyframes) on the timeline outside of the range of frames that you intent to render.

You can also slice animation clips by the way. I don't remember to what the tool was called, but it's there.

Ok Jack thanks, makes sense, copying & moving them out of the range, temporarily saving them there so I can bring in which ones I need. That way I don't have to keep going back to the morph sliders for the same poses over and over. That's good because unless I remember exact numbers for morph slider placement, I won't get the same pose every time.

Actually, aside from how the animation tools operate, the "look" of the animation editor is one of the things I can say I'm familiar with since it looks a bit like the "track view" in most of the music recording programs I use. I should be able to apply the same procedures (cut/copy/paste, etc...) once I've done the steps a few times.

Musikman wrote:Hey Robert, very cool, I can see why it won the contest! The mouth and eye movements were very good, did you use a separate program (video editor) to match the voiceover to the morphs, I'm assuming that's how you did it? Like the cutscene too, I am only now learning now how backgrounds/textures & moving water are created, very inventive how you turned water into words, well done!

Paul

Yeah I had a separate sound editor open to scrub through frames for matching, then in the video editor I put the audio in and dragged it to fit.

The audio was originally in separate slices and I moved removed things to make it all fit together.

The water was actually words imported into blender, turned to fluid and splatted on the floor.
Then I used Froo's importer and brought it into trueSpace, reversed it, and textured/rendered it.
So really I turned the words into water and played it backwards.

I think like 3DFrog mentioned, a plugin to display the wave form in tS is very important. If someone hasn't done it and I get some free time from the other projects I'll see what I can do. Hopefully someone else will beat me to it.

Yeah Jack, would be very nice in the future to have waveform visible in TS, even for roughing a first draft to get it at least close. Once finally rendered to a video file, most of the digital audio workstations now come with a designated track for video playback, and smpte audio sync capabilities, most even with frame by frame accuracy.

Robert, that's interesting about the water, I would have thought it the other way around, the water first then the words. Didn't even realize TS could reverse animation, that must come in handy!

Another cool tip is that you can copy and reverse an animation clip then blend where the two clips meet to get a seamless loopable animation.

Yes, great tip, that would definitely come in handy! Could probably apply that principle to lip sync/morphs as well. Thanks!