United3dArtists Archive

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 10 Jan 2012, 22:51

This is a WIP for the flowers of the show! They are Momo's pets, and they are quite flirty and chatty. I have to make 5 or 6 of them, and also characterize each of them.

Here is my latest progress for the day. A slow start, but coming on!

MikomDude · Post by **MikomDude** » 11 Jan 2012, 00:52

Cute! =D

jeffroig · Post by **jeffroig** » 11 Jan 2012, 20:17

Draise I did a talking flower a a couple years ago for a music video.
It is a talking sunflower that is already rigged and ready for Poser.
If you need another one let me know I would be glad to let you use it free of charge.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 13 Jan 2012, 02:01

Awesome! I'd love to check out your sunflower! I just installed Blender and so I'm down to trying it out!

I have already made the 6 flowers tho.. 2 petunias, 2 margaritas, 2 geraniums. Ohwell! I have yet to name them.

Here are some of the pictures and progress! I will texture them officially in Softimage, but for TS they look mighty fine already!

I've been playing with the textures and shaders a lot. I like TS. It's a fun little thing to play with, due to being able to see everything already.

I am tempted to get more into CryEngine 3 or Unity and try make nice games. I love the whole concept of making things look good in realtime, oh and animation. I hate rendering...... Lighting I love tho! I have also to learn Blender with it's nice little upcoming renderengine that looks super promising!

But... till then, work requires Softimage, and I will wait patiently for Arnold (I have used the Beta already, and bloody hell it's fast!)

So.. here are my flowers that will sing, dance, laugh and stuff.

Download the large file with all 6!

http://www.mediafire.com/i/?tl6ai6fm8nta9vo

Dragneye · Post by **Dragneye** » 13 Jan 2012, 14:16

VERY nice work guy.

jeffroig · Post by **jeffroig** » 13 Jan 2012, 14:45

Draise,
Question for you on the flowers.
While some of the flowers apparently have a mouth that is a cavity that can open and close others do not.
Will the ones that do not have a apparent mouth be talking and if so how will this be displayed as the mouth can not open or close.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 13 Jan 2012, 15:13

Thanks!
Ah yes.. well none of the mouths will open. I just made some pistols with two ridges instead of one on the daisies to look like a mouth. All the mouths will deform with some random shapes, or expand to simulate mouth movement, because I don't intend for lipsyncing once i begin to animate. The "mouths" are mainly used for expressions. 6 extra lipsynced characters on a 20 minute program is a workload I can't afford! So random mouth deformations or expressions is what I'm gonna do.

jeffroig · Post by **jeffroig** » 13 Jan 2012, 15:32

Ah Yes, I see said the blind man...LOL
That should work out perfect for the flowers.
Are you having to do any rigging in the flower stem or will you just use a morph target to create movement like swaying back and forth.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 07 Feb 2012, 21:09

I'm starting to rig the flowers now! I have finished all modeling for the project (so far, I'm sure more will come later) and now I have to rig like mad!

I am rigging traditionaly IK chain based using Null controls. I prefer fullbody IK skelaton rigs with nails/constraints, but not many programs use the like.

So here is a rough idea of how my skelaton is working, or rigged.

Here are the constraints to the control object.

I found a good little script for softimage that get rid of a very annoying IK bug softimage has (which when you stretch a bone it snaps into it's extremes, and it looks terrible in animations). It also gave me the ability to create stretchy bones. It is very easy to use, and I will probably post that in a softimage tutorial.

So using some strechy bones and some smooth one and with the pistols under some chains and shapes which i will make when needed (not sure if i want to do it now) it looks good.

The rest, with some trial and error, was rigged to my liking. I try to keep controls as minimal as possible, hiding everything else to avoid clutter and ease animation.

With the petals i used Syflex, an ICE plugin in Softimage. It is very powerful. So making the cloth quite stiff, not too heavy, and lots of dampening made it look like cool organic petals. I did a quick little animation to test it.
(I'll finish rendering it then I'll post it here. Not the best, but it's just to test the rig.)

It is a node based system (similar to using LE in trueSpace), but once you get the hang of it, it's super cool.

So now with the weight, I did add a couple of things to it. As you notice in the rig above, you can see that the color things have weight influence. It is all very smoothed down for more bendiness. Keep it cartoony. ALso, if you notice again, the top and the bottom have been reassigned for better root and head control.

I'm working on the other flowers now. I make one rig, copy it and do it for it's twin flower. So only 3 rigs for 6 characters. And mainly all of the rigs are based of the one rig with some minor modifications.

oh, and the pyramids over the leaves are up vectors. They help control rotation of the leaves. Took a bit toget the rotation of them just right, but after some frustration i figured it out today. Works like a charm.

ONWARDS!

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 07 Feb 2012, 21:55

SO CUTE! DAMMIT!!!!

MikomDude · Post by **MikomDude** » 07 Feb 2012, 22:00

That's a great animation!!! So cute

Steinie · Post by **Steinie** » 08 Feb 2012, 12:46

Very very nice!!
I love how the petals have a delayed motion following the action of the flower bending forward, a jerk up and then a look to the left. The action reacts like our own hair. NICE.
I still cannot get my head around a node base system (LE). Everything you show about that is helping me.
Great job!

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 08 Feb 2012, 16:50

That's great!

Draise wrote:I am rigging traditionaly IK chain based using Null controls. I prefer fullbody IK skelaton rigs with nails/constraints, but not many programs use the like.

What's the difference? Explain each please.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 08 Feb 2012, 17:46

Finis wrote:That's great!

Draise wrote:I am rigging traditionaly IK chain based using Null controls. I prefer fullbody IK skelaton rigs with nails/constraints, but not many programs use the like.
What's the difference? Explain each please.

A traditional chain based IK rig works like this:

First move the whole body chain using a body Null control.
Then move the shoulder chain.
Then the arm chain.
Then the hand chain
Then the finger chain.

Each chain has true IK, but the process of a full body chain based rig is actually FK. Foward Kenetics over Inverse Kenetics.
You have to move from the parent chaing forwards to get a full body movement. It is a redundant IK system...

A full body skelaton based IK rig works like this:

Pull the bone from the finger - the whole body tugs along like a puppet.
If you don't want to move the body: activate a constraint/nail and pull from the finger to affect the whole arm from the finger only.

It is true IK because it has inverse kenetics, starting from the child chain affecting the parenting chain/s (or up till the constraint). It is intuitive, puppet like, quick, fast, and easy. It also has full power and ability to work using FK when necessary.

Similarities:
Both have null based controls. (true IK doesn't really need them, but it helps- IK/FK needs them almost definately for a good rig)
Both can have constraints. (true IK almost definately needs them - IK/FK doesn't, because it's very meticulously accurate and methodogical)
Both implement IK to a degree. (true IK is truely inversely kinetic - IK/FK is only iversely kinetic within chains)

I've done some animations, and by far full skelaton IK rigs is what I need. Maya, Softimage, 3Dmax, Blender among others, as far as I know, don't implement full IK skelaton rigs (except possibly Autodesk's Motion Builder)... unless you have heavy programming (with ICE in softimage, eg.).
Truespace, tho novel and buggy, does do the latter quite intuitively.. and I love the concept! Even a child can pick up the mouse and pose the "doll" (the 7 year old son of my director did this, to his delight)

It takes me 10 seconds for a good pose in TS, meanwhile in Softimage (yes, I try be quick and all) takes maybe 15-60 seconds. When you do hundreds of keyframes, it adds up on the workload and mouse clicks and strain. (true IK: click and drag to pose - IK/FK: click drag, click drag, click drag, click drag, click drag to pose)

I wish I could find a group of developers for Blender or something to implement a true IK addon or something.

So... ah... that's what I was refering to, traditional chain based methods of rigging, the industry "standard" which I don't like..

Steinie wrote: I still cannot get my head around a node base system (LE). Everything you show about that is helping me.
Great job!

GOOD! node based compositing/3d/shaders/etc is the the best! I must admit, I too am still learning and it is a bloody hard concept. But once you wrap your head around it, it is by far the simplest and logical way to program/create things! I'll try to keep up my posts!

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 08 Feb 2012, 20:19

This one ain't so cool, cause the lighting is terrible, but hey!

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 09 Feb 2012, 23:44

My little flowers in there place!!!

I’ve worked more on the passess and it’s getting better. I am still thinking about the animation pipeline, because the whole scene file is huge. So I may just make a seperate animation scene and their passes for the rest and see how it goes. But I’ll see…………. There must be a way to make things lighter on system loads. Render is ok, it’s just the refreashing of the scenes that take up memory. Silly OpenGL.

I would love to implement some final gathering, but we can’t afford the extra render times………. it does look fine tho don’t you think? Just got some antialiasing issues right there... ergh.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 10 Feb 2012, 00:39

Morrow there may be an animation to put onto render. I NEED MY RENDERFARM! I got enough compturs here to do it, just no switcher!

Finis · Post by **Finis** » 10 Feb 2012, 02:24

Thanks for that IK explanation!

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 10 Feb 2012, 20:01

Found that Blender does do this.

Armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics with pole target support

Blender Features

Alas it has a GPU renderengine called Cycles (does GPU based unbiased renders). I will learn blender now!

Also has a compositor, and it's on the development. Truespace, forever my modeling software and cheap small productions pipeline... but I will be migrating eventually.......... Well in time.

artnic · Post by **artnic** » 27 Feb 2012, 13:53

Oh my gosh I love the animation. It really reminds me of a 3D version of the flowers of Alice in wonderland! Or one of those comic flowers which you can buy in kitsch shops, do you know what I mean? They also look quite similar. Sometimes I send flowers on line to my friends because they appreciate that much, especially when they are so cute like those.

Draise · Post by **Draise** » 27 Feb 2012, 16:44

artnic wrote:Oh my gosh I love the animation. It really reminds me of a 3D version of the flowers of Alice in wonderland! Or one of those comic flowers which you can buy in kitsch shops, do you know what I mean? They also look quite similar. Sometimes I send flowers on line to my friends because they appreciate that much, especially when they are so cute like those.

Thanks thanks! Your a cool person, buying mates flowers. I would dig that, even tho I'm a guy and shouldn't! and WELCOME TO THE FORUMS! I hope you have fun here. It's nice supportive place with various topics.

And thanks on the compliments on the flowers. I too thought them to be like Alice and Wonderland, but I made them more like babies.

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