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Jamie - all messages by user

2012/6/4 10:29:35
Stone Age Animators very interesting bedlamsbard, I wonder if they had much trouble with bugs interrupting their process
2012/6/4 10:25:41
Sketchup to Muvizu Dylly wrote:
The second part of my 'Dismantling High Bridge' blog dealing with finishing off the roof section, UVW unwrapping, basic collision, parents and pubs, beagles and edible graphic tablets, and importing into Muvizu is now available on my website http://animationworkshop.co.uk/?p=131



Wow. This really has been a labour of love Dylly - and the results is a testimony to that. Can't wait for the full, finished model.
2012/6/4 10:12:13
Moving limbs simonheffer wrote:
Head/eyes following an object , like a person walking by.
Head/eyes turning/moving to look at an object.

These feel move like direction than fiddling about dragging the spot around.



Another one for the post-it note feature list, it'd be nice to have this as an option
2012/6/4 10:11:02
Random requests! I think there were some nice, easy to use, features of the old timeline that was lost when we moved from the scale form / flash UI to the c# wpf one. One thing to note though, I think due to the technology change of the UI there is something we could do in the old one that we can't in the new (and vice versa).

What would you keep from the old one and change on the new one?
2012/6/4 10:07:43
Spotlight image not working lol
2012/6/4 10:06:55
Feedback Thread - v0.20b release (May 2012) MrDrWho13 wrote:
I created a fat man but when I directed the eye's, only one moved. I know this was not meant to happen but it works well as the fat man is old. Maybe it was a one-time thing. Does anyone know?Duhh



I think I seen your video, well a video on youtube but I can't find it right now. There are a few eyes where one of the pupils won't move. The "Lazy Eye" does this by desgin and the others are severed eye (the one hanging out doesn't move) and war head eye (one eye is replaced with a warhead) and a couple of eyes that don't have pupils to move (zombie eye and fly eyes).

I tried all of the eyes and apart from what I've listed above, they all appear to be working as expected. If you had this with another set of eyes, could you let me know what ones and what you did to get the character? (E.g. created a fresh character in the latest version, opened a saved set from a previous version or maybe loaded a favourited character?).
2012/6/4 9:32:02
Funny Vid! This is brilliant, thanks for posting Kerry, and thank you tripfreak the "Making of..." is a nice insight into the animation process!
2012/6/1 14:34:51
Moving limbs Dreeko wrote:
I do see how the points that you raise could make the weight slider impractical.

Perhaps a height slider for the arms would be a better solution. That way you could just adjust the arm/s from over head to held out front to down by the side and the object scale slider would still cope with the other aspect of whether it was a small object requiring only one hand or a large one requiring two.

Thanks for your interest on this btw

Cheers
D



I'm really interested in this, it'd be amazing to finally have characters holding objects in Muvizu. It's a really awkward thing to consider though. There are so many things and ways to hold things. The most common request seems to be guns, so if you take that example, and for simplicity lets consider only a revolver as shown in -


The most common use is to shoot the gun, as can be seen about 50s into the video. Another option, equally as valid, would be to pistol whip the cop, this would need another set of animations as well as hand positions for holding the gun. Then you might want one character to give the gun to another character or even to hide the gun behind a trash can or take it out of the holster or put it back. So there is 4 or 5 ways to hold and use that one gun, at an initial consideration. Once you start considering rifles, swords, spears, coffee mugs or tea cups or pencils or flowers or .... well you understand. Once you consider the possibilities then the number of options required to be available it all gets a bit overwhelming. It's kinda what was started with the musical instrument system, each instrument has a set of animations associated with it and (with the exception of drums and keyboard) an attachment the character can wear and use.

Moviestorm seems to take this type of approach as well but I don't know the underlying organisation of their "held object" system to say how they organise animations for attachments. iClone i'm even less sure of but I'd guess it's more complex. The one I know more about is secondlife, there you basically create your own animation file, import it and either make or get the object you want to use and write scripts to tell the character model where the object is attached, what animations are played when and for how long. Obviously that's a level of complexity Muvizu would like to avoid as it really starts to get away from the whole "Direct - don't animate" thing. Simplicity is the key really.

One thing I'd like to see is character interactions with the environment, such as drinking from a glass. This clip is from Mass Effects 2 - which also uses the unreal engine, the difference with a game and Muvizu is that the art and dev guys can script the whole sequence once without worrying about letting the user direct when, where, what, how or who does the action.

2012/6/1 12:18:40
Moving limbs Dreeko wrote:
Weight slider.....
Size slider....



I've thought about this size and weight slider a fair bit and I just can't see how it'd be a practical solution. The problem I see is with how would these properties affect things.

Ok, it's easy to imagine that a heavy object would mean the characters arms are not as high as they would be with a light object and that a larger object would cause the arms to move further away from the rest of the body to accommodate the larger size.

The weight aspect seems unneeded. If you had a super hero, you'd expect that even the heaviest of objects to be handled effortlessly and a wimp character to struggle with the lightest thing, so over all that'd be covered with the animations chosen for the situation the character is in. If you had to go through each object attach to the character and setup the weight of it for the right effect it might be a bit time consuming and easy to get the wrong results without realising.

There is a size slider already, we call it scale. The problem, I see anyway, is with the technology. How could the animation be changed, on the fly, to suit different sizes? If you have a really massive object (a 1980's mobile phone, for example) you'd still expect the character to place it at it's ear but the animation would need to be adjusted to allow the hand to be further away from the ear to allow space for the phone, which in turn means a different angle on the elbow joint and in turn a different angle on the shoulder joint and possibly a different angle on several other joints to make the holding action look right. A weird situation might be the character holding a large, heavy box over it's head, both hands would need to be used and you wouldn't be able to just have the arms go as low as the weight would suggest, due to the rest of the body below.

Ok, that's all a bit garbled but I think there is a more elegant solution to be found, that gives a simpler interface without causing to much extra things for users to do. I'm not against size or weight sliders if there's a practical plan on how it'd work, but it might be worth one of the animators or devs confirming if that sort of thing is possible with the technology we're using.
2012/5/31 12:00:25
Moving limbs ukBerty wrote:
Separation of upper and lower body animations is the logical next step and would help enormously. Also separation of head and body animations - i.e. I want to point forward but with a sad face. Again a much simpler task for the Devs than individual finger animation, but would give us so much more with the animations we already have.



We already have separation of the upper and lower body for animations, its just that the lower body can only be animated independently of the upper with movement. So you can record an animation like the scared jump over the top of movement and then only the top half will do the scared animation while the lower does the movement stuff. It certainly would be nice to have some legs only animations but that'd require another animation track I guess. I like the idea though!

Also we're in the process of making a system for mixing animations with moods, but that's likely to be limited to the new characters at first.
2012/5/31 11:32:17
Moving limbs Dreeko wrote:
Jamie!
What do you think of the limb freezing idea?

Give me a chance to reply :P
2012/5/31 11:31:47
Moving limbs Dreeko wrote:
I would firstly like to see all upper body animations available for both sitting and standing modes.


Yeah, that really does bug me as well.

Dreeko wrote:
In addition to this it would be nice if we could have the option to freeze one arm during character direction and freeze the other for a second direction.


Interesting one Dreeko. Not sure how freezing one arm would work - I guess it'd have to be the character's current mood's idle animation for the "un-animated" arm

Dreeko wrote:
when we do reach the stage where characters can hold objects,this will allow us to animate without the dreaded greyed out experience which I assume would be the order of the day if we retain the existing pose restricted choices.


Err.. I don't follow what you mean here. Hmm?

Dreeko wrote:
...or worse! We CAN use all the animations when they are holding objects and the spear holding character starts moving both arms all over the place cause he's performing a conversation animation.


Possibly this is actually making things more complex? It's certainly one of the challenges with character and object interactions. How does a character hold all the different things it possibly could and be animated in ways that look good and suitable? On the other hand, maybe that crazyness is the effect someone wants in their movie?

Dreeko wrote:
..head tilt! The head can move up and down and side to side and everything in between but the ability to tilt the head to one side isn't there!



Now that is an interesting one. It could be very useful.
2012/5/31 11:16:20
Moving limbs MrDrWho13 wrote:
Perhaps we could have an option to manually move the limbs, similar to the eye and head movement. Elbows, shoulders and fingers, that is all we really need for now...
Do you agree?dunno



It's something we've considered, giving "puppetry" controls for characters. So it's on the post-it note list of requests already. I think there are a lot of complications with this. Dreeko mentioned a few - the extra tracks on the timeline and potentially the additional time required to animated the whole character. There are a few others such as user interface to control limbs and body as well as the mix and match of the existing animations with puppetry animations.
2012/5/31 11:11:17
Urgent Problem Directing Object Movement Hmm... it's a curious issue. I have seen it the odd time, but that's been it. I'd say it is a bug.

Could you give me some more info on when and how it happens?

How long is Muvizu running for?
How long is your computer running for?
Are there any indicators that its about to happen?
Does it only happen with the direct object dialog or other dialogs?
Is this windows 7? Or XP and Vista as well?
Are you using DX9 or DX11?
2012/5/31 10:33:06
The Queens Jubilee haha, that's awesome!
2012/5/29 13:16:57
Bug or my machine? Have you had the character saved in a set file or favourite from a previous version of Muvizu?

If so, what happens when you make a new character and create the announcer again?
2012/5/29 11:28:24
Even More Nick Danger than anyone asked for! Fantastic work bigwally. Where can I get some of Ma Rainey's cookies?!
2012/5/29 11:25:54
Slow-mo recording I see now, thanks for the clarification. It's an interesting idea MrDrWho13 and I've added it to the post-it note covered wall we call the feature request list.
2012/5/29 11:24:57
Import Options Beautiful way with words Dylly!
2012/5/29 11:23:53
Sub Wars! Awesome find Kim - very brutal indeed but great style and direction!
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Muvizu is easy to use 3D animation software that allows anyone to create high quality animations quickly and easily. Muvizu’s animation engine is ideal for storytellers, animators, teachers and businesses looking to engage, enchant and delight audiences with animated content.