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Hi!
I like this environment better then the cartoon-like from your previous
attempts, the movment of the man is convincing, albeit his hands seem too
stiff or restricted in movement to me. As I understand the human body was
made with blobs, I always thought that the blobs have tremendous modelling
potential as organic shapes are concerned, but you have used too little of
them IMHO to make the body look realistic. The problem with blobs is that if
one wishes to use them in POV-Ray, she or he needs a good modelling
interactive, e.g. Open GL-like, utility. I have come to quite silly
conclusion that at the moment one has to use... Blender for that purpose and
then export his or her job to POV-Ray. In Blender however, the blobs are
handled on the mesh basis rather, than on "true blobs" as in POV-Ray.
Jelly objects look nice, but late in the animation, the left jelly cube
seems to stick to the right hand of the human figure. Something definitely
is wrong here.
I look forward for further improvements of the blobby man.
What material did you apply for the jelly objects?
Keep up good work.
Matt Burns
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"Matt Burns" <mac### [at] wp pl> wrote:
> Hi!
>
Thanks for your interest in my work.
1) The jelly objects are from the "blocks.pov" shipped with Megapov 1.1 to
demonstrate its mechsim capabilities.
2) Re: sticking. I'm still working on the sticking of individual points. It
may be a function of the friction setting too high, the stiffness too low,
or an inherent result of the blasphemy of combining cartoony blobs and a
"serious" mechsim patch. And my threshold for posting here is not whether
it's highly polished but rather whether a piece represents some
groundbreaking in my capability and whether it's entertaining. ;-)
3) Re: Hand motion. Good feedback that the hands ought to move during a
walk as well.
4) Re: blobs. I once installed a blob-making program installed with one of
the early povray CD-ROM collections. With just four spheres I made a cool
human face with a lot of character, as per the OpenGL view of the blob.
When I imported it to povray, it looked like crap, regardless of the
threshold I used. Yes, there may be something a bit odd about how POR
povray does blobs, which is one reason I'm so interested in seeing how the
blob2 patch may work. I've got five hobby-years invested in doing people
with povray blobs.
5) Re: some other modeller. I have a system which is suitable, IMNSHO, for
doing the kind of movie production I'm into. The idea of using some other
modeller to export a mesh to pov on a frame-by-frame basis to povray is
philosophically untenable for me for two reasons:
i) If the "other program" were capable of doing a better job at modelling,
why on earth would you waste your time exporting into *this* program,
especially for a project like a lengthy animation? I can see Gilles doing
it for his stills but it seems hopelessly impractical for an animation. I
have the highest loyalty to povray in regards to some of its capabilities,
but am first to turn traitor on others.
ii) Right now, I can fit my life's work (4 years) of coding onto a single
CD. That's the joy of procedurally generated characters. I also at this
point in my life need to stick with the animation system I have set up.
With it, I can with a few lines of cutting & pasting insert different
poses, skeleton sizes, and costumes/racial effects. The joy is that I don't
have to re-invent a walk cycle every time I make a radical advance in the
construction in my characters, or switching between CSG and my blobs. Even
if a program were to display with OpenGL the blob character as it were
being modelled, I'm wondering just how export-able it would be. I've got
so much skin invested in this game that I'm not going to change now.
iii) I think the answer may be in coding *into* povray (SDL or v. 5.0?) an
Animation:Master-like system with bicubic patches controlled by bones (uh,
transforms) which are completely controllable with SDL code. I've tried it
a few times but got nowhere.
6) Re: realistic. I often feel like the guy who has brought the best
applie pie ever to a chili cook-off. I believe there is an unfounded
prejudice against cartoony work versus what some would call "serious" work.
At the same time, I know there's the possibility of making sloppy work and
saying, ah but it's cartoony. I love "actual-photorealism," as evidenced
in most of Gilles Tran's work. I truly hate "wooden attempts at exhaustive
photorealism," as evidenced in [deleted]. [ Just kidding, couldn't think
of a name and glad I couldn't ;-D ]
I am trying, however:
http://pterandon.blogspot.com/2004/10/ive-been-working-on-increasing.html
http://pterandon.blogspot.com/2004/10/portrait-of-latest-version-of-my.html
Consider the products of Pixar. How many kids have Jar-Jar Binks dolls vs.
Buzz Lightyear dolls? Mrs. and Mrs. Incredible, with their hip or
shoulder and facial shapes, are goofily cartoony. They will bring their
creators a billion in revenue and bring their fans great delight. I've
already spent $8 on a book and my son says he loves how Dash can zip back
and forth so fast. These are marks of "great work" if not "serious work."
> Keep up the good work.
Thanks greatly again, and sorry for the rant.
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