Hi people

After almost a year after I finished the modeling of this robot,
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3Cweb.4aee868aaed4cc17da6353d60%40news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=349325
&toff=200
I finally found a way of smart animating this harmless looking monster.

Again and again I was looking for the best way to do in 3DS-Max, using my own
applications to convert the matrix-data coming from Max, using these insight of
PovRay, or like in this picture in MC-Pov.

Without a good technique of animation, I had no other way of animate this thing
using only forward-kinematic! The problem was the complexity of some joints,
like the shoulders. And the bad work of scripts, constraints and expressions in
Max. For this I really hate this application!

That doesn't mean, that I've finished with this problem, I just know how to
solve it, and its still a lot of work to do.

Well, however after solving the problems, It should be possible to animate this
thing, using realtime-dummy's, motioncapturing-data and inverse-kinematics.

Meanwhile I have lots of different files for different PovRay-versions, such as
Megapov 0.6 and 1.2.1 as well, MC-Pov, ML-Pov and PovMan.

I made this rendering, after watching "The art of photography", that inspired me
to do a portrait of the robot. I really like this documentary. Every 3D-Artist
should watch it.

When I'm looking at this picture, I should give it a view cables, coming out of
these round elements, looking like cats-hair.

BTW I've not using HDR here, just a BMP-File in the environment, and very blurry
reflection.

Funny thing - As we was discussing of the technicals of brute-force-rendering
here:
http://news.povray.org/povray.pov4.discussion.general/thread/%3Cweb.478286cd8ffe2b1020776f0%40news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=
340487&toff=50

Some people said that there don't like to wait 11 hours or longer for a
rendering. This picture has 1244 passes, the rendering took over 14 hours.
Somehow I like to work on such projects: I trains me to do the right decisions
at the right time. A thing that I'm really missing by a lots of people I worked
with. They see my stuff, they like it, but they not recognizing that they, as
the director, have to make the right decision /before/ the rendering (of an
animation) is done. I spoke to a lot of people, still in directors school. Most
of then do NOT learn how to make decisions, having a look onto animatics or some
other kind of rough work.

Everything has go be fast.

I still prefer to wait for a good result! And I still again and again have to
say thank you Fidos for making MC-Pov.This renderer has become my favorite toy!

Best regards to all so far,

Holger

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Attachments:
Download 'portrait.gif' (223 KB)

Preview of image 'portrait.gif'

"H. Karsten" <h-karsten()web.de> schreef in bericht 
news:web.4c6b03428f5d59cdec81f370@news.povray.org...
> Without a good technique of animation, I had no other way of animate this 
> thing
> using only forward-kinematic! The problem was the complexity of some 
> joints,
> like the shoulders. And the bad work of scripts, constraints and 
> expressions in
> Max. For this I really hate this application!

I learned backward kinematics using Moray years ago. If you can correctly 
define the origin of the rotation points of each movable robotic element, 
you could probably achieve that *fairly easily* in POV-Ray, or am I missing 
something? It is *just* a matter of correctly nesting and translating, and 
defining the rotation angles and constrains. It is a lot of tedious work, to 
be sure, though.

> Some people said that there don't like to wait 11 hours or longer for a
> rendering. This picture has 1244 passes, the rendering took over 14 hours.
> Somehow I like to work on such projects: I trains me to do the right 
> decisions
> at the right time. A thing that I'm really missing by a lots of people I 
> worked
> with. They see my stuff, they like it, but they not recognizing that they, 
> as
> the director, have to make the right decision /before/ the rendering (of 
> an
> animation) is done. I spoke to a lot of people, still in directors school. 
> Most
> of then do NOT learn how to make decisions, having a look onto animatics 
> or some
> other kind of rough work.
>
> Everything has go be fast.

I usually end up with scenes taking 72 hours or more to render. It does not 
matter to me. I usually build in a lot of switches in order to test more 
rapidly though.

Great image by the way. I love your robot.

Thomas

Post a reply to this message

> I learned backward kinematics using Moray years ago. If you can correctly
> define the origin of the rotation points of each movable robotic element,
> you could probably achieve that *fairly easily* in POV-Ray, or am I missing
> something? It is *just* a matter of correctly nesting and translating, and
> defining the rotation angles and constrains. It is a lot of tedious work, to
> be sure, though.
>

A friend of mine in germany and me, we like to work out the robot-pipeline to
several applications. The next step is Houdini.

The pipeline is:
- Modeling in Rhino - exporting to PovRay, using one .inc file for each object
- converting all incfiles into ONE obj-file, containing the numbers of these
files for each object insight the obj-file
- importing into the 3D-application, still heaving the number as object-names
- all object-names having _ at its end, when now an object is clones as an
instance, the original number is not changed, "object524_" becomes
"object524_01"
- after animating from all objects the _ will be cut off (and all the rest of
the name) so that in PovRay "object524" (former defined as a variable-name) is
being translated several times (once for each instance, coming from the 3D-App),
because all these different object now having the same name.

The problem is actually that after importing the .obj-file into the
3D-application, often names are gone, the rules of renaming when making an
instance is different and so on.

I don't know how it is in Maya but you already see, the animation-process is way
not the only problem.

We need to fix these, by writing scripts for each 3D-app importing the names
too, making the right instance-names and so on.

Hopefully, some day, we have this working for Houdini, Maya, Real3D and Blender
as well.

But this will be a long term work...

Post a reply to this message

"H. Karsten" <h-karsten()web.de> wrote:
> Hi people
>
> After almost a year after I finished the modeling of this robot,
>
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.images/thread/%3Cweb.4aee868aaed4cc17da6353d60%40news.povray.org%3E/?ttop=3493
25
> &toff=200
> I finally found a way of smart animating this harmless looking monster.
>
> Again and again I was looking for the best way to do in 3DS-Max, using my own
> applications to convert the matrix-data coming from Max, using these insight of
> PovRay, or like in this picture in MC-Pov.
>
> Without a good technique of animation, I had no other way of animate this thing
> using only forward-kinematic! The problem was the complexity of some joints,
> like the shoulders. And the bad work of scripts, constraints and expressions in
> Max. For this I really hate this application!
>
> That doesn't mean, that I've finished with this problem, I just know how to
> solve it, and its still a lot of work to do.
>
> Well, however after solving the problems, It should be possible to animate this
> thing, using realtime-dummy's, motioncapturing-data and inverse-kinematics.
>
> Meanwhile I have lots of different files for different PovRay-versions, such as
> Megapov 0.6 and 1.2.1 as well, MC-Pov, ML-Pov and PovMan.
>
> I made this rendering, after watching "The art of photography", that inspired me
> to do a portrait of the robot. I really like this documentary. Every 3D-Artist
> should watch it.
>
> When I'm looking at this picture, I should give it a view cables, coming out of
> these round elements, looking like cats-hair.
>
> BTW I've not using HDR here, just a BMP-File in the environment, and very blurry
> reflection.
>
> Funny thing - As we was discussing of the technicals of brute-force-rendering
> here:
>
http://news.povray.org/povray.pov4.discussion.general/thread/%3Cweb.478286cd8ffe2b1020776f0%40news.povray.org%3E/?tto
p=
> 340487&toff=50
>
> Some people said that there don't like to wait 11 hours or longer for a
> rendering. This picture has 1244 passes, the rendering took over 14 hours.
> Somehow I like to work on such projects: I trains me to do the right decisions
> at the right time. A thing that I'm really missing by a lots of people I worked
> with. They see my stuff, they like it, but they not recognizing that they, as
> the director, have to make the right decision /before/ the rendering (of an
> animation) is done. I spoke to a lot of people, still in directors school. Most
> of then do NOT learn how to make decisions, having a look onto animatics or some
> other kind of rough work.
>
> Everything has go be fast.
>
> I still prefer to wait for a good result! And I still again and again have to
> say thank you Fidos for making MC-Pov.This renderer has become my favorite toy!
>
> Best regards to all so far,
>
> Holger

simply wonderful!
Bravo!

Post a reply to this message