Hi,

anybody listening on irtc.animations any more?
Hello? *tap* *tap* Is this on?

Thanks everybody who participated in the Explosion round and 
thanks to all that voted. I'm really, really happy with my 
#1 badge ;) and kudos to all participants, especially to 
Philippe Hovaguimian - i think this was the tightest result 
between #1 and #2 i've seen so far (15.9630 vs. 15.9333 - 
looks like "technical merit" was the edge).

Anyway, in a desperate try to somehow revive this newsgroup 
;) i'll comment on the three (!) comments from my comments 
file...

> =====
> From fcu### [at] riceedu:
> Nice.

Thank you :)

> =====
> From mar### [at] ulethca:
> 
> Nice animation.  The technical aspects were great.  My only problem was
> following the story line - I found it a bit disjointed and hard to follow. 
> Perhaps that is just me.

No, it's me too, and i've written it... ;) guess i've wanted 
to show too much in too little time. I'll try to do better 
the time after next time - i don't think i'll be able to get 
something ready for SPORTS, been slacking for too long...

> =====
> From lou### [at] yahoocom:
> Excellent, I don't know who picked on your lighting. I thought it was lit very
> well. 

I'm not sure about lighting. Most of my animations tend to 
play in outer space or in dark places, and sometimes the 
MPEG encoders seem to add an extra layer of obscurity on top 
of what little brightness is there to start with. Of course, 
picking an actor that already has a black/blue surface 
doesn't help much...

> Your texturing and materials were first class. 

Not really - look at the rooftop. There are - except for the 
metal surface of the window cleaning wagon - no textures on 
the roof or any other object. I originally had planned to 
use photographs to create realistic textures, but ran out of 
time. What helped were a) the sky dome (made from a fisheye 
cloud shot i did in 1998 or somewhere), and b) the windows 
that reflected that shot. One of the reasons why the camera 
is tilted upwards most of the time - to avoid showing the 
non-existing ground.

> Character animation was pretty good. 

Thanks! Most of the facial features are made with Cinema's 
PoseMixer which controls a "magnetic wire" (a spline that 
acts as a mesh deformer). A set of invisible splines 
represent various poses (lip sets for vocals, eyebrows 
etc.), and the PoseMixer controls with sliders how much of 
each target splines is mixed into the "master" deforming spline.
For the bones motions, i did forward animation instead of IK 
- IK is great for "hands on objects" or "feet on ground", 
but most of the movements in the animation are not 
target-driven and would require setting at least extra 
"magnets" to keep e.g. the elbows straight.

> I'd like a little more variety in my fireball color please, and maybe a little
billowing smoke too. 

Oh yes - the fireball is a single voxel from PyroCluster, 
and only after the deadline did i find solutions to two 
problems in the animation:
1) Fireball color: I've made the material too "dense", and 
the inner color too similar, that's why it's mostly an 
orange ball...

> The shockwave effect with the windows was pretty cool with sound that would have
been sweet.

2) Wow, thanks a lot. To me, actually, the windows look like 
the World Glassware Championship of synchronised jumping - 
because the "explosion" algorithm does calculate the 
movement based on the axis of each window. Since these 
windows are cloned objects, each of them has the same base 
axis settings - no variation in the movement. I've recreated 
the scene with the windows as one big mesh, resulting in a 
much more convincing "bang". Only problem is that i did so a 
week later... ;)


As always: looking forward to seeing the videos from the 
next round!

-Markus

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Markus Altendorff wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> anybody listening on irtc.animations any more?
> Hello? *tap* *tap* Is this on?

Yes :-)

Congratulations! Nice to see that the IRTC animation competition is
still alive (I was quite shocked last round because there were only
three entrants).

I won't submit an entry this round (Sports), but try to participate
again next time...

-sascha

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