John VanSickle wrote:

> The posing is done with an app called Marionette, which looks like a 
> spreadsheet of animation variables over time.  Pixar doesn't appear to 
> use motion-capture (although other houses definitely do), which makes 
> their work even more impressive.

I'm not sure how to put this in words, but most motion-captured 
animations in videos appears a bit "odd" to me. Most recent example i 
saw was "Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children" (yes, it's actually a 
movie, not a video game - but it sure feels like just watching someone 
play 1 1/2 hours without ever making a wrong move on the joystick ;) and 
before that, "Final Fantasy: Spirits within". Maybe it's because the 
actor supplying the spatial data doesn't exactly match the proportions 
of the CG character? Or maybe because the data needs to be smoothed or 
oversampled or something, removing what makes it "human" instead of 
"machine-like"? Whatever it is, it flips the "there's something wrong" 
switch in my brain... especially compared to Pixar. Maybe the manual 
tweaking approach, with the animators acting it all out in front of the 
mirror and then playing with the motion curves (i've seen the add-on 
DVD, too ;) works better - like an actor that needs to act 
"larger-than-life" on the stage to make it appear "natural" to the audience?

-Markus

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> Try *writing* a point-and-click modeller.<

Admiration is off the scale for folks that do that.

> The posing is done with an app called Marionette <

Yeah, for my first entry into IRTC I tried writing something similar (in a
tiny-unworhty-way) so I could script the movement of Poser figures. It
works of a fashion but my math just isn't upto it yet

I notice that Pixar have written quite a lot of propriatary stuff. REYES
(Renders Everything You Ever Saw) may make an interesting IRTC animation
topic - a bit of a tribute to one of our inspirations and quite open ended
in its interpretation?

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On Thu,  1 Mar 2007 18:52:20 EST, "i_need_a_unique_name"
<ine### [at] gmailcom> wrote:

>
>I feel a bit guilty buying in a model but in this day and age, 

I know what you mean but not everyone is altruistic and some people what to earn
some cash from their hard work. 

>with fast
>hardware and cheap/free software to me the IRTC animation competition is
>about being able to tell as story with the level of skill one has.
>
I mostly agree with you about the IRTC being a place to show off your own work
but I can see the argument that says if you can buy a professional modeller and
renderer you should be allowed to use it combined with your skill and artistic
talent to enter. After all it's not the Internet Pov-Ray Tracing Competition :-)
 

Regards
	Stephen

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