A few years back I found myself shocked and impressed by some of the cool
animations people like John VanSickle, Dan Byers, Sascha Ledinsky, and Tim
Nikias were showcasing.  I wanted to try my hand at it and see if I could
approach the same level of artistry.  I'm not feeling quite there yet, but it
has been fun working at it, chipping away at this little project I set out for
myself.

I'm not typically one to post work-in-progress, but I find I'm at a bit of an
impasse since I upgraded my PC almost a year ago and broke my workflow in the
process.  (3.6 has not run reliably for me under Windows 7, and Moray is
completely non-functioning, possibly due to my NVIDIA graphics card?)  Even if
my project is unfinished, I didn't want it to get lost forever without sharing
it in this little corner of the web that inspired it in the first place.  I may
get back to it at some point, particularly if a new version of Moray comes out
that works for me.  In the meantime, here's a look at what I managed to produce
up until now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74sA0GrjicI

Thanks for watching.

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DSevy wrote:
> A few years back I found myself shocked and impressed by some of the cool
> animations people like John VanSickle, Dan Byers, Sascha Ledinsky, and Tim
> Nikias were showcasing.  I wanted to try my hand at it and see if I could
> approach the same level of artistry.  I'm not feeling quite there yet, but it
> has been fun working at it, chipping away at this little project I set out for
> myself.
> 
> I'm not typically one to post work-in-progress, but I find I'm at a bit of an
> impasse since I upgraded my PC almost a year ago and broke my workflow in the
> process.  (3.6 has not run reliably for me under Windows 7, and Moray is
> completely non-functioning, possibly due to my NVIDIA graphics card?)  Even if
> my project is unfinished, I didn't want it to get lost forever without sharing
> it in this little corner of the web that inspired it in the first place.  I may
> get back to it at some point, particularly if a new version of Moray comes out
> that works for me.  In the meantime, here's a look at what I managed to produce
> up until now:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74sA0GrjicI
> 
> Thanks for watching.
> 
> 
I particularly enjoyed the camera work

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On 05/09/2010 4:39 AM, DSevy wrote:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74sA0GrjicI
>
> Thanks for watching.
>

I think that the character movement is good and the lip sync is very 
effective.

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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To Be Continued?

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Very ambitious project, and you did well.   That you succeeded in entertaining
character animation using only CSG shapes is an important fact as we try to get
character animation contests back up and running.

What kinds of contests do you think we could get back up and running?  A
youtube-like contest?

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> I'm not typically one to post work-in-progress, but I find I'm at a bit of an
> impasse since I upgraded my PC almost a year ago and broke my workflow in the
> process.  (3.6 has not run reliably for me under Windows 7, and Moray is
> completely non-functioning, possibly due to my NVIDIA graphics card?)

A lot of work went into this, would be a shame not to finish.

Did you try using POV-Ray 3.5, and/or older/newer NVIDIA drivers?

What is the error message you get?

I've never used moray but at least for some people it seems
to work on Windows 7:

http://news.povray.org/moray.win/thread/%3Cweb.4ad9a1543477adadd0f022b60@news.povray.org%3E/

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@ Charles C:
I'd like to finish the production, eventually.  The script was done and the
audio all recorded before I started working on the animation.  I'd hoped the
next version of Moray might do the trick, but I don't know how far out that
release date might be.

@ gregjohn:
I wonder if YouTube might be an easy place to host a contest by using a common
keyword to tie all of the submissions together.  I'm thinking something specific
like POVCharRnd001 (POV Characters - Round 1).  If every submitter put the same
keyword (incrementing the last three digits for later rounds) then I assume it'd
be simple to bring up a YouTube search of all the videos at once just by
searching on that keyword.

@ Christian:
It has been a while now, but it seems like I might have run into a problem
trying to install 3.5 under Windows 7.  I was using it before the upgrade, but
for some reason I went to 3.6 when I switched PCs.  Most of the time 3.6 works
okay, but occasionally the GUI gets hung up and thinks it's rendering when it's
not, and it has to be closed and restarted to fix the problem before a new
render can begin.

Your post made me go back and look at my POV/Moray setup again.  I had forgotten
that I worked out the video driver issue (turned off certain NVIDIA
accelerations for Moray), but there is a persistent problem where I can't load
some of my larger scenes that I created under XP.  New scenes and small scenes
open okay, but large scenes cause Moray to hang.

There's also the little inconvenience where Moray and POV don't integrate (ie
you can't render directly from Moray) under Windows 7.  Not an insurmountable
problem, but it's annoying.  Especially when using the materials editor - which
I used to do frequently.

Anyway - maybe at some point the tools will work again.  I'm hoping for native
Windows 7 support for POV and Moray in the future.

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On 9/5/2010 11:05 AM, Jim Charter wrote:

> I particularly enjoyed the camera work

I've done a few tricks to get the camera work to look more realistic, 
and it's rather surprising how easy it is for some of the effects.  A 
random value that smoothly changes over time, added to the camera 
location, very effectively transmits the look of a hand-held camera. 
The right amount of a dampened sinusoid (with the proper motion blur) 
makes it look like something heavy just hit the ground nearby.

Regards,
John

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