Awesome job on the review, Opera! Looks like you hit the nail on the head with the "good" and "bad" points.

Also, Kudos to CLSteve for promptly addressing some of the concerns!

"For the most part, the deformation looks pretty good, unless you push it. In other words, you can find trouble if you try hard enough. If you download and play my Video2 above, at the end, you will see knee flexing in motion. I did not try to push it. What do people think? Does that knee flex look too wierd?"

It doesn't look completely natural, but it does look much better than that horrible breaking mesh in the first test! Definitely more acceptable. However, you'll have to take care not to push it beyond the limits, and when using any mocap files, I'm sure there will be some extensive editing to do... beyond what is typical (I think). Keeping her arm and leg range of motion constantly within tightly confined limits might severely limit you as an animator as well. The limits imposed on the mesh are not the same limits of the human body. It all depends. Creative camera angles can hide these flaws, but if you are determined for a particular angle, that's going to be tricky.

"On thing I need to remember, I am looking with hawk eyes in glaring light for problems, whereas in production very much can be done to not only "not go looking for trouble" but mask it."

Yes, this is true. In animation especially, so many of the "flaws" you see glaring out at you in stills will not be as evident. You'd be surprised how much motion blur and quick camera angle changes can hide imperfections. Often times, you'll go and add a great texture to your character because of tiny details you think will make a difference in realism, only to find out that when the animation is played back with motion blur, all those small details you admired are not even noticable at all. ;-) Mesh problems from bad joints/rigging are hard to hide forever though... eventually you're going to come across a shot where these problems are unavoidable, and not easily concealed. Hopefully, they only last a few seconds on screen. LOL. PS: I'm willing to bet that the annoying "shadow flicker" visible in the expressions test (the first clip) is just driving you insane! LOL. SCALE UP, my friend! JK ;-)

Message edited on: 09/08/2005 22:47

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.