This is a character I've had on my mind for quite some time, inspired by the surrealistic stop-motion stylings of The Brothers Quay, who I admire greatly.

I'm trying to develop a unique walk cycle for this strange little guy, something that depicts the tortured soul he has become.

Anyway, this is what I have so far...

Character Walk (WindowsMedia Format) - 2.25 mb

Character Walk (Quicktime Format) - 4.3 mb

Some details for those who are interested in the process:

The animation (including cloth dynamics) was done in 3dsmax v7. I rigged the figure myself using CharacterStudio Biped, and rendered the sequence with MentalRay. No GI was used here, it's lit only by a skylight and MentalRay's AO shader. Rendertime was only about 2 minutes per frame, at this frame size, on a single 2gig Pentium 4.

Looks pretty good. Is that the final choice for the characteristic walk, or are you going to try a couple more? Lou.

"Is that the final choice for the characteristic walk, or are you going to try a couple more?" I'm working on a few more, but this one seems to be pretty close to what I had imagined. I'm really trying to convey an emotional state of "torture" in his walk, as if just being alive is a particular burden for him. This character will not speak, of course, so everything he feels must be presented through his motion and expression. I'm creating facial morphs for him, but his mouth will never move, and his eyes are just black, glossy bulbs that will subtly reflect his environment, but not his inward feelings (if that makes any sense). ;-) I know it probably sounds "artsy fartsy", and perhaps a bit ridiculous, but I'm looking for a dark, moody style change from the heavy FX-driven sci-fi project I've been working on for months.

Can you post a preview from the side? It looks to me like the character is off balance but I can't really tell. I also think you should move the arms at least a little.

The Brothers Quay! Yep, this character definitely reminds me of some of their works, especially from Street Of Crocodiles.

Things I like: The textures and pants dynamics. The clothing textures look awesome, and the pants movement is very realistic. The footsteps are animated well also, from what I can tell.

Things I dislike: No arm movement at all. At least some up and down motion as he takes a step would help this. The shirt looks too stiff, but that depends on what kind of material you're simulating. Looks like a heavily-woven wool or something, which should have some more movement.

He certainly has an interesting appeal to him. I can't wait to see what kind of environment you do for this, because it will have to be something with lots of depth and texture if you plan on doing the Quay brothers any justice in their influence.

Message edited on: 01/27/2006 17:22

Attached Link: http://www.3dknockouts.com/videos/creature_preview.wmv

***" Can you post a preview from the side? It looks to me like the character is off balance but I can't really tell."*** I did a very quick, flat-shaded render from the side view just for you. ;-) He may indeed appear "off balance", but that's actually kind of what I want. Again, the walk cycle needs to be unique for this character, something fragile, and pained. I agree about the arms. I'll be working more on those once I decide on a final walk cycle. ***"I can't wait to see what kind of environment you do for this, because it will have to be something with lots of depth and texture if you plan on doing the Quay brothers any justice in their influence."*** Oh, I don't think anything can ever do them justice, but I will try. LOL. Yes, the environment is going to be simple by most standards, but rich in texture and "grime".

Maybe the hip hip could be a little bit more on top of the hips.

" Maybe the hip hip could be a little bit more on top of the hips" Not sure I'm following you here. Could you explain in more depth please?

As in the hips should be on a vertical line that goes through the feet so they support the hip at all times.

The problem of the balance is caused by the wide legged type of walk. In a balanced walk the body weight is centered above the leg that supports it from the moment the second leg is lifted: wide legged walks are usually only believable if the body sways a lot to keep in balance. Try doing a wide legged walk yourself, and study how your body behaves in order not to lose your balance.

Aaahh, yes. I see what you guys are saying now. I'm gonna work on that.

Given the advice you already got, there's not much left to say, but I just can't help myself, so here we go... First of all, I love the model and the textures!!! The way the pants move is indeed awesome but I have to agree with luvver_3d on the way the shirt moves. Also, the arms could certainly use a little more movement, maybe try slight rotations starting from the elbows with each step. "something that depicts the tortured soul he has become" Maybe, just maybe, the character moves a bit too smooth to depict a tortured soul. You can try making the walk look a bit more unstable, or let the character hit it's feet on the ground with a little more force, giving it a 'heavier' feel to it. Still, u seem way better than I am, so u do have the right to just ignore my advice...

"Still, u seem way better than I am, so u do have the right to just ignore my advice..." Last I heard, Roger Ebert never directed a movie. Meaning, you don't have to be the 'best' at something in order to give an effective critique. :-) I'll take it into consideration about the heavier footsteps. That sounds like good advice, thanks.

I think, maybe, when you start animatine the arm movement, you might think about a kind of hopeless dangle, they move, but not much, and don't REALLY synchronise with the walk, exactly. this would be part of projecting "I'm useless and worthless, don't notice me"... movements for that would tend to be small and tentative. Lou.

I agree... more the arms respond to the swinging of the body, but don't have much conviction of their own. I disagree about the pants though. I think they seem to act like very light, unlike the pattern which looks more like a burlap kind of fabric. That would hang heavy, like the shirt. The bunching is good, really reminds me of burlap, but the edges flap too easy for my eye. Of course, I have NO experience with making fabric look realistic, so.... just my 2 cents.

ebert wrote "beyond the valley of the dolls", but it was directed by russ meyer IIRC. anyway, I think max did a great job on the animation, and I don't have anything to add about the comments, excepting to bend the arms and wrinkle the flesh around the inner bend.

Depending on how tortured he is, you might consider tilting his head forward a bit. Right now it's erect, which suggests he isn't totally "broken."

BTW, I like the little head shakes you've got going there.

Regarding the materials, the pants look like they are a lighter material than the shirt. That seems a bit backward but that is purely a subjective thing. It didn't strike me as 'wrong' or something that needed to be changed. It just conveyed that the character is obviously not from my Texan culture. Our shirts are usually lighter than our blue jeans.

I hear Californians wear thin cotton pants. Maybe he's from there?

[grin] On re-observation I just noticed that the top of his shirt sleeves do not follow the curve of his shoulder and arm. They stick out. That might need to be adjusted.

Message edited on: 01/30/2006 10:33

I agree with the observations so far, but I'm just mostly impressed with the quality vs. rendertime. I've been struggling to achieve this kind of GI look in Carrara. Actually, I can get the lighting to look good, but I always end up with noisy artifacts when objects are animated, and it takes very high settings and long render times to clean them up. Yours came out really clean and nice. Wish I had access to that mentalray engine.

Message edited on: 01/30/2006 18:02

" I agree with the observations so far, but I'm just mostly impressed with the quality vs. rendertime. I've been struggling to achieve this kind of GI look in Carrara." I really don't know Carrara at all, aside from some modelling I did with RayDream waaaay back in the day. That's about as close as I've come to Carrara. ;-)

That said, I don't know what kind of options the render engine in Carrara has or doesn't have, but if it has a skylight and AO shader, you can do just about the same thing I would imagine.

MentalRay is really an excellent renderer, although it can be quite complex to master. Some people don't like to have lots of dials and parameters to work with, because it makes the learning curve rather steep. In the end, however, the more options you have, the more chances you have at finding a great render setting that provides the quality/speed tradeoff you need to get almost any job done. So far, I've been most impressed with both MentalRay and FinalRender. I think I prefer them over any that I've tried, regardless of the application. Then again, I've never used PRman. ;-P Message edited on: 01/30/2006 23:02

AFAIK, Carrara doesn't use AO, which, in poser at least, is a way (when using GI) to put shadowed areas in spots from which ambient light should be excluded (or occluded), but aren't. hence it's a kind of "fake" GI lighting/shadowing patch, at least in poser. carrara uses photon mapping, which is rather slow at high quality, as mentioned by jimbo. artifacts might be eliminated by rendering as a series of uncompressed tiff images, as any codec is gonna screw things up, compared to uncompressed.

This looks good. I think once you refine the upper body movements, it will really be great. I love the way the feet bend when he takes a step. Well done.

Attached Link: http://www.eovia.com/products/carrara5/carrara_new_features.asp

Carrara 5 has AO as part of their new features, but I don't know if it's as good as what you get with MentalRay or even Poser for that matter. It seems to render very quickly compared to real GI, but the results I get don't look anything as smooth as what maxxxmodelz has achieved in his clip. I always render to uncompressed frames, so I thinkt he artifacts are a direct result of the settings I'm using.

oops, my misteak, jim. don't have c5, but I searched the c4 manual index and didn't see AO listed. but if you post an image in the carrara forum, they may know what causes the artifacts. like too few bounces, or some bad interaction with light thru transparency or something.

This is a character brought to life!

This is what it's all about, actualization. It's obvious you are getting on top of your tools.

You've made me believe in the walk itself, which is the point of your post here; there is reality in it! I can tell it is complex down in the trenches of the lower body skeleton; there are some highly subtle movements in there that really contribute. For instance, there is a tiny shudder that interacts with the jerkiness and conveys the cost paid by such stiffness. I'd say your getting at your desired emotional mission.

May I ask...in Max do you "create a walk cycle" by manipulating the settings of a purposed sub-feature which interacts with the bones, or when you say 'I am creating a walk cycle for it' do you mean you are learning to hand key-frame the character in it's own style?

Render wonderful, with sweet rendertime.

Greg, I'm going to start calling you Max!

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 02/04/2006 12:47

I've been looking into Carrara with a trial version. Everyone gets so excited by Carrara's supposed Poser compatibility and render speed, but there are many problems, such as no strand hair support, difficulties with both import methods, and especially flicker in animation unless you crank up the settings to the point the supposed speed advantage goes bye-bye. I think one could overcome many of the problems and work out a Poser/Carrara workflow, but it nothing other than a fresh learning curve. ::::: Opera :::::

"Greg, I'm going to start calling you Max!" Thanks, John (I'll call you Opera). ;-) "May I ask...in Max do you "create a walk cycle" by manipulating the settings of a purposed sub-feature which interacts with the bones, or when you say 'I am creating a walk cycle for it' do you mean you are learning to hand key-frame the character in it's own style?" Well, there's a lot of things you can do here. There are indeed purposed sub-features which interact with the bones. In Max, we call them "Controllers", "Constraints", and "Wires". You can, for example, wire a noise frequency to a set of bones (like arms, legs, hip, whatever), that will make the bone "shake" automatically, giving you jerkiness to the movement. That's actually what I did here. You can control the level of noise, and it's frequency in various ways. Since I'm using Biped as the rig, there are some limitations to it over Max standard bones, but for the most part, it's highly customizable. I can set up a wire, for instance, that bends the fingers to a certain degree whenever I rotate the head. The possibilities are great. For this walk cycle, I started out with Biped footsteps, which are basically the equivalent of using the Walk Designer in Poser. It gives you a basic, generic walk cycle on your rig. From there, I added a new animation layer over that walk cycle, and just keyframed a few new movements over it. Using layers basically allows you to "blend" keyframed motion over previous motion (be it keyframed or mocap), without screwing up the previous keyframes or motion curves on the layer beneath. It's a useful feature that comes in handy when doing custom stuff like this, because it allows you to quickly add motion "detail" on a fresh clean timeline. I just kept adding new layers, and adding some subtle stuff till I came up with this. I have improved on it somewhat since I posted this, so I'll have to get that rendered out sometime soon. :-)

You're obviously quite good with 3dsmax. I tried the demo of version 8, and was impressed with it's features, but I didn't have time to explore it all the way.

Carrara, on the other hand, is far more limited in it's character animation abilities, but I was able to catch on to it much quicker. I agree with Operaguy that the Poser compatibility is overplayed, especially for animation.

That said, I was in a thread with Operaguy recently where we were discussing Poser's strand-based hair, and how much more efficient it is to render from within Poser itself, as opposed to rendering it in Carrara. Since I believe 3dsmax has strand-based hair capability, can you tell me how efficient it is to render? If you have used it before, do you happen to have any benchmarks as to it's usability in animation? How does it compare to Poser's dynamic hair in both looks and speed?

Message edited on: 02/04/2006 15:14

I think strand hair is tricky no matter what application you use. I don't think anyone would argue that fact, considering all of the factors involved in getting it right. Plus, it will always increase rendertime. There's no escaping that. Personally, I keep away from it whenever possible, opting for modelled hair instead. There are circumstances though that call for strand hair, so it's a good thing to have available when you need it. I think Poser's dynamic hair is good, but definitely has certain limits I don't care for. Mainly, the styling tools are a burdon to me. I prefer more intuitive solutions. 3dsmax 7.5, which I do have, incorporates hair and fur into it's features. The difference between it and Poser's dynamic hair are immediately noticable when trying to style the strands. Styling hair in 3ds is more like actually "combing" the hair, rather than working strictly with vertice selections. It's just more natural to me, and I've at least been able to get some looks that I wanted out of it. As for render speed... well, I think it's about the same off hand. Depends a lot on how complex the lighting is, and the resolution you're rendering at. Forget about GI if you're using strand hair. Takes far too long. Simple 3 point lighting renders much faster, as it does in Poser, if you use depth shadows instead of raytraced. I was thinking of adding strand hair to this little creature I did, so now you got me thinking about it. I'll post some test renders and speed comparisons using strand hair shortly, and you can see for yourself the time vs. quality factor.

one important decision, at least Poser-wise...

Decide if you hair needs to cast shadows. Unless absolutely necessary, have it not cast shadows. You probably know that, of course, but sometimes it is a detail that goes unnoticed.

I second the idea of using 3-point lighting and depth map shadows with strand hair in Poser. It is practically the only manageble choice for an animator. If you push the map size to 2048 and/or the bias to .02 or even .01, effects similar to AO emerge and the individual strands resolve in relative close-ups.

::::: Opera :::::

Message edited on: 02/04/2006 17:28

Attached Link: New Thread on Strand Hair

Hey guys, I just posted a new thread about this subject of strand hair. I'd like to hear some thoughts, and perhaps see some of your own samples if possible.