Forum: Animation


Subject: Bit o' Mimic silliness

Redfern opened this issue on Apr 27, 2002 ยท 6 posts


Redfern posted Sat, 27 April 2002 at 7:24 PM

Attached Link: http://www.mzzkiti.com/Alien-1.AVI

I was organizing my 'puter folders when I stumbled across a certain zip file, Virus and 6WolfPack's Giger-like Alien. I remember trying to load it a long time ago but with no success. I decided to have another go at it. This time it worked! The entire figure popped into the posing window, not just the skull. I'm glad I never "nuked" that file!

While playing with it, I crazy idea struck me. I spawned the morph target "OpenLips" and fired up LIPSync's "Mimic." You can see (and hear) the zany results by clicking on the link. Oh, you'll need the "DivX 5" codec to view the clip. It's free at http://www.divx.com

I purposely animated it in "display" format without anti-aliasing so that it would compile faster. I did, at least, select the "texture shaded" display option. Comments (yeah, even "slams") are welcome.

Tempt the Hand of Fate and it'll give you the "finger"!


wyrwulf posted Sat, 27 April 2002 at 8:03 PM

The sound is great. I haven't downloaded DivX 5 yet. I heard that there were problems. Have you had any problems with it? Probably not, since you used it for this animation.


Redfern posted Sat, 27 April 2002 at 8:10 PM

No problems so far. The only reason I upgraded was because "Lemurtek" sent me a sample video encoded in "DivX 5." I had been using version 4 until then. DivX has introduced a patch since version 5's release. I believe my copy already has those corrections.

Tempt the Hand of Fate and it'll give you the "finger"!


Little_Dragon posted Sat, 27 April 2002 at 8:27 PM

Of all the voices I've imagined for Giger's alien, Marvin the Martian wasn't one of them. :)

Lately, I've been studying ERC, EMC, EasyPose, and other advanced Poser techniques. Thanks to this knowledge, I was able to make Lemurtek's Lionheart character Mimic-ready.

Lionheart speaks! (MPEG format, 230KB)

Lionheart has a posable jaw body-part which is separate from the head. Mimic looks for the OpenLips morph in the head section, so normally there would be no way to make him Mimic-ready. But I used ERC (Extended Remote Control) to create a dummy dial (named OpenLips) in the head, and linked it to the jaw's x-axis rotation dial.

I still have to do the phoneme morphs: two of each, for the head (upper lip) and jaw (lower lip), with ERC linking the head morphs to the jaw morphs.



Redfern posted Sat, 27 April 2002 at 9:14 PM

Ah, that's what had me stumped with Lemurtek's Wolfgang. I know you asked me if I could do something with him, but obviously, you've progressed far beyond my current abilities.

I halfway expected to hear LionHeart speak with Ron Perlman's voice, but Sean Connery is also a great choice!

OT, how goes your project to model Mark Stanley's Florence Ambrose?

Tempt the Hand of Fate and it'll give you the "finger"!


Little_Dragon posted Sat, 27 April 2002 at 10:26 PM

Haven't gotten around to it, yet.

I'm in the middle of a very frustrating animation project: Poser with mirror reflections (see some of the threads below for details):
Thread #1
Thread #2

Poser will output the test animations and reference videos without difficulty, but when I try to do the real renders, it keeps running out of memory, several dozen frames into the render. I pulled Lionheart out of the scene, I reduced the resolution to 320x240, and it still runs out of memory, although I made it to frame 200 last time. I'll either have to render it in pieces and splice them together, or crack open the case and add a boatload of memory (I wonder what my neighbor would think of that?).

Anyway, I'll move on to Florence after I finish this (and possibly another short animation). Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go nursemaid a stubborn computer through another render-attempt ....