Animation II Final in 3ds Max 2009 1st Pass

This was a Final Project for my animation II class using 3ds max along with after effects (not required). I will fix most of the animation in the near future. I did have hardware issues while keying the charecter which should be obvious, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed creating it a lot. Unfortunately, I dont know who made the charecter rig and model, but I did reconstruct it quite a bit for this particular animation. Originally I had a very high poly model and rig I made for this project but due to my hardware and time constraints I had to use the class rig/model. This was also supposed to be a 5 second lip sync animation but I wanted to do something that I could be at least half proud of. However, I am not too happy this came out as bad as it did; I will have to stick to smaller renders and scene file sizes. Even with everything hidden that wasnt needed, scrubbing the audio perfectly in sync (then moving all the keys back 2 frames) still was not in sync once I rendered. By the way, I have no idea how to read music or play a guitar - I searched for "it wont be like this for long lesson" and used the video that popped up to do all of the animation with exception to the lip sync.

As for the music, the song is "It wont be like this for long" by Darius Rucker(?). I would like to find out how to get permissions or w/e, but that is not something that I know how to do.

My daughter was born 3 weeks ago and I had a final animation due this week. I was driving to school last week and heard that song for the first time and knew I had to try to sync an animation to it, but I didn't quite picture an animation so problematic once I started on the project. The original project was about 40 seconds per frame; using a model of myself (Subsurface scattering material with displacement maps out of mudbox) and a rig created entirely by me, but I couldnt render that out by my deadline - this thing is 7200 frames long (@ 40 seconds per frame on 3 PCs, that's a bit of a long wait).

Modeling - I modeled every asset in this scene with exception to the charecter. Modeling (both hi and low poly) is natural to me, I cant really give any information on this.

Animation - I animated all of this scene (the camera animation was very weak, but I will have to work on different techniques for cameras and camera angles.

Rigging - I set up a custom float attribute and used reaction manager for the strumming. I setup the strings with link to modifiers linked to a dummy object that had a noise constraint on it. The chords (these were rough).... after several attempts at trying to setup custom attributes for the chords I ended up having to just make 8 keys and label them on a sheet of paper moving them onto the timeline accordingly. The lip sync was done much the same way making roughly 20 keys for different sounds and moving them into place (again, I wanted to setup a custom attribute for these, but my rigging skills and experience is lacking and that is the hardest thing to find information on).

Lighting - The lighting is very simplistic, I couldnt do what I wanted due to the render times, so this is all standard lighting with maybe 4 shadow casting (shadow maps, no ray tracing).

Rendering - This was rendered on all 3 of my PCs at 800x600, 6900 frames prior to after effects - in 20 hours. It said 2-3 seconds per frame, but I question that now.

3ds Effects - I used a motion blur effect (2.5) rather than setting it up as object or image since it seemed to render faster, but there seemed to be a difference in quality (I should have done my blurs in AE I think). The only other thing was the 2nd avi (not a sequence) that I rendered for the animated material on the TVs (they have no shadows and much lower res).

Category:

Education

Tags:

• animation
• modeling
• rigging
• 3ds
• max
• rendering
• music
• video
• autokey
• cartoon
• concert

[Fromology]

is there a way to project an camera view onto a surface IN REAL TIME? i am personally stuck with this and im doubting the possibility of it..the avi is good enough but not for my desire..could ye msg me if you know this is possible with MAYA i use 8.5 but any info is good :)

[Dante2904]

@Fromology No, there is no possible way as of max 2012 that I can find currently. I toyed with this as well and would have preferred to do it that way, but by "Live view" you do realize that it still has to be rendered and no matter how you look at it, you would need a dedicated render pass specifically for that camera or projection.

[Dante2904]

Too add more frames you set the frames in the time configuration next to the skip frames button.

However, I wouldn't suggest trying to render a lot of frames with complex calculations all at once; try to break it up into a few separate sections. Example: render first sections as the first 100 frames, 2nd sections as 100-200 etc.... I usually have to break my scenes up into smaller files since I like to do really complex animations.

You can render in elements for total control of animation.

[InternalStryke]

What is the character you used in this animation called?

[Dante2904]

I am honestly not sure or I would have added it in the credits. This was a rig provided for our animation class.

[Gravesyte]

And where'd you get the concert background from

[Gravesyte]

Very good sir I'm in animation 2 as well working in my final finally getting somewhere with the biped check out what I've done so far I've just uploaded my video

[ClinicallyObeseMule]

the fuck? o.O

[TheHuesaturation]

good job

[rmartin21hayston]

ha ha nice sitting in work looking for cool things and this tops them all up

[etwproductions]

Good job on this.

[DarkCarrot99]

@Dante2904 I understand, yeah, it just annoys me when people start hating on projects when they dont understand how much work has gone into it and how complicated it is, nice one! :)

[Dante2904]

@DarkCarrot99 It doesn't really phase me that someone that has no idea what goes into a project of this magnitude and such a short time allocation can so easily disrespect the work.

I, in no way, claim that this is good. This was a complicated obstacle I had to overcome in order to progress my knowledge.

My next video will be quite mind-blowing with my new hardware.

[DarkCarrot99]

@circuscrew evidently i can see that you can do a lot better

[TheiSwedishVirus]

@circuscrew I'd like to you do better :)

[parkourwayoflife]

2:15

was not wise going behind em

u showed us a mistake from there

his torso and head _ never moved _

chose the camera movements wisely ^^

great animation

[123rebelguy]

bad animation i like the songgggggg

[123rebelguy]

whata best song and whata fresh voice

[circuscrew]

this is the worst animation ever



[psailamike]

Superb job mate! I really liked the animation! Seeing this video, I've decided to learn 3D Studio Max myself this summer just for the fun of it. Nice song and animation .. keep it up mate. Best of luck to you for the future.

[Shainkov]

@linkspecialproximity Also you can animate short scenes, then you mix them together with another program, like camtasia ,virtualdub or premier or vegas, you decide.

[KeanesPark]

@linkspecialproximity There's a little button on the bottorm right corner; if I can remember correctly it looks somewhat like a clock. I think it's the end time you have to change (is that what is says?) can't rememebr too well. I haven't used Max in like 2 weeks,

[linkspecialproximity]

@Dante2904 how do you get such a long time to animate?

i only have till keyframe 100 and then everything stops animating.

do you have the solution?

[krixto]

Well done!!

keep on going...

[Dante2904]

Well, I am quite alarmed... There are actually many chords - that was really the only thing I had actually keyed comfortably. I think there were 8 different chords, though I am not certain - done a lot of poly-pushing since this vid.