Tuesday, October 14, 2008

new version - new tips


A couple of quick tips. Having the emotions feature is so cool and getting the eyes to move around a little just adds even more to the performance. The way forward is to roll out the "lookat" command and have your character lookat at dummy axis. Send the dummy axis on a little romp around a path and you'll be set. Note; if you activate the Display/Targets mode you'll see the eyes are looking at the centre of the bounding box (of the dummy axis). This means the eyes won't actually look at the dummy axis, but rather off to one side. So, take the dummy and scale it right down. Reducing the dummy axis size also reduces the bounding box and gets the target much close to the center of the axis. Remember you can also tweak the scale of the path and the duration of the move to obtain some different eye movements. One more tip, I found that when it came to render, there was a real twitchy action in the blinks. It did seem related to the amount of emotions active in the timeline, but still, it wasn't much chop. Anyway if you set your render to 12fps the twitching gets sorted out.
T.

Oh btw click on the image to see my little test clip, then check out this cool clip as well.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Deeper into v5.

An important asset that the Antics v5 development team exhibit is the ability to listen. It is a real credit to them and it is what makes being part of this maturing market such fun and satisfying.
I've been following the forum for a while now and it's quite clear that the Antics dudes have been taking all the feedback to heart. Just look at the new forum!
V5 is full of concepts which have derived from your comments and suggestions. Not to take anything away from the innovative and creative core design at the heart of Antics. Take this example in V5. Now when you save a pose it now prompts you with the name of the selected item so you can type in a description to it. This is helps you organise your poses better. In the prior release, a pose was simply called "pose..(#)".
Let me know what you guys like/dislike about v5.
T.