Antics Academy

Thing best thing about a pencil, is that it's compatible with all forms of paper! So as a tool for creating a storyboard it's always going to be king! However, as a tool to create moving storyboards, well Antics is now royalty. It's a fun and creative kingdom we live in.

An ever growing sector of the Antics community is the Machinima group. Traditionally Machinimals would express a creative concept using the 3d engine of their favorite computer game. Short clips were made featuring scenes and characters derived from the game world.

This artform has produced some wonderfully imaginative and brilliantly written works.

It's great appeal is that it opens up animation to anyone with a computer and a little creative flair and you can create pieces very quickly. Of course people were limited to staging stories in some other artist's world, using some other artist's characters but that was also the appeal.It's a bit like a movie spoof. The gag's are funny because you are already familiar with the backstory.

Then along comes Antics. As more and more of us study at the Antics Academy we are being given a much wider choice of stories to tell, and ways to express them.

Take this clip , here the artist has followed through with a creative presentation of a subject that is very close to him. It's an interesting showcase as it mixes game scenes with Antics scenes. It's also worth noting, it's the first clip by this artist. Aside from some framing and sound elements I think it's great. Thanks to Michael Stitt for the clip.

FYI here is my favorite clip. by JAYDEE. It's made with the SIM'S but it's the one that got me in search of a product like Antics and to start making my own stuff.

Oh and if you get a chance drop by my son's blog, he'd be wrapped if some comments are left.

Give your characters a Second Life!

Starting to compile a new list of "wouldn't be great if"... here's one.

WIBGI .... there was a "youtube" setting.

also I found these Second Life animations bvh

they can be a lot of fun for your Antics characters.

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.

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.

V5 first look

First impressions,

The first thing that struck me with V5 is the new design for the gui. There's a
fresh coat of paint over the whole work area and the icons have all been updated with new coloured icons. The tooolbar sets have been designed to remove clutter, and are set to autodock. Shift click rotates the toolbar 90 degrees, and Ctrl click lets you float it. By default the Project and construct windows, come up without the transform, display or cameras toolbars, with the Direct windows giving you all toolbars. You can alter these layouts simply by selecting View/Toolbars/ and choosing which toolbar you require to be on or off.Many of the icons have a new design and holding your mouse over the icon will reveal the name. Some the operations have been consolidated in the one button. Some have been removed, (like snapshot).A new tool is the edit object tool, (it's a hammer/wrench icon), this allows you to adjust the height/width of primitive at any time using a gestural action, very handy.The Camera controls are the same but also with a new set of icons, The selection of skeleton joints has been carried over from the prior version also. As before you select the character then click on the TAB key on your keyboard to enter the pose mode. You'll find the PIN operation is now invoked as an option once you have selected an appropriate joint. Right click on any object in the scene and you'll find some new options in the list. "Direct commands" lets you choose an operation. For a character, it's here where you get one way to direct a lookat or eyeball command. (you can choose from a list of items currently in the set) Another way to direct your character is with a new Context- Sensitive feature. And it relly works well, selecting the direct icon and choosing your character puts you in a direct mode, now when you hover over things in your set, the icon changes depending upon what is available to you, these can be lookat, goto, pick up, put down, that sort of thing. Antics V5 comes with a quick start project which is a fast way of trying out the latest features. Perhaps the most exciting new feature is the implementation of Emotions to Antics V5. They have achieved this throught the use of two new "smart" characters which are in the Characters/Emotional folder. There is a male and female model and they look good. The have a certain "sims"-ness to them, they appear to have a higher poly count, (especially around the face). Strangely, they are about 80% of the scale of all your current characters which may be a issue! (try placing them closer to cam to offset this). Also the lookat commands are set to the forehead rather than the eyes. (may be related issue). There are a number of ways to use the emotion modes. I suspect the faces contain blend shapes which warp and distort the mesh to give the appearance of expressions. The emotion can be set as a personality of the character, this'll means the character will retain the mood. You can choose from Aggresive, Average, Cheerful, Confident, Implusive, Shy, Sorrowful, Submissive andUptight.

These are all very cool. All the while the character will blink randomly, which adds so much life. But this is just one part of the new feature.The other important aspect is best used in the direct
mode. Selecting the character and then choosing the set emotion mode (by clicking the emotion icon, or by right clicking and choosing "change emotion") will bring up a new set emotion window. In this window you'll see a your characters face and you can load in a preset emotion from a drop down menu. These are different again to the personality choices. When you Apply the emotion it'll run for a set time and that'll give you an element in the timeline which you can adjust. Opening up the advance features tab gives you the option to really tweak the expression. Saving the emotion adds it to the drop down list.

V5 - Dial in that smile!

As you've probably heard Antics' latest version, V5, has just been released and it looks like the team have hit a home run!
There's some info  on the website, which among other features describes how  
you can add expressions!

They say you use the emotion tool and then click on one of our predefined expressions to instantly add emotion and then you can use fine-grained controls to edit facial expressions intuitively, adding or taking away degrees of happiness, sadness, anger, and so on. To really hone in on the exact expression you need, and convey a truly subtle emotion.

I totally agree. The smile on my face gets bigger every time I think about those sliders!
Full review coming soon.
 

New Antics Website, logo and V5 coming... Is it xmas already?

Wow the guys in the steam room have really been chucking in the timber. The new website for Antics looks very slick and now has that search feature we've been looking for, what a great resource for users. I'll cover off the V5 news just as soon as it's released. How exciting, emotions on our characters! And what do you think of the new logo. I guess they'll change the watermark in the new version also!

Also checkout the latest Machinima Podcast called The Overcast. This week Ricky talks to Brad Kolacinski from Antics3d about the latest improvements to the Antics program in version 4, including a much improved lighting system and a new pricing structure, and he gives us a taste of what to expect in version 5 (FACIAL EXPRESSIONS!) (here's the link they released)

http://theovercast.com/overcast-038/

I'm home for my (once a month) weekend with the family right now, but when I get back to Adelaide I'll post some more.....

T.

Panning a light

Here's a trick Antics user "Knownic" came up with for controlling a light,
add a light to a set then get a free camera to look through at where you want the light to fall , then attach the lamp to the camera, you can then pan and tilt the camera and see where the light is acting... you can also get it to target a moving item....

good one.

Project - Spiral Stairs

So for the past few days I've been attempting to work out a way to get a character to walk down a spiral staircase. As you may know Antics allows you to simply point and click your way to stairway heaven, so long as you use the Antics stairs. If you do wish to import a set of stairs from Sketchup you'll have to take some further steps to get the action to work. The workflow goes like this: Import your staircase. Count the steps. Create an antics staircase with equal steps. You'll probably have to scale the imported asset to match. If you're lucky you'll be able to align the stairs so that the character appears to walk on the imported one. Most probably, the imported stairs will be taller or longer. You can overcome this by moving the staircase whilst the character is ascending/descending. The probem though, is that you cannot simply move the staircase alone, if you do so then the character won't know where the stair starts/stops. So you move the room that contains the whole lot.

Ok, so that's how the straight line setup works, but what if I want to use a spiral staircase? Well, as I found out, this required much more head stratching! I tried lots of things, camera key- framing, poses, linking to axial billboards.... The problem was how to build the rotation into the setup, given that the rotation needs to be relative to a character who is moving.I sorted this problem out by moving the staircase/room in "z" and "x" axis. This gave me the illusion of the character walking the wrong way up an escalator. That is, the character is doing the stepping action but not actually moving in any direction. The idea was then to get the whole room to move around a centre pivot and float down the centre pole of my spiral staircase. O.K. if you followed that you've done very well. The problem was, it was a nightmare to setup!! I think it worked once but there were plenty of errors and it was really unreliable.
So I abandoned the idea of using the stepping action and set about just using a walking action. I built a long corridor of a room, one that would allow my character to take the same amount of a steps as I had in the spiral staircase. I then moved the room, so she just walked on the spot (like a treadmill). Then I had this setup move through a series of poses to get the rotation and z position correct. A lot of work, but it turned out ok. here

Cambridge Film Festival - 2 films short listed!

Wow, I 've just read two of my ANTICS films made the shortlist to screen at this year's Cambridge Film Festival.
They are "Looking Back" which is in the Synthetic Cinema session,
and "Folie a Duex" which is in the Dreams and Shadows session.
Antics also makes an appearance with "Right Guard" by Eric Kmetz and "Pawn Trailer" by V.W. Scheich. (Sorry if I missed someone).
We share the screen with work from Phil Rice (aka Overman) and Tom Jantol, not to mention Hugh Hancock and Lit Fuze and Frank L Fox. These guys are all from the Machinima scene, where Antics is the new kid on the block.
Fingers crossed.

(prays to Peter Rasmussen)

ANTICS v10 - Absolutely Fabulous

A little while back Ricky Grove chatted with Brad about Antics3d. It makes for some interesting listening and it got me thinking.....
When you're learning Antics (or any other app) it's great to get an idea of where the product has evolved from and where they are heading. Because there is so much out there in terms of solutions, it's hard to know where to invest your time. So learning about the software's plans for the future and checking out the path they are taking, helps sus out whether the product suits your current needs and aids in forecasting what your needs may be in the future. Aside from the feature set Antics offers, a strong appeal for me is the way Antics are responding to feedback from everyday users. We asked for lighting, we got it, needed more characters, got it, needed a better cam system and an easy way to get more assets in, got it. Soon we'll get emotions and that's a direct result of community feedback I'm sure. These are positive points. But lets not forget the reason we like Antics. The innovation and simplicity of creating 3d content in a world where you once needed an entire team to create stuff. We like the innovative, imaginiative way they took the 3d game engine out of the game box and put it into our creative toolset.
So here's a thought, inject some wild and crazy thoughts into the discussion. Let this community know what you think would be the most unlikeliest, yet Absolutely Fabulous new feature of Antics v10. Let's keep the innovative going. Build upon your own investment in learning this app. We know they're listening.

Oh BTW, found this earlier.....


It's from a blog for Moviestorm development
Check it out.

MACHINIMASH OR ANIMASH

Cute iclone clip, nice demo of a simple idea excuted well. By MassiPG. Obivously Antics would have made this easier to create. The use of a full sound mix helps so much. Why not try your own rebuild of a favorite clip. Should we call them MachiniMash or Animash.
T.

HULK - PREVIZ PLF

Here's another cool previz comparison clip from the gurus at Pixel Lliberation Front. - enjoy

Let's try it one more time but with feeling......

Antics3D HQ are busy getting ready for the launch of v5 in October.
I'm told V5 will have a number of cool new features, including CHARACTER EMOTIONS.
That's great news. There's been a few workarounds for users in the past. These include making a face animate in Crazy Talk. Some results were cool but the main issue is that the face is not 3d. Photoshop and lighting can also help evoke some emotion. In fact even with the upcoming feature lighting and head angle may aid in the delevery of emotion in your scene.

For your research ..Dr. Robert G. Nulph article

Aaman Akram article

10,000 HITS! ANTICS BLOG

Wow, 10,000 hits on my blog. That's more than a year's worth of sparring with Mike Tyson! It's been fun. Let me know if there's anything in particular you want covered.

T.

ANTICS3d - ZVIZ the a to Z of Previz

Zviz is an application being developed by ILM. Currently in Beta Testing and soon to be released. If you see some info on this very interesting PREVIZ product please let me know.

Martin McEachern writes for Computer Graphics World.
His cool Computer Graphics World article gives us a little more info.

Bill Desowitz talks technology, convergence, The Force Unleashed and Star Wars: The Clone Wars with Richard Kerris, who recently left Apple to become CTO of Lucasfilm
VFX World article

T.

jump!

Make 'em Jump More,

A little while ago I posted on the Antics Blog a tip showing how to have a character jump over large distances and various heights.
Here is another example. Thanks to Brett for asking for clarification on the workflow.
It went something like this...

(Given that your satanic dude is on his own little "floor mat" size room already)
1.Go to direct mode and with record on,
animate devil to jump. (use jump 1, see note below)
2.scrub timeline to where he lands.
3.turn off record
4.now position room to line character up to where you want him. (by moving the little room he came from)
5.save a pose for this new room position.
6.turn record back on.
7.animate room to blendto pose.

Now you have a jump element and a room move element in the timeline.
8. Adjust the room move element to eleminate sliding. (see pic)
Set the room to start to move only when the character's trailing foot is off the ground,(leaves floor), then set the end to make sure the ground is not moving at the moment the foot touches the ground.(lands)



(Note: I got weird results using the jump 2 animation, the problem was that the character would pop to the original room position once the animation finished. Seems it reverts to the original state rather than the current room position)

IronMan previz PLF

Hi Guys, found this cool comparison clip from PLF. Enjoy

Adding to Antics

It's was quite entertaining showing off the sketchup import in Antics. "Pick a location" I ask (like a guy saying pick a card, any card), "the Eiffel Tower" was the response, in a few minutes I'd found a model and had girl walking around the base. How cool is that. In the same session we got serious and took the current script to task. In about 10mins I had placed a car on a turntable, positioned a huge megascreen behind it and set the whole lot up in the middle of a birdnest style stadium. Once I'd put a couple of cameras in the scene we started to get a real sense of how the concept was going to work. Everyone agreed the process was very quick and produced useful results straight away. There were a couple of things that would have made it even better. When I'm working one on one, on my laptop, I like to one viewport open and I like it as big as possible. I also prefer to use the master cam for this as I find the ability to orbit around a selection the quickest. At one point the director and I spent a good deal of time setting up the ideal framing, the difficulty then came when he wanted to have a object in the background moved into this frame. In this case it was the light towers, and the issue was that the axis controls where no longer in the frame. My thought here is, wouldn't it be good if I could move the item from where I select it. Or, better still, an axis for an item could be repositioned to a new point by clicking there, (similiar to the 'edit pivot' option on an imported prop).

Another feature which I desperately needed was the ability to quickly tell what lense we were on. I know you can set a freecam to get this detail but director's want to see this stuff displayed in the viewport. Also it's almost becoming a regular question from the 3d guys and compositors "can you export the camera?". It really makes sense, until you can get in on this part of the workflow, you aren't offering a full solution.

I'm talking cam export to maya/max, AE and the autodesk compositing products. Just on that, it works back the other way also. Part of Storyviz's appeal to me was the ability to import a camera move. They had a cool demo where a once a shot was 3d camera tracked, the cam data could be imported into the app and then assets could be placed into 3d space relative to the shot. Like characters running along the surface of a kitchen bench shot by a hand held camera.
While I'm on the camera side of things. The curve editor in Antics really needs a good going over. For starters the ability to cut and paste keyframes is needed. Also needed are linear and curved options on individual keyframes. I'd like to see users able to invoke a series of hand held or camera shakes easily, and when are we going to get the ability to do a dutch tilt easily!! Try it with the master cam let me know how you go.

On a side note, I was very fortunate to talk with some fellows from the computer science faculty at the local uni here and thought you might like to see what the've been working on here.

It's really innovative work.
Some of the tips I've been posting involve ways to get assets to animate in ways that don't involve poses or preset animations. On reflection, the use of cameras to perform these tasks is really a workaround. The better concept is to have Animatable Dummy Axis. They would come with many features that currently exist in the cameras and billboards, things like target, link, pin and the ability to always face camera etc, but also have other features, like the option to keyframe position and rotation values on the timeline or the option to set rotation limits, or to be constrained by the room's floor. The ability to easily cycle a motion curve would be another animation aid.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.