focus on Alexander Sokolov

Alexander Sokolov

Is a russian previz artist who is my feature artist this time around.

He most recently worked on "Wanted" which starred the lovely lips of Angelina Jollie.

In addition to his site which is packed with great stills, there's also an old blog with a couple of interesting production stills.
Alexander Sokolov’s is a
3D Artist with production experience in television, аnd feature films. Specializing in Layout, Camera work and Vehicles animation. Alexander Sokolov’s Specialties:
Software: 3ds max, Vray, Adobe After Effects, Photshop, Illustrator, Premiere, PFTrack, SynthEye. Skillset: Planing, Layout, Vehicles animation, Dynamics, Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Rendering Alexander Sokolov’s has Experience
as Previz/VFX Artist, Supervisor
Bazelevs (Motion Pictures and Film industry) Jan 2005 — June 2008 (3 years 6 months)
Wanted (2008) - dir. Timur Bekmambetov Ironiya sudby. Prodolzhenie (2007) - dir. Timur Bekmambetov Dnevnoy dozor (2006) - dir. Timur Bekmambetov

Action

Hi all, in between drinks and eating way too much, I thought it might be of interest to you to have a look at this action sequence I built earlier. The whole clip is done in the timeline, it does continue with the girl kicking the guys butt, but that part was a little buggy.

Check out the project file if you get a moment. It was done on v4.

Third Floor Reel

OMG I loved Cloverfield. 1 oscar coming up.

Merry Christmas

Snake prop!

check this out anyone know about the assets used in this official antics clip. In particular the snake at 28sec. Also I'd like to tip my hat to the artist who did the helicopter blasts! very cool.

NEW FORUM UPDATE

The new forum is coming along nicely, there has been some real progress in the character development area. Also there's an important petition for pro users to check out. The forum is very open and becoming a great resource for veteran and newbies alike.
please take some time to check it out.
Also news is that the new offical characters have now been released and are available to download on the antics site.
If your are thinking of contributing to the discussion on Project Talent, the forum topic dedicated to character building, (both kinds), then check out this tut on skinning.
This latest test is from Quidam to Max to Antics.

make 'em jump

The library of character animations available within Antics is very large no doubt. But there are times when you need to have your character do things which are a little more custom built. Creating poses and blending to them will work quite nicely, as will importing .bvh animations (if you can find what you’re after).
But there are ways to set up your scene to get Antics to solve these custom moves for you. If you can get Antics do to do it realtime, then the process can be much faster.
For example, say I wanted my guy to run, then jump over something. Firstly, I set the walk (in properties:general:walks) to a run animation namely male_run.k3d so now wherever I direct him to go, he’ll get there real fast. Then I get him to perform the jump animation Jump_1.k3d
Ok so far so good. He runs, he jumps. Brilliant. But of course it’s very very unlikely the jump will take him the exact distance you have in mind, I mean, we could just let him drop into that lava pit, or croc pit or whatever he’s meant to be jumping over. So. Rather than go off in search of longer jumps, what if we move the room to make up the distance? If you setup a move on the room with him just standing there, you’ll see him move with the floor. So we simply setup the floor to move at the precise moment he leaves the ground, and have it stop moving just as he is to land.
Try it, it’s fun. In my example clip I moved the floor vertically as well, to get the guy to jump down to a lower level. Oh and then I added a little bounce off move using another jump and floor/combo.

As you can see I also changed the guy into a girl, it’s like a kill bill, bourne identity, bond thing now!
Moving the room also solved another problem I encountered a little while back. The idea was to have a whole bunch of shooters aim for the one target which was moving. The shooting animations in Antics are cool so I wanted to use those. Plus they work with the props! The solution was to put each shooter on a little room about the size of a floor mat. Then have these rooms hooked up to a cam. The room is linked to the cam.
The cameras (one for each room) are then told to target the target, (if you get what I mean). This way the target can move and the shooters won’t miss! You can get the cameras to look where ever you want, just make the target at ground plane level.
T.
(part 2 here)

Making the Fairy fly - Sketchup tip

In one of the packs was an angel, I thought it might be fun to go through the steps needed to make the wings of the fairy move. It’s possible to use the tab key to allow selection each wing, set a pose or two and then get the fairy to blend from one pose to another, but, I thought you might want to have a little more control, plus this way you can have your fairy free to do other stuff. (Like walking.)
For this you’ll need some eggs, a little flour and an inclinometer. (just kidding you won’t need the eggs!) Actually this process works best with photoshop and sketchup and of course Antics. We’ll be plucking the wings off our fairy and then sticking a couple of new ones on. So place the fairy on a new room. To remove the original wings, right click the fairy, choose textures then right click on the wings.ksh texture in the list, to select edit. Under the colour tab you can set the transparency to 100%. So now you have a wingless fairy. Not bad looking as a female character, bar the ears and the ridges in her back!.
The next step is to set up for creating or own wings. We do this by importing a new fairy and positioning her so that all we see is the wing sticking up through the floor like a wing shaped floor mat. (Turn off the snap to position,rotation option.) Line your camera up to this wing and when it’s large in frame save out a single frame. This’ll be what we use the create and texture our new wing. Your wing should look like this…….
Using sketchup, import the wing still frame (as an image) so that we can trace the shape. I found a Bezier Curves plugin for Sketchup which made the job much easier. Once you have a completed the outline of your wing, you can import the stillframe again (as a texture) and apply it to the surface. A little scale/rotate/position fiddle and we are all set. Remember to do the other side as well. Ok now save the .skp file as wing.skp then back into Antics and jump into the file/import and select your wing.skp
All good. So now you should have a wing and a wingless fairy. At this point I saved the Antics project. When you do this you can access the texture map being applied to the new wing so that you can set the look of it to match the original wing texture map. These maps are found in a “maps” folder within the saved project. The original wing was mapped with a fairy_hair_wings.tga file. If you want the new wing to be identical to the original you’ll need to use photoshop to match the RGBA channels. Otherwise you could set the transparency value so the new wing has the look you want.
The next part of the process is to get the new wings flapping. As usual, I’ve gone for the old, “use a camera to create a motion curve” trick. If you haven’t heard of it before, it goes something like this. Put a freecam in the spot where you want an animatable axis of some sort. Link the asset/prop to this freecam. Now use the pan, tilt and dolly values to drive your prop. In this way the values are recorded via the camera’s motion curve, and therefore editable. For the wings, make sure the pivot point is in the right spot, then link each wing to it’s own freecam, which you put, right on the ridge on the back of our wingless fairy. It’s useful to have two viewports open. One is the Mastercam, framed so you can see the whole wing, (say from the top). The other viewport (which you make active) is to see what the freecam is looking at. When you pan left, the asset will swivel to the left. Make sure the freecamera animation is recorded in the timeline.
Once you’ve got your cameras doing their thing, link them to your fairy. Now she is free to be directed, and the wings will perform on cue.
Have fun.
T.

speed utility

Trolling through the old forum I found this speed utility created by Col Klink.

Using Machinima to teach film

Using machinima to teach film
Machinima has the potential to be a powerful tool for teaching film-making techniques. It has several advantages over existing 3D animation technologies such as Max or Maya. The film-maker doesn’t need any knowledge of 3D animation techniques – controlling the characters is as easy as playing a computer game. The virtual world is “live” - in other words, everything takes place in real time, and so it feels more like directing on a real set.

The disadvantage of using machinima is ......................
(article continued in comments section)
 
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Thanks go to
Matt Kelland, Short Fuze, for writing this article.

New emotional characters

Here's a sneak preview of the upcoming new emotional characters.
Keep a lookat at the Antics download page.

New forum - Antics

here
Invitations to JRay, Colonel Klink, Ricky, InfoCentral, AnticsFife, afterThought, dazza101, klate & Michael and to all current and future users of Antics. All are welcome. Learners especially welcome.

to be honest - the artist formerly known as Antics

There's a lot to be said for the Gordon Ramsey way of expressing yourself. Shooting straight from the hip and getting on with it. I started as a beta tester for v2 and have been fortunate to have been commissioned a number of times for various demo pieces. Like a couple of other select few, I was asked to join the moderating team on the official forum and contribute to the official blog. So it certainly surprised me with the nov 28 news and now with the closure of the web site/forum. (F**K!) Like many others I have invested way too much time in getting across the product to just let it slide. When I setup my little previz shop under the name AMMO PREVIZ, I thought I had identified a future market. The concept was "AMMO" : to provide ammunition to the previz creator. I choose Antics at that point as it was the only one I felt suited my creative and 3d skill set. Even with the current owners orphaning the child, I can see plently of growth possible. This one product is in use by around 20,000 people. The best solution available to us all is one which takes into account the most popular features. Without taking away any credit for the artists formerly know as Antics developers, the product evolved in part as a result of our community feedback. So we do owe it to ourselves to keep the momentum going. So lets take the batton, stir the pot and work on that F***ng recipe. Please leave your mark for what worked best for you, in the comments section.

Keeping the Blog afloat.

Fellow survivors, feel free to use this forum ,or use the shout box on this blog, or just post comments as you wish. If any one is keen enough to help with posts etc, let me know.
Here to help.
T

lights are on, nobody's home - Moviestorm anyone?

The Antics site is closed. For some registered users, you can continue to download the 1.1 gb content file as well as the v5 installer.If you are having logon trouble, perhaps try brad
or support
I am wondering about v5.1 and reported new emotion characters.

Here's hoping Matt K or David B (Moviestorm) will shed some light as our crew of 20,000 decide whether to sail on or jump ship......I can hear the band is still playing.......lovely music......nice night for a cruise... pity it's so cold out.....hmmmmm what's that lump of ice ahead.
T.

Indiana Clone

thanks to afterthought for finding these iclone examples.

Will the last one to leave please turn off the lights!

Well last day for download of v5! (sad, but maybe there'll be an unofficial link out there) .....
The good news is there's a link for the content library now!
download content
Still no news on V5.1 and those extra emotion characters!
I noticed there are still new comers on the forum! Wow seems wacko that a product is being phased out whilst the customer base is growing!
If anyone wants to share how they have been going with alternative programs I'd be interested.

JRAY posted this final wishlist on the forum
Antics3D is ceasing development of the software, but if someone out there is looking to create the next best thing in RTR / Pre-viz, these are my top suggestions of which direction I'd like to see the field move in (considering Antics3d's feature set as the base). FIXES OR NECESSITIES:
-Off-line Help File
-Rigging specs for Emotional Characters (or more Emotional Characters)
-Accurate BVH animation importWISHES:
-A "Replace" object command-Move Main Camera to this View command-Color Coded Toolbars (i.e. "Direct" is red, "Camera" is blue etc..)-U/V or other coordinate control for Textures
-Keyframeable Textures
-AVI Textures
-Keyframeable Object Movements
-Object Clipping-Add Custom Content to Content Viewer
-Depth of Field Control-Automaton Characters and Traffic
-Automated Chase, Follow, and Fight scripts
-An Automated Environment Engine
-A Physics Engine
-A Particle Engine
-Hi-fidelity Stereo Positional Audio
-A variety of 3D geometry importers and exporters
-Camera Track Exporters
-Text (xml) based user editable files for everything including takes
-Integrated Video (or Macro) Tutorials
-A character rigging converter workshop for mocap data
-The ability to split animations (waist up and pelvis down)
-Recordable game style real time control of vehicles, characters and cameras (a la Machinimation)
-Multi-actor real time character controls
I know it's a lot of stuff, but many game engines already utilize the majority of these. I'm sure you have your own ideas, post them here and hopefully the author(s) of future machinima - rtr 3d software will have a single post to reference.

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I suppose Iclone scores highest on this list. I haven't checked out the new v but the cam control was a definate dud on the prior v. Also the poly count was quite low.

If I had the time I'd think an engine like that in Half-life 2 would probably be able to be kitted up to get us there. Maybe we should get across those modders, I know that community is about the size of a small country! What's happening with Z-Viz?
I'm still thinking the Antics toolkit is looking good for a good while yet. Good.


Finally, Please ... a moment of silence for the victims in Mumbai and Afghanistan.

What's new in Google SketchUp 7

tree plugin for sketchup

natasha hurt.mov

check out filmwerx77 's clip, a like the bearded baby!

Quidam the "Holy Grail"

I've started to get stuck into working on a pipeline for custom character creation. I've now got acess to 3ds so I can try out some modding of the sample character supplied by Antics. The Plug-in "Antics exporter" worked nicely from Max to Antics. The main tip is to name your root node "pelvis". I'm no max expert but I was able to get in and play with the mesh to make the guy have a fat tummy or a big head.(bit like some people I know!)

As for building my own character, I was able to create a biped in Max which exported into Antics quite well, (although the eyes will require a node each.) My next step is to bring in a character mesh from say Quidam or Poser and skin the Biped skeleton. Better still would be to try a fully rigged character imported into Max. I remember going down the Poser road a while ago and I ran into a deadend with the skeleton being too different from the max biped structure. (and not knowing enough to fix it)

Although Deep Exploration do have a poser to max solution now.

I see Quidam have a max exporter and it'd be good to get hold of a 3ds converted file from someone to try this out.

I'll let you know....

please let me know if anyone out there is having as much fun as I am.