Moho Forum

A short time ago, there was a snow storm that sort of took everyone by surprise. I had no clue. Wasn't listening to the news or checking weather reports... nothing. I woke up one morning, was working for a while. Never even looked out the window.

I decided I needed to go to the store and get a few odds and ends and pick up some lunch. Was expecting the same thing I always see when I open the door. Just another normal day.

I open up the door and WHAM! All I see is white. Snow coming down like crazy. Must have been 5 inches. Snow had come down so fast none of the plows even had a chance to get ready for it.

I just sort of stood there on my porch shivering and looking around in total shock. The dialog of the animation (what little there is) is entirely accurate and is exactly what I said, very loudly. My neighbors have a very large great dane and I was sort of thinking it might be possible to hook it up to a sled so I could get my hot lunch. I really did expect to see arctic beasts wandering by. It would not have surprised me.

While I was working on the animation we had another small snow storm. By the time I got the animation finished, we had a sudden reversal. 70 degree temperatures for 2 days.... in FREAKING DECEMBER. Felt kind of silly to put up an animation of why I hate snow when I almost had to use the AC in my car.

Well, here it is.

I Hate Snow



I used particles for the penguins. I also found a cool trick for the "flippers" with smart bones. I figured out a cool way to create "two sided shapes". Just change the color of a shape at the half way flip of a shape. Was able to use that to get the two sides of the flippers (black and white) very easily.

I found another trick for the bear walk cycle. Apparently, a four legged walk cycle is very similar to two people walking. One is walking forward normally, the other walks backwards in the same direction. Used that as a reference and watched lots of video of polar bears.

Polar bear is quite well done. Good one!
-G

Well done, I love the way you made the shaking! Also the bear and the penguins where great!

Very nice! Great work on the walk cycles for polar bear and penguins. I bet a lot of work went into making the polar bear move so realistically. Thanks for sharing some tips on that. You nailed it as far as conveying a sense of arctic cold. Made me think... it would be interesting to play around with ways to make snow swirl? I wonder if a script could be written to create semi-random paths for each flake, it would be too tedious to do manually? Thanks for sharing your very "cool" animation!

When I return home I'm going to look further into "two sided flippers". Hands, wings shoes... that's an essential bit of knowledge.

3deeguy wrote:When I return home I'm going to look further into "two sided flippers". Hands, wings shoes... that's an essential bit of knowledge.

The cool part is it works for transparency as well. You can have a shape over other shapes. Then you can make it transparent with a flip and "hide" it. I've used that trick a few times in other situations, but the penguin's flipper trick really came in handy.

Without smart bones this technique would be a royal pain in the tushy. Having it a part of the smart bone makes it so easy and it just does its thing with a simple bone rotation.

Let's assume you are creating a smart bone action similar to the penguin flipper change, that has point or bone scaling. For my penguin I have a smart bone that scales the bone controlling the flipper to a negative value. So the SB rotation causes the flipper to completely reverse the scale making it "flip" to the other side. So the bone scales down to 0 then to -1.

At the half way point or "0" scale of the SB action, the flipper is basically squished to nothing. That is where the color change would happen so it's hidden.

There are some problems or limitations with smart bones. You can't use step interpolation in smart bone actions which would make this easier. I could simply have one step key that would change my penguin flipper from black to white.

I already set the smart bone action up as a multi key action with the smart bone rotation at the end. Then at the half way point of the smart bone rotation you find that "flip" point to hide the shape change and put in two keys for the shape color change right next to each other. The first key is just a copy of frame zero key for the shape, then the next key on the next frame would be the shape key to to the white color. Having the keys right next to each other would "fake" the step key interpolation that doesn't work for smart bone actions.

Instead of one step key, you have two "regular" or smooth keys next to each other. I will try to do a tutorial when I get a chance. It's really really easy. It only sounds difficult.

the "two sided" switch colours technique also works for doors: (e.g. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=25214) and, with a variant on the "shape over shape" technique that Vern mentioned, you can do page peels / page turns etc where the "lower" shape is incrementally revealed.

you can also take that shape over shape with transparency technique one stage further if you use it as a masking layer (or export it as a matte for use in a compositor) to, say, do a page turn where the pages have animated content or just an "interesting" scene transition... (this is a "near example" of that approach http://www.kelleytown.com/forum/animato ... IC_ID=2026)

on the Random path for individual snowflakes... particle layers have a lot to offer. By using a combination of particle lifetime, directional scatter, initial velocity variations and multiple vector layers with animated content you can get a long way to what you want - (e.g. http://www.kelleytown.com/forum/animato ... IC_ID=2553)

I'll be watching this thread because it'll help me get closer to stuff like extending fingers toward the camera and revealing palms. I would call it '2.6D'!

Great work. I especially like the movement of the polar bear!

S

Thanks for all the feedback about the polar bear walk cycle.

I have to confess I put a bit of effort into it. What you see is like the 3rd version. I did the first version based on what I knew about 4 legged walk cycles but it just didn't look right. Bears don't seem to walk like say, a horse or a dog. The legs have a somewhat different shape or joints. More like a person. When they walk, they almost seem to look like a "guy in a bear suit" or a person walking on all fours. The key was actually WATCHING VIDEOS OF POLAR BEARS!

I also did an alligator for this animation, but didn't use it. The alligator actually has almost the same kind of leg and walk style as the bear. It's the back legs. Very different from other types of 4 legged critters like dogs and horses. I was going to use the alligator for a second segment in the animation with me in a winter coat, but now the weather is hot and tropical with an alligator and tropical birds.

True story; a very very short time after that snow we had a couple of days of freak warm temperatures in the high 60's. Hot enough to cause sweating in my car. I woke up, thought I had over slept, missed winter, and it was now spring.

Vern, you need to move out to west coast where a December in the 80's is the norm . Fun to watch your work, and thanks for all the tips. Always appreciated.

I love snow. Possibly because we don't get much of it, so it has novelty value.

Wow, those penguins were great! Very good animation, but you should turn down the A/C in your car if it's attracting polar bears and penguins!

Freaking heck! I still really hate snow. I'm in the middle of a huge freaking storm (blowing through north east USA). It's about 11pm and it will be snowing until 10 am tomorrow. It's snowing about an inch an hour. Already about 4 inches. Sub zero wind chill all day tomorrow... not... going... outside... at... all.... buurrrrr. I knew I should have bought more MRE's.

Will have to do "Part 2" of this animation. Maybe sled dogs? Abominable snow men?

My boss is happy. He bought a snow blower like 2 years ago and this is his first really good chance to use.

I am sure there are people who live in "snow country" who think this is just a flurry... but we don't get snow like this all the time and it really bites the big one.

This is awesome. Really fun to watch it again and again specially the penguins. Great job.