proccess

colbo

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proccess

« on: July 23, 2007, 08:04:38 AM »

hiya, if you can help me in any way ill be really grateful...

im really interested in working as a character animator one day but have been coming up with some problems during the proccess...

ive been working in maya for a while now up to a limit being fairly successful in being able to pose and animate characters and getting them to do what i like...
however i have just started to work with audio, so first of all using the audio track i have acted out what the character needs to do. its something ive not done before acting goofy infront of a cam but hey, its quite good fun too...
then i have tried for the tricky bits to copy frame for frame of my source acting to help put in the keys for my character
ie.
frame 10 i beging to raise my hand, frame 10 in maya i key the hand
frame 20 my hands above my head, frame 20 in maya i move the hand to the same place etc...
but unfortunately the audio and my charaters movements dont match up doing it this way./???

obviously the frame rates are different between the audio and the source acting video, which i where i need some info on whats best practice

what software should i use to scan through frame by frame to copy my acting out gestures so that they will match the frame rate of the audio in maya... Huh

or am i going about it all the wrong way..>???HELP!

any advice to help me achieve using my acting source as a guide for my 3d character will be most grateful

yours, colbo


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Phil

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Character animator - Action Synth?se

Re: proccess

« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2007, 09:54:43 AM »

Hey Colbo,
first of all, welcome on AL !

You have a good start to establish a nice workflow here. Filming yourself doing acting is definitely the way you want to do acting shots. This is a part of the planning process which is insanely important in animation.

But apart of that, I think you're missing something here. When you have filmed yourself, you don't wanna copy frame by frame your video. This is a video reference and had to stay this way. What you should do after shooting yourself is drawing your golden poses out of it, trying to push them, because I assumed that what you acted in front of the camera is not perfect and could be improve.

And guess what ? that's the beauty of animation !
Compared to stage acting, we can plan, we can draw, we can think about details such as fingers poses or eyebrows poses.

Talking about frame rate, I'm not sure but I would say PAL video is 25frames/sec, NTSC video is 30/sec and your audio or the shot you wanna animated is problaby 24.

But you don't wanna count every seconds to fit your animation on your audio. During your planning process, make to sure to note yhe accent of your audio and just use the frame numbers. You should have your audio file loaded in your maya timeline and you can see the wave on it. Then you can see which frame is which accent on the dialogue. This is the way it's working usely..

hope it helped, let us know

Good luck man


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"Discipline is defined by what you do when no one is watching."
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colbo

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Re: process

« Reply #2 on: July 24, 2007, 05:23:59 AM »

thanks for the input phil, its really super to have somewhere to talk about animation, i am at the beginning of what i imagine will be a very long road to where id like to end up, and with input from experienced people really helps and i WILL be returning often! Wink

the tips on the process are great, ill put them into practice immediately?

cheers, colbo


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