Our latest assignment was to animate a little guy running up to and kicking a soccer ball.
I learned a good few things from this assignment but I think I'll start by detailing some of the technicalities.
This animation (and the stair stepper) was made entirely using 3DS Max. I used the Mental Ray renderer with all global illumination and final gathering turned off. This eliminates shadow flickering in the animation caused by the final gather solution and prevents the increased render time from the global illumination.
I opted instead for manual lighting which was very basic in this scene, simply because the focus was on animation and because I've already been sitting here 4 hours after class has ended. Doing so meant that there would be no flickering (because final gather was turned off) and render time was lessened considerably (apparently the mental ray ambient occlusion map is less demanding than global illumination).
All of the materials that I wanted to have ambient occlusion had an instance of the mental ray ambient occlusion map attached to the ambient color slot. To allow this, the ambient and diffuse colors have to be unlocked from each other. I then added an omni light in the scene that produced only ambient lighting (no diffuse, no specular) and turned the intensity down to about 0.5. The sun is just a simple targeted spot light with an intensity of around 1. Also! in the ambient occlusion map, the "light" color was changed to a deep, warm yellow and the "dark" was a dark burgundy. This added an overall warm tone to the scene. The highlights are never stark white and the shadows are a deep red instead of straight black.
I opted instead for manual lighting which was very basic in this scene, simply because the focus was on animation and because I've already been sitting here 4 hours after class has ended. Doing so meant that there would be no flickering (because final gather was turned off) and render time was lessened considerably (apparently the mental ray ambient occlusion map is less demanding than global illumination).
All of the materials that I wanted to have ambient occlusion had an instance of the mental ray ambient occlusion map attached to the ambient color slot. To allow this, the ambient and diffuse colors have to be unlocked from each other. I then added an omni light in the scene that produced only ambient lighting (no diffuse, no specular) and turned the intensity down to about 0.5. The sun is just a simple targeted spot light with an intensity of around 1. Also! in the ambient occlusion map, the "light" color was changed to a deep, warm yellow and the "dark" was a dark burgundy. This added an overall warm tone to the scene. The highlights are never stark white and the shadows are a deep red instead of straight black.
...for those that were interested.
As far as things learned go (looking at it again a day later), bright green is a BAD color to use for a ground. Heck, even a medium gray would've worked better.
Number 2 is that I need to save a LOT more often. What I have posted is my second attempt because I lost everything in my first attempt because of a program crash.
A reiteration of what we've learned before is that a sense of weight comes from holds at the low positions and extra time to move upwards, in effect lessening the time it takes to fall, over the span of the motion. The angle of the hips really helps the effect as well although it's much harder to implement.
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