Decided this was so technical and long-winded, it belonged on a technical and long-winded blog. So I made one. :)
Working With Video Reference
It's a better place to put this kind of stuff. I'll link to my little articles as I write them, that way I don't derail this space with dry technical stuff.
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I'm not a Maya animator so I'm afraid a lot of that went over my head about "breaking the timeline in Maya" and "hooking it to an animatable function curve", but it looks like you've got some kind of method for extracting key poses from video?
Right, Tom. That's the main idea. Extract and manipulate to get what you want from the reference. Use it as a framework - to give your animation strength and solidity. You go on top of that with your own thing to give it flexibility and to add your own touch.
It took watching Fielding's talk a few times to really get what he was doing. He took video reference, ripped it into individual frames and then had those sequential frames play back on a plane in Maya. Instead of using the default timeline settings, he used an expression or something (not really sure how he did it) to force Maya to playback the frames based on the keys he created in the graph editor. Maya still played at 24 FPS, but would hold on stepped keys, slope or cushion in or out, etc.
The benefit was that he needed a relatively small set of keys to control the motion and those keys could be edited easily.
The Hulk example I posted is 208 frames long. I was able to easily extract 19 poses in a couple of minutes. I could probably pare that down even more. Or added more 'poses' if something isn't clear.
While I'm using existing films and random clips, I will probably video myself and use my own performance as a basis, at some point.
Thought I'd share this working method because I think it's pretty amazing.
Very interesting.
Clean way to go straight into to a rotoscopable source, not copy it exactly, but leave behind the actual time the action took as your timeline.
Almost eveything exports frame sequences. I could do it with 3 programs I have. I'd probably just use quicktime pro to give me frames vs this technique.
Greatest love story of all time. The African Queen.
It's been probably 30 years since I watched The African Queen. I mainly remember my father loved it and there's a scene with Bogey and leeches that my mother hated because it was kind of disgusting. :)
I'm going to follow this post with another re-timed video using this technique using a scene from the Avengers. I use a whole slew of timing and blocking techniques along with compression and decompression. It's pretty much case-closed for me as the best way to study movement, acting and animation, in general. Makes everything so much clearer.
For my sake on the old mac mini and Marty also complained about it, I got rid of the embeds.
Fairly slow loading page when you have that many on blogspot.
I made them into jpg captures with the word link underneath them . Just right click and open New Tab. Open all Four at once for that matter.
I just checked my work. They all go to the right spot.
Thanks, Ellis. Sorry for dragging things down with my silly vids.
No, share all this tech adventure. I dig it. You might copy my style for future posts. I should do this exact same thing for my storyboard blogspot page.
Blogspot just isn't good at it. Tumblr does the better job.
Glad you made the changes (had no idea it was bogging things down) and good to hear you are getting something out of my random ramblings. I tend to get kinda OCD about these things and I'm never sure how much of a bloghog I become when I post this kind of stuff.
For the record, Marty's complaint was an old one. Dating back to some pop culture stuff that was being embedded that he was taking about 15 minutes to load on some mobile access he was using.
I hope you don't feel driven off. This is good stuff. I still have an itch to get into Blender based on the introduction you gave to us. (My introduction anyway)
But any time you do an extensive article, do crosspost.
Starting up a blog skewing to my particular technical interests has been bouncing around in my brain for a while and this seemed like a good time to do it.
A lot of what I'm into is hard to condense into a small, group-friendly post -too much 'Inside Baseball,' maybe. I don't want to kill the awesome vibe that exists here.
Knowing that my posts also might cause loading problems (like what happened with Sketchfab and with all the YouTube embeds) is another reason to stick that stuff somewhere else. I had no idea it was killing people's computers and that's the last thing I want to do.
I'll still contribute here, but I'll save the long-winded stuff for my own blog and just post a link for posterity. :)
I hope everyone jumps in supporting your posting whenever you feel like it Ronnie.
Of course! Always want to know what you are up to Ronnie. Keep the reports coming. Your joyful enthusiasm for whatever you are working on is always uplifting.
Thanks, much, Tom, Ellis. I'll still post. Not going anywhere.
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