Animation II Final in 3ds Max 2009 1st Pass Video

This was a Final Project for my animation II class using 3ds max along with after effects (not required). I will fix most of the animation in the near future. I did have hardware issues while keying the charecter which should be obvious, but it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed creating it a lot. Unfortunately, I dont know who made the charecter rig and model, but I did reconstruct it quite a bit for this particular animation. Originally I had a very high poly model and rig I made for this project but due to my hardware and time constraints I had to use the class rig/model. This was also supposed to be a 5 second lip sync animation but I wanted to do something that I could be at least half proud of. However, I am not too happy this came out as bad as it did; I will have to stick to smaller renders and scene file sizes. Even with everything hidden that wasnt needed, scrubbing the audio perfectly in sync (then moving all the keys back 2 frames) still was not in sync once I rendered. By the way, I have no idea how to read music or play a guitar - I searched for "it wont be like this for long lesson" and used the video that popped up to do all of the animation with exception to the lip sync.

As for the music, the song is "It wont be like this for long" by Darius Rucker(?). I would like to find out how to get permissions or w/e, but that is not something that I know how to do.

My daughter was born 3 weeks ago and I had a final animation due this week. I was driving to school last week and heard that song for the first time and knew I had to try to sync an animation to it, but I didn't quite picture an animation so problematic once I started on the project. The original project was about 40 seconds per frame; using a model of myself (Subsurface scattering material with displacement maps out of mudbox) and a rig created entirely by me, but I couldnt render that out by my deadline - this thing is 7200 frames long (@ 40 seconds per frame on 3 PCs, that's a bit of a long wait).

Modeling - I modeled every asset in this scene with exception to the charecter. Modeling (both hi and low poly) is natural to me, I cant really give any information on this.

Animation - I animated all of this scene (the camera animation was very weak, but I will have to work on different techniques for cameras and camera angles.

Rigging - I set up a custom float attribute and used reaction manager for the strumming. I setup the strings with link to modifiers linked to a dummy object that had a noise constraint on it. The chords (these were rough).... after several attempts at trying to setup custom attributes for the chords I ended up having to just make 8 keys and label them on a sheet of paper moving them onto the timeline accordingly. The lip sync was done much the same way making roughly 20 keys for different sounds and moving them into place (again, I wanted to setup a custom attribute for these, but my rigging skills and experience is lacking and that is the hardest thing to find information on).

Lighting - The lighting is very simplistic, I couldnt do what I wanted due to the render times, so this is all standard lighting with maybe 4 shadow casting (shadow maps, no ray tracing).

Rendering - This was rendered on all 3 of my PCs at 800x600, 6900 frames prior to after effects - in 20 hours. It said 2-3 seconds per frame, but I question that now.

3ds Effects - I used a motion blur effect (2.5) rather than setting it up as object or image since it seemed to render faster, but there seemed to be a difference in quality (I should have done my blurs in AE I think). The only other thing was the 2nd avi (not a sequence) that I rendered for the animated material on the TVs (they have no shadows and much lower res).

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Dante2904: The annotations are mine, this is so that I have direct access to my errors and can fix them a lot simpler than doing all of the annotations on paper and frame numbers, or in premiere or after effects! In short - I criticized it, more criticism on things I missed is encouraged as well.

dominater237: u should make more chords because u only placed 2 chords i saw it throught the rear shot

Author: Dante2904; Uploaded: Nov 3, 2009; Duration: 3:51; Views: 424

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