Don't call me babe.

[ThomasL]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfWSSCUOjIA

Blenderartists thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php/201622-Don-t-call-me-babe.-MakeHuman-field-test.?p=1733016

[workinprogress]

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awwww Grosss!

( I Can't tell you how many times I've wanted to do what she did. ) ROFL
You must have put a lot of work into that video, thanks for posting the link.
I Had to watch it about three times...but I squinched my eyes down really small for the gory parts,
so I could hardly see them. I know it's wrong, but I laughed every time I watched it.
You should probably put a warning on it, so younger viewers wont be traumatized,
and people with bad heart problems wont have attacks. I liked the dancing guy at the end.

[ThomasL]

With 15 days between the first shot for the animatic to the youtube release, I wouldn't say that I put an enormous effort into it, although I did work rather intensely during this period. It is quite easy to make something look fairly decent with mocap - the hard part is to clean the F-curves afterwards. Also, the plot is driven by the available mocap files rather than vice-versa; the villain is laughing because I happened to find a laughter animation. And the guy is doing the Macarena dance at the end (he is supposed to look like myself btw), because such an animation is available from CMU.

There are a number of issues with the animation, and even more so with the lighting and shadows, but I felt exhausted and wanted to move on.

Do you think that people may find the clip offending? This has worried me a little, but I thought that it is too absurd to be offensive. Somewhat like Monte Python.

[workinprogress]

Almost anything will be offensive to someone when your clip is exposed to such a wide audience, but no I don't think that's something you need to worry about with this. The gore is a bit much, and I really was a little shocked by that ( hey this is me, I know I'm very sensitive to such things and just accept that everyone else is probably not) But it really didnt get in the way so badly that I couldnt watch it several times. A warning might be nice, especially since kids watch youtube...and not all of them are , or should be totally immured to that sort of thing.
I'b we willing to bet that spouting gore effect was fun to make.
A surprised expression, and a rolling , severed head might have served about the same purpose in the video. Anything that showed the guy was totally beaten might have served, I suppose.But this is your animation and you get to say how things happen. Did he deserve it?? yes he did! I wont make any further comments on the action in the clip, or the plot. don't want to ruin things for others who haven't seen it yet.

When watching an animation, its easy to focus totally on visuals unless there are big problems with sound, and I think you did a pretty good job matching sound to action. The first time I watched the clip, I didn't get have sound on, and my understanding of the action was totally different than it was when I watched it the second time, with sound.

I see what you meant about some of the problems you mentioned. The CMU mocap files don't usually animate the hands at all, but I must confess I don't know what an F curve is. I'm surprised to hear you only spent 15 days on the animation.

I recognized the Macarena right away.

[ThomasL]

I'm surprised to hear you only spent 15 days on the animation.

For me the whole purpose with MH is to increase productivity. One thing I wanted to show was that you can use MH to make a short movie in a limited time, despite limited artistic skills. You could add more than a year to the production time for working on the mhx rig and importer and on the various tools, but this is a one-time investment which can be reused in future projects.

The time budget might be rather unusual. I spent essentially no time on character modeling, rigging or animation, which traditionally would take up a lot of time. What did take time was searching for useful data (mocap files, 3d models, sound effects), cleaning animations and stitching them together, and setting up lighting and shadows. Which could have been done better.

F-curves are the individual animation curves that make up an action in Blender 2.5. Like IPOs in Blender 2.4, but presumably better.

[workinprogress]

ohhh, thanks, I wondered what an F curve was.
Can you import the models, to Blender 2.55 with rigs and weighting intact?
I always have to re-do the weight assignments in blender 2.49...and it isn't something I'm good at.

[ThomasL]

I'm using mhx to export the character to Blender. The mhx files contains just about everything: the mesh, uv coordinates, shaders, rig, bone weights, shapekeys, and even some basic clothes if you enable them. Somewhat similar in spirit to Collada, but much simpler since it is only supposed to work with Blender (which Collada really does not).

Mhx for Blender 2.49 is not really supported anymore.

Documentation can be found at http://sites.google.com/site/makehumand ... rt-and-mhx . It is somewhat outdated but the main structure has not changed.

[workinprogress]

Thanks, I'll have to make another try at using a 2.5x Blender build then. (curses!)