Viz Characters

[lunarcamel]

Continued from "LW Community" thread ...

Walk1:
http://www.kristiancarey.com/movies/Walk01_QT.mov

Walk2:
http://www.kristiancarey.com/movies/Walk02_QT.mov


I did both these tests in about 30min each - obviously its not perfect ( hehe notice the bad keyframe in walk 2's loop) but it's been my best solution to date - quick n easy viz people without the high cost and low quality of RPC/Marlin.

Once I pull up some good mocap I'll do a final test :)

[trick]

Making a natural undistracting walk, even if you use the best mocap, is more difficult then modeling a complete city with all the details...;)

[lunarcamel]

I disagree with that but it's not a piece of cake. For the scenes I have populated I really make sure to place specific people performing specific actions in the proper locations. Most viz work I have seen has a bunch of 3D people all performing the same fast walk and they looked like they were just dropped into the scene randomly. Your eye instantly goes to that strange motion.

It's all about tricking the viewer into seeing the big picture not a walk cycle :)

[trick]

Have you ever tried to do 50 characters with different extended/personal walk cycles in a fully loaded 3M poly arch.scene with the current 2GByte RAM limit for LW without compositing ? :D To make them random, you need at least a 200 frame cycle, which results in at least a 15MB MDD file (which is the most obvious route to go). And even if you use PointOven, which is the only way to go if you want to read all the MDD's on the fly instead of reading them all at once into memory, it's still quite a job to do this without POST. If you want lot's of perfectly animated characters in photoreal architectural animations, you will come to the conclusion that compositing is the only way to go. Consequently this will make you hate some loved plugins, like HDInstance. And after a while I hope you will still love LW ;)

[lunarcamel]

Hehe I'm not dumb enough to try to put everything into one scene - and I composite anything and everything since that's mainly what I do for a living :)

[Hervé]

I dont want nor I need to be rude here.... but it looks like these two guys have a poop in their pants, specialy the first one... he walks like Goofy... :D

I think if you want believable people in natural motion (read almost no movements), U have to put them in their right enviro.

Best is to copy reality.... go out at a café terrasse, and shot discretly the people walking, looking at shops... and work from there...

AXYZ models are nice, but there is nowhere in europe where I could use them... well maybe in Italy...

Keep posting, it is fun to watch....

No offense as usual.... :)

[lunarcamel]

Of course they look a bit funky - it's 30 minutes of work using generic mocap :)

And I agree - you need to match the people to your scene. Keep in mind you might not have time (or be in the right location) to actually observe the real life scenario. My whole point of this thread has been to describe a specific method of quickly populating a viz environment.

[trick]

If you can quickly populate architectural scenes with (50+) animated characters, each with individual realistic moves, in multi million poly scenes, with or without compositing, within a reasonable timeframe (by which I mean it does not take more then 5% of the project time) on current hardware....give me a ring, show it to me and I'll hire you instantly.

[vpii]

http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?t=29982

This may help

[lunarcamel]

trick: Aren't you using MB as well?

[trick]

vpii: this method is more for crowds in specific environments, certainly not for individual realistic moving people.

lunarcamel: I have been using MB with mocap indeed, but prefer LW/ACS4 or MAX/CS since I don't need specific animation, only standard day to day movement cycles (walk, sits, runs, turns) with a bit of secondary motion. In MB I can either make a complete character animation over 500 frames (this mostly is the longest clip length I make) or just make the walk cycle, export this to LW, and make secondary motions over there. Maybe for one character this can save you a lot of time. But when doing this inside LW, you can easily transfer animations from one character to another by loading the previously saved motion channels to the characters controls, which again can save you a lot of time when having lots of characters (This is in 7.5a; 8 should have more tricks). In MAX/CS this can also be done very easy: at the end you just save the MDD file via PointOven for MAX.

[kopperdrake]

Have you ever tried to do 50 characters with different extended/personal walk cycles in a fully loaded 3M poly arch.scene with the current 2GByte RAM limit for LW without compositing ?


Woah!! Are you saying that Lightwave has a 2Gb RAM limit? I was thinking of building a new Athloni 64 PC with 4Gb in it...am I wasting my time?

(Sorry to hijack the thread)

[kopperdrake]

Having never actually put an animated person into a scene, as all of my stuff so far has been stills, where would you start in your opinion? I have heard of Motion Builder, but no idea which part of the pipeline this takes over.

Any stuff I would have to animate I imagine would be local shop developments, but nothing too crowded, maybe 50 people maximum.

Is it best to bring in ready modelled people in T-pose or similar and rig them in Lightwave? Do I take T-Ppose models into Motion Builder and rig them there and animate them there?

In your eyes chaps, which is the least complex way (without outsourcing of course ;) ). Ah, I currently use LW7.5c.

Thanks for any advice :)

Dunk

[trick]

...Are you saying that Lightwave has a 2Gb RAM limit?...

I could be terribly wrong about this, but I have been investigating this some while ago.

If I understand correctly, a 32bit application can be assigned a maximum of 2GByte physical RAM. There is a way to get around this by using the 3GByte switch in Windows XP's boot.ini. This way an application can be assigned 3GByte of RAM. However this application must be 3GB-aware to use this, and I thought Lightwave was not. You can use an application called "imagecfg.exe" to flag an application 3GB-aware, but since I never hit the 2GB barrier, because I'll have to stay within the constraints of my rendernodes, I never tried this.

More memory is fine if you have multiple processes at the same time: rendering while working, photshopping and lightwaving, etc.

[kopperdrake]

Thanks for this :) From what I've read just now there also seem to be potential stability problems with installing over the 2Gb limit - perhaps a bit beyond the average DIY PC builder (like myself). It sounds like 3Gb would be a healthy amount though, 2Gb assigned to Lightwave with the other 1Gb assigned to OS tasks and any other app open at the time.

Hmm...just when I thought I'd figured out the perfect setup for me too!

Cheers :)

Dunk

[pixym]

Hi Luna,

Can you tell me more about your project for Archi Viz anim characters project?