Siggraph – Character Animation

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bassam kopie.jpgHere’s another demonstration by Bassam Kurdali at the Open Source Pavilion on Siggraph. He talks about the techniques that were used for rigging the character of Proog in Elephants Dream.

This demonstration overlaps slightly with the Hand Rigging demo we posted earlier, but it goes into much more depth about the armatures that were used for the rest of the body.

I had actually planned this one for yesterday, but once the compression was done (which took over 6 hours) I found out that I had put the wrong titles in! :-/

Download: mirror 1 | mirror 2 [Quicktime, 74MB]

Note: right-click and save-as to store the files on your harddisk

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    • Azdo

      Thanks for the video. However, I am actually getting here 74Mb, not 53 maybe because the second compression you mention. The first mirror works well, the second gives

      ERROR 403: Forbidden.

      Regards,

    • http://www.blendernation.com bart

      I had forgotten to update the filesize – 74MB is correct. However, both mirrors are working fine from here. I guess that’s why we have two ;-)

    • MagicMyshu

      thanks dl’ing now

    • http://www.pointy-stick.com/blog Malcolm

      Is there anything different about the way this video was created? It’s the only one of the SIGGRAPH series that xine (on Fedora Core 5) won’t open and mplayer hates it as well. :-(

    • http://pitel.borec.cz Pitel

      Malcolm: My mplayer on FC5 loves it. But mirrors were crashing when I was downloading it. So maybe redownload may help :/

    • aws357

      °° the more I watch the video, the more I see the gap between my poor little WIP and… animations… #gasp#

      One question has been running in my mind since the video tutorials have been released on blendernation…

      Blender seems to operate at a speed my poor 6 years old PC build might never reach as it is…
      Can somebody tell me the configuration of the computers used in the demos?

      CPU, motherboard, (don’t mind the OS), memory, HDD capacity and speed, don’t think the graphic card have an influence, but I ask all the same…

      My current WIP begins to be bloated with vertices although I take great care in deleting what is unuseful… And ss I intend to change my old computer soon, I might as well make it Blender friendly…

    • http://niel.seyanim.com madman

      hahaha…
      Crash! That’s embarrasing :-P

    • DT

      aws357: I think the graphic does have an influence, as blender uses OpenGL for its GUI.
      I don’t know about the system specs of their machines, but they are probably a bit higher than mine
      (Athlon64 3400+, PCChips M860, 1024 MB DDR, 160 GB SATA, Radeon X800 Pro) from what I can tell by the performance seen in the vids.

    • http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/pub panzi

      Blender works fine for me: Athlon XP 2000+, 1GB RAM and GeForce 4400.
      The ‘static’ build did run very slow, but because of the python-linkage error in the dynamic buid I compiled blender on my own. Well, I didn’t manage to build it with ffmpeg support (compile errors!), but what the hell.

    • DT

      panzi: I was referring to the performance of the Elephants Dream files. I bet they do not run smoothly on your machine as well as on mine with all layers on (even characters only with animation preview is a bit slow).

    • szofiel

      After looking each one of the videos, don’t everybody think that some tutorial DVD made by the Blender team, as an upgrade to the printed manual, would come as a real groundbreak for the system?

      I have my copy of the manual and even if the web version on wiki upgrades, some aspects seem to be a little behind after every upgrade, other tend to come a little obscure, but at some point, pretty well explained through the people who makes use of those new advantages straight with video.

      Some know the gnomon workshop DVD’s, why don’t make a try with home made tutorial, as a sort of budget preamble for the next movie project, increasing its viability and cooperation among the users already registered as well, also extending any capacity of spreading information already existing.

      As far as I can remember, Gimp does not have any DVD made by them, nor Inkscape or the most powerful packages already on open source, that, by support on the web can become truly landmarks.

      Just a suggestion.

    • Michael Crawford

      @bart: Please in the future use (from Quicktime) File > Export, Export: Movie to MPEG-4. Under options, choose h264 for the video format. That way the video will be in a standard .mp4 container and not a .mov. You can still do a dual pass encode. It’s the exact same thing internally. This way the video you encode can be watched with any standard mediaplayer supporting MPEG-4 level 10 (avc / h264). This includes mplayer, vlc, xine, and any other project using x264.

    • Michael Crawford

      @Malcolm: Fedora Core’s multimedia support has been neutured out of the box. The lawyerly types are terrified of vengeful companies with US patent law behind them. Your easiest solution is to download new mplayer or xine rpms from a source other than redhat. If you download a package from redhat, the package will not be compiled with ffmpeg support (which renders it useless).

    • http://www.pointy-stick.com/blog Malcolm

      ho-hum

      @Michael: as I mentioned, this was the only one that I had trouble with, not a problem with my setup. I am well aware of the multimedia choices that are made and the valid reasons for them. Pitel’s suggestion was correct: it was a corrupt download and after a couple more attempts I managed to retrieve a non-corrupt version.

      Bart: regardless of all the comments here about format choices or framing choices or anything like that, thanks for taking the time to do these. The whole series (including the setting up videos) has been very interesting and nice to have in the collection. I really appreciate the effort you’ve put in.

    • Omar

      thank you Bassam, really professionnal.

      bye

    • http://www.albartus.com/ LOGAN