Nice to see some progress Stwert, looks interesting.

Not tried doing an AO inside a room before, so not sure how you could do that, hope someone replies with an answer as I'd be interested to know too.

Hope you've got your animating hat on mate, not long to go now....lol

Good luck!

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i guessing you've put the walls, floor and roof in the render layer you're doing an AO pass on, so the reason why it would be all black is because you've closed the room off so the walls, floor and ceiling have occluded the light from getting in

if you put in windows or remove the roof or a wall then everthing will show up

of course if you haven't then i dont know what you've done wrong!

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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Yeah, everything's on the AO layer, and there's no windows, so I guess it makes sense that it would be black. I was just wondering if there was a simple way to get around that. I'll just remove the room from the layer and add a couple planes for a quick setup. Thanks for the help.

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i'm not sure but i wonder if overriding the render stats in the attributes editor of the roof is going to work

if you make not cast shadows or something... not sure if that works with AO passes

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

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Cool, I'll give that a shot sometime Chirone... but right now I got a problem. Didn't see it until I started trying to animate. I can move around my different controls, but as soon as I move the master control, they all snap back to default. I think it has to do with the parent constraints I've got set up. I'll fiddle with those.

The really weird thing is when I open up the file, the robot is in a totally different position, with a variety of the channels on the master curve zeroed out. Moved to two different spots/orientation when I opened the file twice. I was really hoping to get going on the animation. Any ideas? I'll keep working with the constraints.

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Okay, I got it... it was a simple matter of deleting the parent constraints. It seems they aren't necessary and were obviously doing more harm than good. Arg, and I thought I knew something about rigging after all that. I guess I'll have to do more... as with everything.

Ok, on to the animating, fingers crossed!

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We're rolling now! Got ~14 seconds of animation done... not tweaked or really much secondary animation, but more than just blocking out.

Had another surprise when my hand controls (controlling the ikHandles) stopped working, but found it after a bit of looking. The ikHandles had their own translates that were being keyed. Removed those attributes from the character set, and it was back to normal.

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-stwert

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sounds like rigging is bigger than we both thought :p

yeah, not sure, i havent had enough time recently (had to sidetrack into finishing a well overdue over and just over a year old wedding video) to play with my rig that has parent constraints

sounds like you're having fun!

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
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In the shower this morning, I suddenly realized what the problem was... I had the master curve actually a parent of all the other controls, as well as parent constraints on them.... doubly parented? I did the constraints first, then realized I wanted it as an actual hierarchy. Guess I forgot to delete the constraints.

Haha, do you get roped into filming everything too? "Hey, can you film this event and edit it, and make a bunch of copies? Cool thanks!"

Yeah, animating is fun, when everything's working

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-stwert

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Making progress... I don't have a nice youtube clip yet, just moving through my storyboards. Done over 20 seconds of animation.

Something I found out the hard way: be careful when using normalized animation curves. Things can go really funky when you set keys using character sets when the curves are normalized.

Here's a screeshot of one point. The moment of truth.

Attached Thumbnails

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-stwert

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I'll post a playblast of the rough animation before I do any rendering so I can get some comments and criticisms of things to tweak (if I have any time left, that is).

And another screenshot:

Attached Thumbnails

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-stwert

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I must try out animation curves next, hadn't really learnt enough about them to feel confident using them for this!

Am eagerly awaiting your first playblast.....

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Okay, the playblast is up on youtube, uploaded it last night. I'll see what I can get done today with texturing, lighting and animation-tweaking and call that a wrap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14HOfY1HIn8

If you get your comments in fast, I'll see what I can fix

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-stwert

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haha, brilliant!
looks really clever!

at about 15 seconds in or so where it's pushing the button a couple times the elbow looks like it's a bit too high. see if you can lower it down (if you go to push that button yourself you'll probably get what i mean)

the animation otherwise looks really sweet

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D

The time has expired... time to upload the final product, such as it is. Unfortunately I suspect it'll take past midnight to render it all out at 480p. Apologies for the brazen breaking of this rule. Here's one of the frames. Everything's so darn reflective. I always forget to change the reflectivity of blinn's cause you don't notice until you test render with mental ray. Anyway, I'll post another youtube link once this is all rendered and compiled etc.

Attached Thumbnails

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-stwert

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