March 1, 2002 - Friday

Today's stuffy theatre was done by Jase! =} Sorry Jase, I forgot to mention it in today's rant.. I put up the image 2 days ago when you showed it to me and I kept meaning to put it in the rant.. but I kinda forgot. Gomen gomen!

[^Young^] - 8:17 AM PST

March 3, 2002 - Sunday

Just about the time I'm about to lose hope. I'm always thinking, man, there's gotta be an easier way to do it. I'm usually finding shortcuts in things. Today I spent so much time forking out only five seconds worth of animation. Most of the time wasted cause of trying to animate with forward kinematics. Not that it can't be done. It can be done but I feel it's much easier to animate with inverse kinematics. But in all the years using MAX, I haven't yet found any techniques to animate arms with inverse kinematics well. Legs of course where given. You had to use IK for that stuff. But arms where a different matter. Setting up IK for arms and animating them was a pain. You know, I'm glad I stole the complete official 3DS MAX 4.0 volumes from my last job. After spending the last five hours in frustration I decided to flip through the pages of the volumes and I stumbled across a lesson showing an arm animation. Luckily too, I also stole the tutorial and supplement CD that from my last job. So I loaded the file and found an arm being animated with IK!!! It was the most beautiful thing I ever seen. And it answered all my questions to finding those shortcuts. So now I have renewed hope. I can't wait to try this on my character. Of course I bet I'll run into another frustrating time wasting moment. And then I'll post another rant on my 3D woes.

[^o0Kynger0o^] - 12:07 AM PST

*UGH* I remember so many times how people hated MAX and how frustrating it is to use. I kinda ignored them and was in denial myself. But yeah, I have to agree MAX takes too many steps to do something. Either that or I haven't found the most effiecient way to work in it. Again, I met up with a few problems. One of them was keyframing. I usually assign position XYZ controllers for translation and euler XYZ controllers for rotation. It makes sense cause that way I can control each XYZ value separately. However when it comes too assigning different curve values for each keyframe, the bitching begins. I have to tediously assign curve values to each frame individually. There's no way I can select all the keyframes that I need to change. So pretty much most of my time is wasted on such a simple task. I really have to learn more on helper objects especially sliders which I can use to assign parameters to to animate objects with set values rather than physically manipulating the object directly. This way I won't encounter problems with rotations crapping out on me. What happens is that rotating while animating an object confuses MAX. So even if I meant to rotate something clockwise MAX will go ahead and do it counter-clockwise which in turn leaves me to having to add more keyframes to fix the animation. With helpers I can just set a fixed value for the objects so that it stays within that range which can guarantee MAX wont get confused. I think I should learn a new app. I hear Soft Image XSI is doing pretty well. Well anyway I'll just show you the fruits of my labor: https://www.nekobox.org/~kingsley/posts/kick_test.avi

[^o0Kynger0o^] - 11:50 PM PST

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