Impulse

Heya Rod, good to see you posting some stuff up!

I like this little guy - cutesy and simplistic but really appealing; I always enjoy this style of short animation, just something about conveying an idea and story in its basic forms along the lines of the animations 50% gray, white space etc.

One thing you may want to try out is making the flat enviro more continuous with a smooth horizon gradient - perhaps try a curved surface on the horizon by extruding the edges upwards and outwards smoothly, or maybe try a radial gradient in the opacity of it (doing a matte/shadow blend would probably be the way to go there).

anyways, good stuff, keep us posted on its development - I want to see it now! [:)]

That is awesome. I have no more to say. I love the style and shading. Keep it up.

thats really great, youve certainly got a very good theme in your shading/rendering happening there.

Some more renders.
[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/simages2/47_Impus_slide_souriL.jpg[/img]
[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/simages2/47_Impus_wave_souriL.jpg[/img]

YES! That is one of the best characters ive seen in a while. I may have a sad life....But i think they r awesome. Did you say u were making an animation? I'll have to see it. Good Work!

that's cool, i luv glowy things :)

Thanks for the kind replies guys! :)

quote:Did you say u were making an animation? I'll have to see it. Good Work!

Yep animation in the works.. very close only a few days now.

woo! I count the minutes!

yeh, be sure to publish this one the web in a nice crisp codec for our viewing, it looks perfect for animation, hes so full of character

Hey all,

I'm going to post the anim probably tonight (depends on the render) but for now here's a quick teaser:
[IMG]http://www.rodgreen.com/forum/jump_samp.gif[/IMG]

nice - did you write your own maxscript for the stretchy spine / limbs ?

Well sort of I wrote my own MEL script for it. In the soon-to-be-posted animation you'll see that I have pretty good control over then too. I can control 'stretch' (so that they bow in the middle) and influence general shape (like an up vector constraint).

Thats very cool :) ive dabbled in a bit of custom rigging before - and seeing that stretchy stuff going on reminded me of a little cartoon doctor model i rigged up. and had the same sort of stretchyness to him :)

That is sweet, like i said b4 i love glowy things, it's even better when they move :)

Hi all!

Here's the animation I've been working on for the last few weeks "Exit Stage Right".
I hope you like.
I'm still tweaking a few points and going to do a cleaner render too. So if anyone has any crits they're welcome to share.

[URL="http://www.rodgreen.com/impulse.html"]http://www.rodgreen.com/impulse.html
[IMG]http://www.rodgreen.com/images/exitstageright.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

downloading, cant wait :D will post comments afterwards

EDIT: amazing, so much expression and character, a really great peice. Love the little hand rejoining thing aswell.

yeah made me laugh. nice work rod.

Just goes to show how far you can take a relatively simple concept.

*applauds rod*

Awesome Rod. The new soft horizon looks great. Looking forward to seeing more :)

neat! very cute :)

The hand rejoinging bit WAS cool, nice work.

haha, thats very cool! Excellent work.

cheers

so much expression yet he has almost no features to express them with... in that way he/she reminds me of vivi a charcater who is a custom line 'brought to life' rag doll from final fantasy 9... really well done man - its hard to pull of an animation that shows so much emotion and feeling with a character so simple...

Hi all,

The final version of the animation is now uploaded:

[URL="http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_xvid.avi"]http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_xvid.avi[/URL] (Xvid 3.3 Megs)

[URL="http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_divx.avi"]http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_divx.avi[/URL] (Divx 4.0 megs)

[URL="http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_indeo.avi"]http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_indeo.avi[/URL] (Indeo 6.4 megs)

[URL="http://www.rodgreen.com/impulse.html"]http://www.rodgreen.com/impulse.html[/URL]

Please tell me what you guys think!

I like it! awesome example of character animation dude! nice to see simple character being brought to life! cool interaction with the door as well.

Great stuff, I enjoyed that! Very nice fluid and exaggerated yet very believable animation - great secondary motion, and feel for weight and momentum.

Good stuff, keep it up! (and don't forget to bug your sound dept. to give you some background elevator music, thump sounds, and character squeeks [;)] )

yeah woulda been nice with some sort of ambient noise atleast, but your work wouldnt have changed ofcourse (the actual modeling and animation) and thats still great.

hahahaha - that is awsome!

get some sound in there man for sure!

Hey again all,

By popular demand the new version now has sound, hope you like!
http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_snd_divx.avi
http://www.rodgreen.com/avi/ESR_snd_xvid.avi
http://www.rodgreen.com/impulse.html

hey rod, that's a nice addition. Nice, minimal sound work, me likes [:)]

Some ambient noise as someone else mentioned could really work to fill in the silent parts... (soft jazz?) The noise sample you're using could use in some variation in pitch to match the dynamics of the animation. A high/low pass filter could work well, not sure which software you're using though.. but i think it could use something other than volume ramping. When I was watching it in silence I actually thought more of a classic laser sound when his optical arms were reaching out for the hands.

Also one of the largest movements (when he flies erm.. stage left) could use a noise turbulence sort of thing.

Ah I'm not sound guy but i do enjoy it. Gone are my days of tracking [:)]