You're starting to go

Dreeko wrote:



I've thought about this size and weight slider a fair bit and I just can't see how it'd be a practical solution. The problem I see is with how would these properties affect things.

Ok, it's easy to imagine that a heavy object would mean the characters arms are not as high as they would be with a light object and that a larger object would cause the arms to move further away from the rest of the body to accommodate the larger size.

The weight aspect seems unneeded. If you had a super hero, you'd expect that even the heaviest of objects to be handled effortlessly and a wimp character to struggle with the lightest thing, so over all that'd be covered with the animations chosen for the situation the character is in. If you had to go through each object attach to the character and setup the weight of it for the right effect it might be a bit time consuming and easy to get the wrong results without realising.

There is a size slider already, we call it scale. The problem, I see anyway, is with the technology. How could the animation be changed, on the fly, to suit different sizes? If you have a really massive object (a 1980's mobile phone, for example) you'd still expect the character to place it at it's ear but the animation would need to be adjusted to allow the hand to be further away from the ear to allow space for the phone, which in turn means a different angle on the elbow joint and in turn a different angle on the shoulder joint and possibly a different angle on several other joints to make the holding action look right. A weird situation might be the character holding a large, heavy box over it's head, both hands would need to be used and you wouldn't be able to just have the arms go as low as the weight would suggest, due to the rest of the body below.

Ok, that's all a bit garbled but I think there is a more elegant solution to be found, that gives a simpler interface without causing to much extra things for users to do. I'm not against size or weight sliders if there's a practical plan on how it'd work, but it might be worth one of the animators or devs confirming if that sort of thing is possible with the technology we're using.

You're all 100% right to want this and 100% right to keep on our backs.

I promise you guys that we'll tackle the 'holding' issue soon. Really, honestly, I promise.

This thread has kicked off an internal email discussion so we ARE talking about it. We may be able to look at this issue v. soon.


Barry

Dreeko wrote:


Err.. I don't follow what you mean here. Hmm?

Possibly this is actually making things more complex? It's certainly one of the challenges with character and object interactions. How does a character hold all the different things it possibly could and be animated in ways that look good and suitable? On the other hand, maybe that crazyness is the effect someone wants in their movie?

Gimmick you are a genius....cured it! Its the quantizer settings needed dropping to 4. Now have perfect Vid from Muvizu!

For Muvizu 64 bits & Sony vegas, I use "ffdshow video codec"

settings:
MJPEG 1 pass quality
quality 100
min quantizer 2
max quantizer 4
edited by gimmick on 31/05/2012

Anyway... We manage to reproduce this without the characters standing on objects/backdrops. It is still a very rare occurrence though.