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theotherguy - all messages by user

2016/11/11 19:04:08
Pivot while sitting on an office chair Hi y'all, I've been trying to figure out how to have my character, who's sitting at a desk, pivot to face someone who enters the room. If I try doing it in 'character movement' they always stand up briefly. I know you can group objects, i.e. the character and chair, and turn them as a unit, but I can't record it.

I guess I could render off the first part, then pivot the character and chair, then start again from that point. Is there an easier way to do this?
2016/9/8 3:24:16
The Motherland Calls That is pretty amazing Ziggy- Bravo!
2016/9/5 18:39:17
An open Letter to Muvizu's developers Well, muvizu IS a great teaching tool, I've used it myself to show someone how to plan out camera angles and placement. I guess, in essence, that's what it functions best as.

As I've said before, and nobody at Muvizu has disputed this, Muvizu is a done deal. The next step up is a huge one, making and rigging your own animated characters in Maya or 3-D studio or similar, is a daunting undertaking.

We'll just have to see what comes down the pipe next, for sure someone is working on something.
2016/9/3 18:27:55
An open Letter to Muvizu's developers I think I'm coming from a slightly different direction here, I recognized Muvizu as a modified game from the start, and like most games it is like a car that is already built. It's a very complex car and to dive under the hood would be a very daunting task. Whenever I get fancy with Muvizu I run into problems, so I use other software, like my video editor, to pick up the slack. With Muvizu it's best to work in tiny chunks of 10-20 seconds or less and to really plan stuff out, especially character movements, which is my particular peeve.

With a bit of experimenting you can put Muvizu characters and props anywhere, in any environment. Although it's cumbersome in use, it gets the job done, without the mind-blowing complexity which is the hallmark of most 3-D programs. I just finished trying to figure out Amazon's Lumberyard to no avail. I've tried iClone and Poser and have given up on them.

I'll continue using Muvizu until something comparable comes along, but I might be in for a long, long, wait. I'd like to make my own 3-D environments for them in the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions they'd be gratefully received.
2016/8/16 17:21:43
Hybrid: Muvizu characters interact with humans Thanks Pat! I'm trying to do different things incorporating Muvizu characters and since the only thing I can make them do reliably is stand and talk, or walk and talk,, that's what I'll do.

I use Sony Vegas Pro Ziggy, I've tried Hitfilm and it's okay I guess but I'm more comfortable with Vegas and since Sony just sold it to another company I'm waiting to see what happens.
2016/8/15 18:31:27
Hybrid: Muvizu characters interact with humans Thanks ziggy. I could do some dissolve cuts with a little more work, I did have a door for him to exit at one point but I think that extra layer of PNG files was the straw that broke the softwares back so I took it out. I'm looking into rendering composite layers separately in the hopes that it decreases the load on the computer so I can do more things.

I'm experimenting with some 3-D programs like lumberyard in the hopes that I can make my own virtual sets one day.
2016/8/15 16:20:02
Hybrid: Muvizu characters interact with humans Hi y'all, I acknowledge that this isn't a Muvizu project so much as a project that incorporates Muvizu characters, anyway, many layers were used, PNG overlays, sound effects etc. - I'm trying to get someone interested in sound design because it's a real chore.
2016/7/6 18:56:21
New South Asian character pack available! The additional 'packs' are okay, but if you're like me and make your own costumes/textures they have limited value. I'd sure like to be able to move the characters precisely where I want them though, this, in my humble opinion, would make Muvizu 100% better.
2016/7/6 18:45:15
HIT FILM SALE June 30 - July 4 $100 off I've noticed Hit Film works on a modular basis, I'd want to do some research before buying.
2016/6/21 1:03:03
Character Proportions I see Muvizu as basically a play-the-hand-your-dealt kind of program, you can map your own textures - photos in my case - on to stock characters, it works okay but it's way better for comedy. The newer more sophisticated characters are much harder to map textures on to in my experience and they have fewer movements.

Muvizu is a great tool but keeping in mind it's price, $30, it (understandably) has limitations. I use it as part of a toolkit along with a good video editor, photoshop, and coredraw. Sometimes figuring out work-arounds make me better with other programs too, as a bonus.

Here is a video I made using everything
2016/6/7 16:40:54
Improved Karaoke music video! I used two cameras.
2016/6/7 16:39:32
Improved Karaoke music video! I filmed the backdrops and characters separately. I took frame-grabs from the scenes, adjusted their transparency in photoshop, and imported them into MUvizu's cameras as overlays to sync the characters and the scenes up. Once everything was satisfactory I rendered the Muvizu characters using the 'green screen' environment. Once that was done I brought them into my video editor and keyed out the green.

The layers were as follows
1. The backdrop(s)
2. The .PNG overlay with TTC and 'nowhere'
3. The muvizu characters
4. The 'inspector' - not bus driver! - which is a series of .PNG frames in series on the time-line
5. The karaoke lyrics
6 Titles and credits

I knew what I wanted it to look like, the trickiest part was getting the characters (and their shadows) to match the scene.
2016/6/6 18:56:31
Improved Karaoke music video! Rocque wrote:
The credits flew by. Does anyone really read credits? I do, so they could have been a bit slower.

I will leave it to the experts to comment on the technical stuff, but I think you had a lot of add-ons to make this a fun video to watch. It was definitely one of a kind with the personal touch to the musicians, and personalization (spell check says this is not a word, so I will leave it) of the buses.


Thanks! Yes, I will definitely slow the credits down 50%. As far as customizing goes, having a bit of photoshop knowledge is indispensable. For characters the MUvizu templates are okay, but it can take a lot of patience and experimenting to get the look you want. As far as backdrops go, if you have a decent video editor that uses layers it's surprisingly straightforward. I use Vegas Pro and if you take a full-resolution screenshot and import it into photoshop you can do what you want with it, save as a .PNG file (which has a transparent background) and overlay it on your scene, which is what I did in the video. Your characters would be in a higher layer so they would be able to walk in front of the imported layer.
2016/6/6 3:16:29
Improved Karaoke music video! It's tough to position Muvizu characters on an alien backdrop without using camera overlays and having some kind of reference point or marker in your scene. This is particularly critical if you want to use other camera angles. As I'm using a video game as a backdrop this poses a problem, most damage in video games erases itself. Good thing I remembered that you can drop things and they stay, so I dropped a box of ammo! (see if you can spot it!) I also made .PNG overlays in photoshop to change signs and whatnot, and to make a lurking character! . Anyway here it is...
2016/6/6 1:45:40
Is this by design or a bug? Movement has proved problematic for me. Like yourself, I had a problem with a character 'snapping back' to a previous position. I had to redo everything from scratch. The more complicated movements get the more fraught with difficulty.

I've had particular hassles having two or three characters come from different directions and meet up face-to-face, and of course the more stuff you have going on, the more likely you are to have crashes, most of my Muvizu crashes have been while trying to adjust stuff in the movement timeline.

I try to offload as much as I can onto Muvizus cameras and my video editor, this saves a lot of grief.
2016/5/28 5:05:06
Speeding up Muvizu editing Upgrading my desktops video card to a faster Nvidia GTX 750 Ti helped a lot, 30% faster renders. The more stuff you have going on the longer it takes, regardless. Maybe render 1min chunks so it seems faster!
2016/5/27 20:53:55
Animated karaoke music video! I used Sony Vegas Pro to generate the karaoke lyrics, it was a lot of work!

Using the provided character templates I generate my clothing and faces with a combination of CorelDraw and Photoshop. A drawing program like CorelDraw or Illustrator makes quick work of clothes, once you make shapes that correspond with the shapes in the template you can use the draw, fill, and shape tools to make any number of new clothes, shoes, etc. Once you're happy with them, export the clothes as PNG files (I do these individually, not as a whole template) Then, import them into Photoshop where you have a template open, sync them up and when you're ready export the whole thing as a PNG file for use in MUvizu.


Getting Muvizu characters to look like people involves getting a good photo, importing into Photoshop, cutting out just the face and making it semi transparent to line up the eyes and mouth with the template, the mouth is critical if you want character to speak. You might have to stretch or squish the photo to make it work, it HAS to follow the template. I then use layers of colour masks to make things look nice and smooth. Then, export the file as a PNG and try it in Muvizu, you might have to tweak it a few times, different Muvizu characters have their own rules.
2016/5/26 23:03:26
Animated karaoke music video! Thanks guys, it's a friends band, they have a few songs on my Youtube page. It was filmed against the backdrop of a video game, STALKER Call Of Pripyat, which I use often as you can make the interface disappear.

I've been struggling with other technical difficulties (couldn't open AVI files for awhile) I'm waiting to hear from the band to see if they want to go ahead with this version, before I get all-ambitious and throw in a couple of extra angles!
2016/5/26 18:39:40
Animated karaoke music video! Muvizu has some pretty good 'musician' animations, albeit difficult to sync up with the music with any degree of accuracy, however my friends in the band were in stitches watching it.

The song is about Toronto's notorious transit system (TTC) performed by Freakuency Z.
2016/5/26 3:12:44
Rendering animation as MP4s Thanks for the input guys. Fortunately I DID get my AVI files working again with some new codecs courtesy of VLC Media Player, I don't generally use MP4s in the editing process at all, it's just for distribution (web mainly)

As a result of a little homework I discovered that for HD 1920x1080 video stream was 4000 Kbps for a busy scene, I had set mine to 4928 Kbps which was a pretty good guess!
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Muvizu is easy to use 3D animation software that allows anyone to create high quality animations quickly and easily. Muvizu’s animation engine is ideal for storytellers, animators, teachers and businesses looking to engage, enchant and delight audiences with animated content.