Jackie_Chan_Fan

Actually i'm a character animator and director. I know cinematography and editing as well. I wasnt aware that this was a mass cg project.. I thought it was just a long thread where fans post their art.

heheh i started to explain that a normal was based off the verts vectors but didnt want to confuse the issue anymore

Not sure about maya.

Normals are basically a vector (direction) that faces out from a polygon. The normal tells the renderer how to shade each polygon. Lets take a single polygon as an example. a 3 point polygon (triangle) in 3d... by default for speed purposes... renderers only render one side of that triangle. That is unless you specifically define the object as "double sided" So the normal is a way of telling the render... which side is the side you want facing a certain direction. If our triangle was to represent a peice of paper.. then we would want both sides rendered (double sided) But in most cases.. such as your valk peices... they're enclosed... so you never see the "other side of the polygon" which is why renderers default to single sided shading of polygons. Again this is a performance issue. So since your enclosed parts of the valk only need to have their normals facing outward.... you should make sure they are. The reason being... is if the normal is inverted.... your objects shading will be inverted as well. A normal is reprsended by a line coming from the center of a polygon. lets say that this "---->" represents the normals direction.... and * represents the light source. your scene looks like this.... * ------> That means your polygon normal is facing away from the light source. Now if MOST of the polygons on that object are facing TOWARDS the light source.... the 1 or 2 that arent... will not light properly. The normals are a key element to the shading model used in 3d. SO in our example... our ----> polygon... is facing away from the light.. which means the renderer figures it to be dark.... where as all of the other polygons facing <----- are being lit up by the light source. On your mesh... some parts of your mesh have mixed normals... but you apparently render double sided so you do not see the errors. Also in the maya viewport.. its rendered double sided... so you do not see the errors until you turn on "show polygon normals" under the edit polygon menu.. there is an option to conform normals. That will unify all of the normals to an averaged facing direction. So if most of your normals are facing <------- and only a few are facing -----> then it will turn all of the normals into <------- And if that is the wrong direction... you can use "reverse" under teh normal menu... that will simply flip them all. you can apply the command to single selected faces... multiple selected faces, and of course entire objects.

btw Dat, you had a lot of inverted normals that made it quite a nightmare to get into softimage. Run normals/conform on some of the objects. For example the hatch for the chest plate where the head pops up. Some of the normals on that peice are all mixed up. Otherwise.. very nice. Also some of the wing has mixed normals too.

Dat asked me to toon render his valk, and so i did. I am so jealous of how good it looks I will be making changes to mine now that i have a good reference for shape. Dat's valk really captures that swoopy/curve form of the cartoon valks. I think the biggest problem with my valk currently is the canopy/cockpit shape and tail wing size. Anyways.. here are the pics. Dat's Valk from below Dat's Valk at an angle.. AWESOME shot My Valk, similar shot... i like dat's better Btw i'm using mental ray to render.

It was painted by Craig Mullins. That was painted.. yes entirely PAINTED... no 3d! www.goodbrush.com Here it is

nope... I used to have jetfire etc. I still have the robotech jet. The one from mospeda i beleive. Not the traditional valk. I have 1 peice left of the jetfire one red leg armor peice. hehehe I do plan on getting one of the newer toys eventually.

how do the tail wings fold over each other? I remember from my jetfire so many years ago... that they overlap.. but is one slightly higher or shorter on the bottom so it can fold over the other? Or is there an indent in the back pack part?

Here's the gerwalk mode. No hands yet The tail wing section really hasnt been worked on yet, and some of the details of the chest panel arent modelled. Feet arent modelled really, just simple stand in objects. Its getting there... I cant wait til i have to do the cockpit Gerwalk01 Gerwalk02 Gerwalk03

Check it Here's a top and side view of the valk... how does it look. Pretty much like this.. it transforms into the robot in the right proportions.

hmm now that i've made the legs bigger... the tail section that has to fold up in gerwalk mode. isnt right.. does it just fold? or does it fold and slide back?

Thanks Dat... THAT CLEARS UP A LOT I just altered the valk a little to fix the scale issues in robot mode... tell me how this looks. It seems that the legs and arms needed to be bigger. Here it is. Let me know how it looks. The head is temporary.

also... i'm having one hell of a time getting the proportions right in each mode. I followed the modell sheet for scale etc... side, top and bottom.. but my nose cone seems too big... i'm a little confused hehhee

hmm good point about the toon shader although i have no idea how it will deal with model swaps. I'm expecting all to be fine. Another thing is.. i'm not sure if i'll be playing the animation at 30fps... i think i may be using say every other 5 or 8 frames of a 30fps.. to kind of simulate that anime look. I'm not quite sure about it though. But that may also help in the transform situation. I havent started to even think about how good of a solution it is.... Its just an idea at this point that really needs a good test. I somewhat think this is how Macross Zero's transformations were handled becuase they transformed so fast in macross zero... and with rather poor animation frankly... which suggests whatever they did.. probably wasnt too pretty and speeding up teh transform probably hid all the oddities. Like i said, i'm not quite sure if it will work as i expect but when i thought about it... i figured a single rig would be near imposible. The problem with the model swap is going from animation motion.. to transform motion. Going mode to mode is probably not much of a problem. I am certainly not set on anything.. Its one hell of a task either way i think

hey gonzo... i'm a character animator myself I'm curious how you're going about rigging the valk. I'm an xsi user these days so i have a great nonlinear editor in front of me for 3d animation... Instead of trying to rig some insane skeletal setup to drive all the legs etc... i was thinking of just having 3 seperate rigs... and 3 seperarte valks all under a single node. With xsi i could set them up perfect for each mode. In jet mode etc, gerwalk, and battroid.. Then set up a nice non linear animation clip where they transform from each mode to the next... And at key moments.. rig/model swap into the propper rig. i'm still in the modelling process... but as i've begun to get proprotions correct... i was thinking of doing it that way because not only will it transform easier (i hope) i can have slight variations of the body for each mode of transform... so that it doesnt look odd. The reason behind this is because the legs have so many complex behaviors. Reverse knee in one pose... Also there is a broken joint upper leg where it has a rotation vector in the middle to swivel the leg from left to right... lots of complex things going on in there and i'm not quite sure i could get them all doing everything with a single rig perfectly.. curious what you think as i will soon have to worry about this soon after i model the cockpit. Here's a pic so far Pic06 As you can see i'm going toon rendered.... Perhaps i can get away with the model swap easier than a more realistic render.. i dont know.

question. when the jet transforms... do the forwarms slide up and down the upper arm part? In other words.. does the upper arm slide into the forewarm part when its in jet mode?

Update I've added more. Legs are much more fleshed out, arms are closer to proper length.. sign fins etc.

BTW if you dont want to wait for the torrent.. join up to easynews.com or a similar news service. It was posted in alt.binaries.multimedia.anime not to long ago.

softimage xsi and some post glow/grain stuff in ps.

I have the NLA avi release, and teh previous DYRL avi release. the NLA is 2x700 meg avis. Very well done. The previous AVI version i had was 600 for the whole film! The compression was pretty noticeable. The NLA version is quite nice, compression artifacting isnt bad at all really. Although the FX bootleg perfect edition is visually superior obviously. Although on the FX bootleg version the songs arent subtitled AND it wont play in PC's for some reason.. only regular dvd players.

i know the arms are short. I'm in the process of trying to make it all fit together right. NOT EASY!

Here is an update. Legs are just roughly shaped, and the arms... hehe trying to figure out the right scale. Thanks Dat for the scans... they helped. pic03 pic04 pic05

Dat, i completely understand. At the time, and still now... i have no real reference other than pictures of the new valk toys. It is quite a challenge to figure things out from pictures.

Dat, i emailed you a while ago asking you for your valk mesh. Probably dont remember me. hehe But yeah i plan to have the valk transform. It'll be some fancy complex rig i'm sure. The pilot is all subD polygons. The plane is a mix of subD's and regular poly models.