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PatMarrNC - all messages by user

2015/9/8 3:15:33
How can I bring in Math equations? If you just want to present an equation on the screen, one way would be to create graphics files (ie. .JPG) , one for each equation in your presentation. Then you can CREATE > BACKDROP and apply the graphic to the backdrop.

Once the equation is on a backdrop, you can move it around either manually or with object movements.

Is that what you meant?
2015/9/6 17:27:37
20/08/15 reelase feedback thanks for doing all the diligent detective work to discover what messed up your project ukBerty... if I hadn't been busy with other things the past few days, I would have undoubtedly saved a project with hidden layers before you brought this to our attention.

So, what's the best approach when I get the message that a new version is available? Make a new installation so the old one is still available if the fix is broken?

(Also, add me to the list of people who think beta testing is a good idea. )
edited by PatMarrNC on 06/09/2015
2015/9/2 19:49:39
QUADRAPED IDEA.... MrDrWho13 wrote:
Fazz, Ziggy, and Dreeko are my personal favourites.


note to self: "study the masters"

then plagiarize. ;-)
2015/9/2 19:46:42
QUADRAPED IDEA.... yeah, viewing everybody's videos is on my to-do list for sure. I've purposefully avoided doing that until I get my brain wrapped around the paradigm because I'm afraid it would be easy to latch onto somebody else's style ... like a baby animal thinking that the first creature it sees must be its mother. But what I've seen here so far is amazing! Y'all put a lot more effort into your videos than I plan to put unto mine!
2015/9/2 17:05:23
Copying and pasting character movements MrDrWho13 wrote:
Currently there's a page that has all of them on: http://www.muvizu.com/GetAssets
However, a store is coming soon.
"we are currently working on some new assets for the content store and a great expansion pack. The store should be ready by the end of August."
edited by MrDrWho13 on 03/08/2015


any insiders who can offer an idea of what the new assets and expansion packs might be?
2015/9/2 16:59:08
New characters and animations another workaround for scenes where you need an action that doesn't exist:

1) set up the scene as usual

2) take a screen shot of it

3) edit the screen shot in a graphics editor to achieve what you want

4) use layers to merge it into the project

you won't be able to move around the scene in 3d, but at least you can have a momentary shot that is exactly what you envisioned. Directing is all about getting the shot you want. Even the pros do crazy workarounds when there isn't a convenient way to get the shot with a conventional technique.

if you switch cameras back and forth to show other characters movements it will be less obvious that the one scene is stationary. And if the still graphic is on a layer by itself, you can even have movement going on in that scene, but on a different layer. The audience will never know what you did.
2015/9/2 16:28:54
QUADRAPED IDEA.... Wow, well done all around! Effective use of all the tools at your disposal! You apparently put a lot of time into finding appropriate music too!

I especially like the fact that your scenes have the appearance of being storyboarded... each one frames well in its own right!

I also liked the circling camera, and the transitions, such as the one from the tombstone to the characters.

all in all it made the point very well, and ended on a humorous note! Standing Ovation here!
2015/9/2 0:30:52
QUADRAPED IDEA.... MrDrWho13 wrote:
Also you should upload your video to youtube through this site so they're forced to watch and moderate it.


good point! I just uploaded it, as per your recommendation...


ziggy72 wrote:
Regardless, keep up the protest vids - I made one (A Fistful Of Coders) to petition for holding things, and that happened...eeeeeeeeeventually Big Grin

It was you! As soon as I watched the cat video I remembered yours. I spent ages trying to find it before reading your post. Doh!


is this video still available? I searched for it to no avail... but I'd really like to watch it!
edited by PatMarrNC on 02/09/2015
2015/9/1 23:39:45
QUADRAPED IDEA.... Fazz,
Your kandar riders are AWESOME!
2015/9/1 21:52:32
QUADRAPED IDEA.... One last thought, then I'll shut up.

If there were an 18th character that consisted of nothing but legs with no feet... we could model and import whatever kind of feet our creatures need. (hooves, paws, talons, cloven whatever)

The whole purpose of this character would be to serve as the back legs of quadrapeds.
2015/9/1 21:37:21
QUADRAPED IDEA.... ziggy72 wrote:
LOL yes, it needs more legs less arms You can't give a group of characters a movement direction, so I guess that's a clue as to the kind of restrictions the Muvizu system has to work with.


Well... it seems to me that since we direct each character's movements in passes, and we can slide them around the timeline to get precision... the engine wouldn't HAVE to control the movement of two characters! (at least not in the same pass)

So the more I think about it, if it is possible to make portions of a character invisible, then this is possible already!

I've already demonstrated how a "body" could be appended to the end of a biped. Add a second character, hide his top, and tweak the 2nd character's motion until his legs stay under the "body"

I need to see if I can find that thread about making parts of a character invisible. Dang, I might have a viable quadraped before I go to bed tonight if I can solve that last hurdle...


Regardless, keep up the protest vids - I made one (A Fistful Of Coders) to petition for holding things, and that happened...eeeeeeeeeventually Big Grin


You inspire me Ziggy! Seriously! (cool idea about holding things, by the way!) You are clearly one of the value-adders on the forum


parting thought:
is there an action that allows a character to walk while stooped over?
2015/9/1 20:07:55
QUADRAPED IDEA.... Having fun playing with the idea of appending the back half of a cat as a tail. Also experimenting with face masks that don't cover up the mouth...

https://www.dropbox.com/s/39qmkoesjymyzoj/catsass3.mp4?dl=0

(I apologize for the cat's poor manners... but he's destined to be the bad cat of the series...)

;-)
edited by PatMarrNC on 01/09/2015
2015/9/1 20:05:47
QUADRAPED IDEA.... ziggy72 wrote:
Yeah, we've asked for quads before (mainly because we have a dog character who is bipedal) but it requires a completely different approach to how it would be animated and handled by the program, so it's dubious if it will ever happen UNLESS we get an improved FBX importer which allows for some skeletal elements and rigging to be imported as well.

I don't think that what I'm asking for would require all that much change to the basic engine... this is the tail end (pun intended) of a longer thread in which I described a way to "simulate" four legged creatures by using the elements we already have ... the only changes needed would be to provide the following:

1) a way to link two characters so one of them always follows the other by a specified didtance
2) the ability to make the rear character invisible from the waist up.

Personally, I would love to have horses in the program because it opens up so many more options..

if what I'm recommending is indeed possible to implement, you could have horses and I could have my cats.

.I wonder if the Muvizu equivalent of a pantomime horse would work, with two characters joined together to give you two sets of legs and a common head?


that's exactly what I'm talking about. I don't see where that approach would really change the basic engine.
2015/9/1 16:17:35
QUADRAPED IDEA.... Another idea that might already be possible, but I'm not familiar enough to know about it:

Is it possible to link two characters (or duplicate one character) and force them to stay the same distance apart? Move in tandem? If so, any of us could import a 3d body container now, and as long as the 2 sets of legs stayed the same distance apart, voila! Instant quadraped!

In looking through the tutorials and other info on this amazing program, I'm sure I saw somewhere that parts of characters can be made invisible.. but I can't remember where I saw it. That would have to play into this too, because unless everything but the legs can be hidden, implementing the idea of a quadraped body container would be harder. Not impossible, but definitely more of a challenge.
2015/9/1 15:58:58
QUADRAPED IDEA.... Heh... last night I played around with the idea of appending the back side of an animal to a biped (as a tail). Of course, the back legs don't move when the character walks, but I have to admit that I found it to be extremely amusing in a Monty Python kind of way.

There were poses that actually looked pretty convincing as a quadraped (but the character was standing still. )

In the event that any of Muvizu's programmers are following this thread and considering implementing any aspect of this idea to allow 4 legged creatures... it would be cool if I could make the character's arms invisible. A 4 legged creature that also has arms wouldn't work for most applications
2015/9/1 5:36:21
Anyone Using Muvizu to promote affiliate products Regarding the topic of using Muvizu to create animated ads that generate income:

The million dollar questions is "how do you get those gigs?" Here is one suggested answer to that question...

Most of you are posting your amazing videos on youtube. Since animation is so entertaining, they get lots of hits. And the shelf life of humorous content on the web is very long.. I'm not sure there's an expiration date at all. And the longer they stay up, the more people see them. I suggest that if you are interested in offering your services for advertisements, you should add your own commercial to the end of every video you make. Youtube inserts ads before your video plays... why can't we put our own ads in a video? It must be effective, Or youtube wouldn't be doing it.

Over time its inevitable that you'll get work from ads that stay up forever and don't cost you anything.
2015/8/31 20:33:32
Change the UV Map? I just discovered this on sourceforge... its a file translation utility that can import a lot of different formats (including .ase) and export them as something else.

http://assimp.sourceforge.net/

It could be useful to import assets that are in the .ase format and export them to a format that is recognized by other modelling software, so you can edit them and then re-export them as .ase files again
edited by PatMarrNC on 31/08/2015
2015/8/31 19:55:04
QUADRAPED IDEA.... another approach that could be used in scenes where the character was not completely visible while walking:

an imported model of an animal's backside and hind legs could be attached to a biped as a tail. This is a device that has been used in theater productions where human actors have to portray 4 legged creatures. The backside, in that case, has wheels, and it follows the actor around when they walk.

Unfortunately, a fixed model's legs would not move, so it wouldn't be useful in full-body scenes while the character walked. HOWEVER...

in that case you could put a backdrop in front of the stationary legs to hide them, focus a camera on the moving front legs, and put the output of that camera on the backdrop. This would do a "pretty good" job of simulating the appearance of a walking quadraped.


UPDATE: I tried the idea above (using a camera and backdrop to simulate hind leg movement) and couldn't make it work because...

1) the hands swing when walking, and they show up in the backdrop video

2) I could never get the background color of the backdrop to blend with the actual background of the scene, so it was obvious that a backdrop was being used. However a more skilled Muvizu user might know how to overcome both of those obstacles
edited by PatMarrNC on 01/09/2015
2015/8/31 18:51:20
is there a set of scaled reference models...? I just got an email saying that SILO is being offered at a reduced price, in case anybody might be interested. Here's a link to the sale write-up:

http://sites.fastspring.com/smithmicro/product/22145?utm_source=thirdpty&utm_medium=email&hq_e=el&hq_m=2449180&hq_l=4&hq_v=a28cb2cfcb

here are a few SILO tutorials

product overview


(how to make a helmet, very useful in MUVIZU)


creature modelling


UV mapping
2015/8/31 18:32:33
is there a set of scaled reference models...? Thanks to UrbanLamb and Dylly for such detailed responses! The video on BLENDER to UNREAL will be very helpful once I absorb the information contained therein.

Dylly, I really enjoy your sense of humor! Thanks for sharing all of your hard-earned knowledge.

The topic is unduly complicated by the fact that there are so many 3d modelling programs, and their coordinate systems and scaling aren't the same. I had figured out that much already, but the video now gives me a lot more info to work with.

I'm not competely stupid about 3D modelling.. (as a manufacturing engineer I used Unigraphics NX6 to build models, then apply CNC machining tool paths to them. Unfortunately the price tag of NX makes MAYA look like freeware. My first two homes combined cost less than a seat of NX. )

... but I FEEL stupid because I have several of the free modelling packages (Sketchup, Blender and DesignSpark3D) and they just don't seem intuitive to me. I bought SILO2 for $99 USD, and it is beginning to make sense to me. So for now I just use the other packages as import-export pathways because they all seem to have options the other packages don't. I see real value in learning Blender though.. it looks amazingly powerful for a free open-source application... especially considering the fact that others on this forum use it with MUVIZU.

So for now I continue using trial and error to build my models. Since it appears that a set of scaled reference models has been requested in the past, I may go ahead and invest the time to make that set, one for each of the 17 standard characters. I justify the time because I figure that anything that makes it easier for others to create new content... the whole MUVIZU community will benefit from that new content.

And MUVZU itself, as a product, becomes more valuable to potential buyers because of its extensibility and the large number of free props that are available for it. I like this product and I want it to live long and prosper.
edited by PatMarrNC on 31/08/2015
edited by PatMarrNC on 31/08/2015
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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.