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[nikolasmantilla]

Well, hereis what im working on! for now im building the little guy, running into alot of problems, since remembering and reading over the manual, and tryung things. but here is a peak to what im doing. any advice is more than welcome. also when you give me yer advise explain why if is not much askign since im sure you have a good reason witha  solid argument.
thanks!

[ENSONIQ5]

Looks good so far nikolasmantilla, no real crits yet.  One thing you might want to consider, making a modelled spring bend like in real life is notoriously difficult in Anim8or (assuming that is your plan).  Morphs deform in a strictly linear fashion, so are difficult to use in this case, without creating several morph targets.  The best way is to use a number of bones constructed like a spine, with careful weight painting to the spring mesh, but note that bones cannot change in length through an animation so the tightness of your abdominal spring (already quite compressed) will allow for very minimal motion before the spring coils start to overlap .  If you do plan to have the springs bend as the bot dances I would recommend conducting a short test animation, rigging just a spring and checking out it's limitations etc.  Great work, looking forward to seeing him carve up the dancefloor!

[nikolasmantilla]

Well, I did take your advice.. altho I have not yet tought on how im going to animate him. im too exitted to put somehting like this together. looks kind of crappy.. the feet that is but I think im getting there. I dont really understand how to animate in morphin, I was thinking bones, but Im unable to rezise object in figure mode. i dont know wha tim doing wrong.
anyways here is the new preview.

[Josmic8or]

Love your robot!Very creative!!
GREAT JOB!

About resizing the object I think you have to do it in object mode

[nikolasmantilla]

Thank you Josmic8or   

Im having some problmes using all 3 Axis, Im having to Key one in and its kind of uggghhh. Any ideas whats going ong?
and then the other question, is there any advice on how to synck motion with music?..

Anyway, here is how its comming out.

[ENSONIQ5]

Re synching to music, all you really need is the beats-per-minute of the music track.  I guess the simplest way to do this is to literally count the beats over a timed 60 seconds.  Once you have the BPM you can calculate how many frames are needed per beat, based on your frame rate.  For example, if you are animating at 24 frames per second, and the music track is found to be running at 144 beats per minute, then:

24 frames per second = 1440 frames per minute
1440 / 144 = 10
So, there will be 10 frames between each beat.

Of course, it gets a little more tricky if the numbers aren't as tidy as that, for instance if the BPM is 150 then there are 9.6 frames per beat.  I guess in this case you would round off the frame number for the sake of keyframing (eg 9.6 becomes 10, 19.2 becomes 19, etc.)  Alternatively you could perhaps script the motion which allows for mathematical accuracy, but you would need to be very keen to define a script for each of the figure's joints in a dance routine (not impossible, but this would need some serious planning).

[nikolasmantilla]

Ok, so Im making the dance floor, but... im really bad with lights, and I want my dance floor to light up and with tiles.. any of you have Ideas on how to make the floor light up. so a squeare has some kind of glowIm thinking of a pattern. and for turning a light off, do you just sdet the color to black?

[ENSONIQ5]

Anim8or doesn't do translucency very well, and at this stage backlighting isn't really possible.  Unfortunately Anim8or also doesn't support animate-able materials yet.  The simplest solution I can think of is to use the Visibility setting to alternate between "light on" or "light off".  The first thing you will need is a material for "light off", which will probably be a whitish, plasticy material, and a set of "light on" materials for each colour.  These will need a colour in the Emissive field so they appear to glow.  Now, you need to essentially build two dance floors in Scene mode, the first using tiles that are all the "light off" material, and the second with tiles using the "light on" materials in whatever pattern you want.  Both these tile sets need to occupy the same physical space in your scene, so for every "light on" tile there is a "light off" tile in the exact same position.  You can now use the Visibility controller to select which tile (on or off) is visible at any given time (ie "light off" tile becomes invisible in the same frame as the "light on" tile becomes visible, and vise versa).

In addition to this you should add a directional light source slightly above each tile, with a 180 degree spread, to illuminate the dancing bot from beneath.  The lights should be coloured the same as the tiles and need to be animated to follow the same sequence as the tiles.  I STRONGLY recommend using a script to control both the tile visibility function and the light intensity, otherwise you are up for an awful lot of keyframing.

[ENSONIQ5]

I have made a very basic scene that demonstrates what I am talking about, available here:

.  It uses only four tiles, for a proper dance floor you would want to use at least an 8 by 8 grid I'd reckon.  The animation is totally scripted (apart from the camera motion), below is the script that controls the visibility of the green illuminated tile

float $trigger;
float $rate;
float $offset;
$rate=2;
$offset=0;
$trigger = 1 + sin(((time+$offset)*$rate)*PI)*0.5;
if ($trigger<1.25)
$visibility = 0;
else
$visibility = 1;

$rate controls the speed of the sequence, the higher the number the faster the sequence rate.
$offset controls the phase of each sequenced element, ie which light is on when.  Acceptable values range from 0 to 1, 0 being no phase shift and 1 being a full phase shift.
$trigger is calculated to vary between 0.5 and 1.5 in a sinusoidal pattern and is measured by the 'if' statement to define the visibility state.
The same basic script is used for the lights, though it varies the light's colour rather than visibility.  I have attached the .an8 file for reference.

[nikolasmantilla]

OMG! thanks alot man... im kind of dumb when it comes to scripting... but what you did is wow, just wow! thanks a bunch. Im looking at how it work it might take me a while the wayI want the patterns but it should do fo now

[nikolasmantilla]

hey, ENSONIQ5 Is there a way to make it like after 10 loops, change to the following. im sure there is and it will take me probably a month or more before I can even know whats going on int he codes >.<

dee, becase what im thinking is overlaping the tiles with colors, and then I can have diff colors in same possition.

[ENSONIQ5]

You can make scripts as complex as you need them to be, following normal coding rules for the script language.  There would be a number of ways to add a cycle counter or temporal loop that changes the sequence over time, though without the ability to use running variables (grrrr...) it is a little more complicated than it could be.  One way would be to create a variable that equalled the "time" function, but without any decimals (I'd need to research how to do this within the language rules).  This could then be subtracted from the "time" function, leaving only the time fraction.  This could then be tested with an IF statement to trigger an overriding "$visibility=0" command.  You would need to add variable factors to control the cycle rate.  I'll have a bit of a play with this when I can, I don't have access to Anim8or at the moment.

[nikolasmantilla]

^.^ Going Vacations! I have not forgot about this project. dont want to post anythign yet till is fully done, but Im gonna post the floor.. just so I can get feedbank in colors! since it so freaking big.

[kreator]

another way to do it.... with animated textures

or here if youtube is overloaded...

http://www.animanon.com/Forum3/index.php?action=articles;sa=view;article=8

[johnar]

hello there nikolasmantilla, ,
  I like your robot so far. Will the screen on his helmet go up and down?.
 About syncing to music.
 A program like 'Magpie pro' is good. (blimin gr8 actually) You only need to use the trial version, becoz the only functions you need to use is the zooming in, play etc.
  When you load a .wav file in to magpie, it shows the sound wave next to a line of frame numbers. You can adjust the 'shown' frame rate to match your prefered animation frame rate. And you can zoom in for the tricky/messy bits. You can also fwd 1 frame at a time, and hear only the noise in that frame which is  Really handy for things like ''S' in lipsyncing, or cymbals in music.
 Magpie pro trial version and a pen and paper.
 I'm trying some dancing at the moment as well. Looking fwd to seeing how you get on.
 I'm finding that, once i have the timeing of the beat in place, the thing is to come up with some convincing dance 'poses'. (makes the difference between 'dancing' and just 'jiggling around awkwardly' to the beat. Still working at it. .