So I'm re-rigging Anna !
Using abAutoRig 3.3 and also doing facial rigs.

And so Ian helped me to go about the rigging in 3D2 on the annav2 - and that is made up of the meshes that I exported from anna.mb as objs. But alas, I realize that I should have used the original anna.mb, as I still want to keep the blendshapes. I should have simply detach the skin(s) from the original skeleton, and go from there, thereby retaining the blendshapes.

So what I do now is:
Import anna.mb into annav2, detach a...
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I was so excited when I got the DVDs of The Man Who Planted Trees from inter library loan. Despite having a pressing assignment deadline, I just have to watch it.

It is so so so incredibly beautiful - Frederick Back's work is just so beautiful that I was so mesmerized, and so inspired. The story - is also so beautiful only Frederick Back could have been able to produce the animation for it....

I really love hand drawn animation ... it has such charm and beauty that i find kind of missing in 3D...
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So here's my first cutout, all ready to animate.



And this afternoon, I've finally gotten a taste of cutout animation (putting it under the Oxberry camera).
No mean feat, but loads of fun.

Strange for one having relied so much on a computer, but now, a refreshing change of using scissors, pencil, paper and loads of imagination. I love it!

Hmmm....
Starting from frame 130
Frames 130-177 for Title (24 frames) and first shot (24 frames) - EWS that shows the tree, girl on swing (Anna?), butterfly.
Fr...
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This is the first pose of Anna that I did - so serene, a sleeping child.
It reminds me of this song - Sleeping Child. My all time favorite! :-)

So serene, a sleeping pose

Sleeping Child -- Michael Learns to Rock

The Milky Way upon the heaven is twinkling just for you
And Mr. Moon he came by to say goodnight to you
I'll sing for you, I'll sing for mother, we're praying for the world
And for the people everywhere gonna show them all we care

Chorus:
Oh my sleeping child, the world's so wild but you'v...
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Frantically and flustered, I rushed to COFA. Will my white hard disk with all my precious backups of my various work and sound resources still be at general access lab F104? It was the afternoon of Saturday 28 Nov, and COFA Annual was coming to a close on Sunday. I didn't plan to go to COFA.

"Hi, excuse me, I err, had my hard disk on this Mac", I said to a lady who was working on the Mac which I left my hard disk plugged in the day before. She smiled and pointed to a hard disk on the desk. "O...
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stand animation....
.. to do...

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Just thought of putting this which I posted on iCinema wiki on Oct 25 for my reference ...

Tortoise SVN on Windows is a breeze, but with Mac, it is not that easy.
I spent the thu before AVIE trying to get SVN client - SCPlugin, to work on my Mac Pro (Mac OS X 1.5x), and it kept showing it is an outdated version 1.4.x.
I decided today to give it a go again - and hmm, ok, perhaps I should download the i386 one that is a later version 1.6.2.

And now I spent the whole afternoon trying to SCPlugin...
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I really love to do the animation. And playing with interesting camera angles is fun!

"I'll add one where we shoot from underneath the spinning magical papers!" so I said to Simon excitedly, "a low angle shot." That became shot 34b - and with 37, 38, 39, I was done with key poses. 4 shots in one day on October 16 - the Friday of week 12!

So here, I've Anna looking bewildered by the spinning paper - one of my favorite shots.


Anna and Jaws looking at Spinning Papers


Jaws Jumps up excitedly towards...
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"Dear Shu, I hope you can finish Anna well." --  little Sarah, who just turned five on the second voice recording.

"Sarah asked to write this message and she recited it, Joy is not wrong about her texting" -- text sent by Esther on 31 Oct.

"I want to see the movie!", said Sarah excitedly in CG09 on the first recording on 13 Oct. "You gotta text her!" Joy urged Sarah.

So I guess, how could I disappoint Sarah? And seven-year old Daniel too! "Anna World" is their movie!

"How did Jaws get up the tr...
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Anna's World is a whimsical world of magic!

In my mind's eye, I could almost see it even as we were building it. It's not just the environment, it's also the sound, sights and experience that we wanted to build. Yes, the sound. Little Sarah and Daniel will be thrilled to hear their voices!

"I'll be putting in a lens flare!" so said Simon over the phone. "Cool!"


Anna's World - a whimsical world of magic!

"It's going to be really so beautiful and magical!" so I said to Simon, happily seeing the dai...
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One cannot imagine how much goes into a dress.

Anna's dress was specially and lovingly designed for Blue. A day after week 5 preso on 20 Aug, I started on the dress. I was so excited as it was almost the last piece of modeling for me (beside the hair and perhaps eyelashes, teeth and tongue). And it was the fun part -- after the grueling task of modeling the human body - one of the toughest modeling task one can ask for.  Unless of course one does not care for correctness of proportion, aesthet...
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In a state of bewilderment, and trying to come to terms with the reality and make sense of it all, we'd to decide what is the best and most feasible. Drop the course? The last resort....a possibility. It was already midway through the semester.

At the time, ironically, I'd just completed the dress of Blue after spending one day on it ... a beautiful bluish white elegant dress fashioned after a photo in Bambini Magazine. To allow her to swim gracefully.  It was modeled based on the nCloth examp...
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A gust of unusually strong wind blows, with dust hitting my teary half closed eyes. Walking out of COFA on the dawn of week 9 preso on 23 September at 5 am, I was bewildered to see Oxford street turning so red. We would not have a lot to show on week 9 preso -- only the establishing shots and shots of Jaws waking Anna -- as I'd just managed to make the blink blendshapes and Anna's sleeping pose, and not started on any animation... after grappling with the difficult paint weights of Anna and h...
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This simple technique is useful for animation. In fact, I redid the smoothing part of Anna, by changing from subdiv proxy to mesh smooth. When animating a character it is good to have the choice of displaying either the high-res or low-res model.

Following [2] what I did was to create a smooth custom attribute on the Anna's master node, with min 0, max 3, and default 0. Then I did a Mesh->Smooth on Anna's character, dress and hair. Using connection editor, I connected the smooth attribute to ...
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Character Set is very useful for animation.

I was looking at [1] and following it religiously to create anna character set (selecting master node).
However when referenced in the environment, Anna's various manipulators (pelvisManip, pelvisOverrideManip, handManip, clavicleManip) stop working after a key is set on the anna character set. Spent the whole afternoon stuck on this amidst time that is running out. After analyzing and trying various things, and on the verge of giving up, I looked at...
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“... the world went all red through the bit a glass...”  - five-year old Anna

And that's how my story evolves ...

My story is inspired by the true story of Anna in the book Mister God, This is Anna -- a tiny gem which I serendipitously picked up at a bookshop.

"the diffrense from a person and an angel is easy. Most of an angel is in the inside and most of a person is on the outside."[1] These are the words of Anna. I was instantly captivated.



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So I realize creating eyelashes and getting the eyelashes to move with the eye blinks require techniques.
Lest I forget, I'll record the steps that I painstaking gathered from various sources.

Creating eyelashes:

1. Create poly planes for each of top and bottom eyelashes.
2. Use eyelash file texture for color attribute, and invert the eyelash file texture (using Photoshop Image>Invert) for transparency attribute.
3. Set Color Balance>Color Offset to brown (brown eyelashes for Anna!), Color Balance>Alpha is...

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Second time round doing reverse foot, I realize now that it wasn't completely working when I did it last semester.
I'd only the "step" working, while it caused all other attributes of the footManip to stop working as the step overrides the attributes set up via connection editor. After sleeping over it, the next morning, Eureka! I got it working. Why, yes, I should take the driver and driven both from the attributes in footManip for the "step".

Ok, so here, I just put down the settings I used f...
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Ah! It is a nice change to be at main campus – and doing interactive stuff for the icinema project.

Really fun! In earnest, doing for both our major project and icinema.

So here’s my icinema project 1 !

(To play requires Virtools Web Player)

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