Rigging 1 foot re-explanation

It's strange how things come back to haunt you, even if its not your fault.  I have had my instructional videos out for 8 years now, and the only complaint I have gotten has been this tutorial video not yielding the same results for other people.
It turns out that some default settings had changed in messiah over the years, causing some headaches with my learning materials. But there isn't anything wrong with the project files or video at all.  Here's why:

Messiah's metaEffectors

Way back in messiah:studio V2, I had decided to animate this skeleton model.  This was my stress test for their new MetaEffector tool back when it was first introduced.  MetaEffectors are weight fields that can be used to isolate different meshes, change how skeletons deform meshes, and even influence how shaders are blended, since it is a value-driven volume.  while I may not be good at explaining *what* they do, I can show you this example. I used MetaEffectors to isolate and assign 160 bones in this skeleton model file to the animation controls within messiah. back then, it was no easy feat. this skeleton easily exceeded 100,000 polygons. so much that it had to be modeled into 5 parts  in the beginning, and took up to 5 minutes to even open on my workstation.

albertasaurus walk cycle

I found an older animation I had done with my skeleton of Albertasaurus libratus.  rigged in messiah, connected to maya through Messiah's live connection and rendered out from there.

Rigging1 and teaser for minituts1

I was digging through my archives when I saw my old portable hard drive.  I had to load it up to see what was on it.  Lo, I found the teaser vids that I had created to sell my first two instructional videos: Minituts1, and Rigging1.  This was back before youtube, so they had to be small, and load fast off of my site.

 Well, joecosman.com hasnt been up for quite a while, the times have slowly replaced it with automated entities such as blogger.com, youtube and vimeo and other various forms of online self-authoring.  So.. here they are from the grave.

you can still purchase these videos still  on www.lulu.com.

I am  sure I have another teaser showing off minituts2 on another backup.  I will keep finding those things and dust them off for you to see.  In the meanwhile, here are some press images from animate2

the Noob teaches you about keyframes and animation concepts in Animate1

 Rigging a full character with facial as well as a four legged character in Rigging2

just parts of a lesson on rigging in Minituts1.  I really like the topology I made for it.

weekend sketches

My brother came over on the weekend, and we had some fun sketching and chatting.  I was showing him the shading pens I had, and some of the charcoals.  I dug up some old pastels I had inherited and played with those.

it sure felt good to just goof off on paper for no reason at all.  the face was drawn from memory, brown pastel/charcoal. smudged away with an old rag until I had my values set in.

A good example of getting down to detail from wide strokes. It started out as a rag smudge and went from there.  I was showing my brother when to stop adding and adjusting... which is when the idea finally shows itself.  Messing  with it more just leads to ruining the whole drawing, as I have clearly done here with the torso and backshading.. ahh well..

Ch5: IK Chains

  This video explains how to quickly set up an IK chain inside Messiah Studio.

2d Picture dump

Its about time I started putting some older stuff up.  alot of it is from my old website from years gone past, but some of these pics are just quick sketches during meetings, or traditional painting back in the day when I thought I had some real talent.   Enjoy!

Ch4: items and heirarchies

Ch4: Items and Hierarchies

 

I upgraded to V5! so... now its time to continue explaining the Messiah interface and methods.

I dont know if I can be consistent about releasing these videos in a timely fashion, but at least they will be available for everyone to get a basic understanding of the program. 

if you are having some issues with using the program, head over to http://www.setuptab.com and enter the chat.  I am there sometimes, and I may be able to help you out.  who knows, it may just wind up as a tip on youtube!....