Monkspider's Fun Corner: Impersonate your favorite Poly members!

[Tiamat]

Blackwidow24 ~ You silly little men, you know you worship me! Lick my toes

devilmunchkin ~ So I dumped this one guy I met online for another online guy but I don't know if it's love. How do you know if it's love? I think I still love my ex and my parents treated me like crap again. ACK!

David Floyd ~ You people on welfare owe me money. And if I want to go around shooting people then that's my god given right

[Provost Harrison]

I don't know whether to feel flattered that no one would be cruel enough to do an impression of me, or offended that I must be such a bland poster

[Provost Harrison]

Ecthelion:

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Just for you, here's Provost "Muso Critic" Harrison's typical song review.

"This doesn't make me feel anything, really."

Repeat to fade.

[Tiamat]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
I don't know whether to feel flattered that no one would be cruel enough to do an impression of me, or offended that I must be such a bland poster

Ditto.......but just so you don't feel left out

Provost ~ Bleeding Christ can't I get a job anywhere? I need resume help!

[Provost Harrison]

[monolith94]

hi-larious! Although I'm emberassed that the impersonation of me is the least funny... Sadly, I do not know how to begin to impersonate Urban Ranger in return, as to impersonate a person, they must have a personality.

[Stefu]

Boddington's impersonation can't be done in one post, as it requires two posts. In post one he throws out an offensive trollish opinion about asylum seekers, and in post two he talks about drinking beer in Aberstwhatever.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

For LWP5, stay off the happy pills for a couple of days and neck loads of weapons-grade espresso. I guarantee that your reviews will be works of bilious beauty that you'll treasure for years to come.

[Provost Harrison]

See my problem is there is very little music (well, of the tastes of you lot which tend to be pretty refined) which I hate...there is indifference but not dislike...however if you got a few Craig David fans in I guarantee you I could spew vitriol

[SlowwHand]

Damnit!

How many times do I have to tell you people!
It's spelled "y'all". A contraction of you all.
Oh, well. You got it right 2 of 3 times. No bad.

[SlowwHand]

MtG:

Michael, what time is it ?
Well, Sloww, it's like this.

Out of the many cool new features in Lightwave 6, Expressions is one that I was quite interested in. Sure, its got a severe lack of documentation, is a bit buggy, tends to crash a lot if you make mistakes and 3.29 of the Motion manual suggests it as the domain of Maths Gurus, but even a moron such as myself can use it using some simple analysis of the situation, an incling of common sense and some basic mathematics...

To prove the point, I used expressions to create a real-time analogue clock animation to test this new tool. Because of the lack of explanation for all the functions in the manual, it took me a lot more work then I had expected initially, but by the time I had managed to crash Layout 10 or so times, I realised I was going way too far with my calculations and the solution was so simple, even a 5 year old could have solved it!
Here you go. A clock comprised of 4 simple models to demonstrate how to use expressions.

There are 3 objects we will be concentrating on here - An hours, minutes and seconds hand that I will be animating. The 'hour markings' object around the edge was simply added in to check the the expressions were working

I'll leave the modelling up to you - Its fairly straight forward - Each hand is simply a long rectangular box with the pivot point at one end... The important part of this tutorial will be how we animate the objects using the Expressions tool!
The Process...
I'll have assumed that you've created your clock model by now and loaded each object into Layout. I'll start by explaining some basics like where to find the expressions modifier, and then quickly run over the calculations for each part. I'll leave the modelling and scene setup to you as part of the learning experience!

To set up an Expression, select the Graph Editor

As you can see in the image on the left here, once you have the graph editor selected, click on the channel you want to modify (for the clock, I used the Heading rotation (Rotation.H) for all hands) for the selected object and then select Modifiers / Add modifier / LW_Expressions to add in the expressions tool.

To set the expression, double-click on the modifier name to get the settings box. The Expression must appear in the top box, but you can assign 4 variables in lines A,B,C and D for more complex stuff!

Now you know the basics, I'll quickly run through the expressions I used to animate the three hands of the clock model...

Seconds are ticking...
We'll start our clock with the smallest measure of time - and that's the second. So, where do we start - well, we know a few things -
A clocks hands rotate a full circle - That's, um, yeh, 360 degrees!
There are 60 seconds per minute - And a minute is a complete rotation of 360 degrees.
So, every second, we need to rotate our second hand 1/60th of 360 degrees (which in mathematical terms is 360/60). So we select our seconds hand object, select the Rotation.H channel then add in our Expressions modifier.

Just to make things easier to understand then long mathematical equations, I've used the A,B,C & D scratch variables to break the maths up. (even though they are incredibly simple!)

First, I've placed the 360/60 calculation for the angle inside the A variable. If you wanted to be clever, you could just avoid this altogether and enter the answer 6 in the expression!

To calculate the correct rotational angle, we simply calculate the A variable (6 degrees, or 360/60) multiplied by the Time value.


The value must be multiplied by the Time - The Time acts as the value that will animate our clock hand by giving the corrrect angle at each frame. ie. Assuming that we were rendering for 30 fps, then if we were at frame 30 (Time = 1s) then 6*1 = 6 degrees, or the first 'second' on the clock face. If we were at frame 45 (Time = 1.5s) then the angle would be 6*1.5 = 9 degrees and so on.

I also set Additive to be active. Why? When Additive is off, the value in the expression will be passed as the absolute value for the rotation. Hence, at frame 0 (Time = 0s), the seconds hand would always start at the 12o'clock position (or a rotation of 0 degrees!)

Using additive, the expression value is added to the rotational value of the object. That is, we can set up the starting position of the clock hand at frame 0 ie. Setting the correct time on the clock

Well, we've got the seconds hand animated (Yep, that's it!). You can play the animation to check it out...


Minutes away...
The Minutes hand is our next object we want to animate using our newly-found expressions. For this we know a few more facts...
There are 60 seconds per minute.
There are 60 minutes per hour.
We know that our second hand rotates 1/60th of 360 degrees every second. Therefore every 60 seconds, we need to rotate the minute hand 1/60th of 360 degrees. That's quite simple....

We know that a second hand rotates 360/60 degrees every second. To move 1/60th of the clock face every 60 seconds, we need to rotate slower, or in this case adjust the angle of the Minutes hand by a smaller angle.

Easy - Since it takes 60 seconds, that means every second we only move 1/60th of the angle of the seconds hand.

Again we need to multiply it by the time to animate it, and don't forget to set additive on so that we can set our clock by keyframing the hands at the correct 'time' in our animation!


You can play the animation to check it out... Though you're gonna need a LOT of frames to see the minutes hand move (at 30 fps, that's 1800 frames per minute!)


The Hour is nigh...
W'eve conquered the seconds and minutes by using some pretty simple mathematics so far. The hour hand is no different (well, not too much anyway!). So, what do we know from looking at our real-life example?
There are 60 minutes per hour.
There are 12 hours in the 360 degrees
We know that our second hand rotates 1/60th of 360 degrees every second, our minute hand had to rotate at 1/60th of the speed of the second hand because there are 60 of them, therefore our hour hand must rotate... Can you guess?

Yep, that's right - Because we know every 60 minutes we need to move 1/12 of the 360 degrees, we can simply calculate that value by dividing the minutes angle by 12! Simple!

Again, multiply the value by the time for animation and activate the Additive option.

That's it!
Now save the scene and you're done - Your very own rendered clock that keeps theoretically perfect time! Of course, if you wanna check out the clock, I suggest setting your render options for a rate of 1fps rather then 30fps, otherwise you're looking at 108000 frames per hour!

Now that you've seen how easy Expressions can be, have a go yourself. I'd suggest if your not a keen mathematician to avoid complex ideas and try for basics like this clock project - Try to invisage situations where the relationships between values, or objects are easy to understand and you'll be on your way! There's a whole tonne of things you can do with expressions - The only limit is your imagination (oh, and mathematics plays a big part too!)

Well, hope that was of use to some of you out there!









Comprende?

[Imran Siddiqui]

I guess I'm unimpersonatable... or something .

--

"It is backed by new research that blacks cannot impersonate as well as whites, but why are there more black stand up comedians that do stand up impersonations? Is it some form of affirmative action for the less talented"
-Caligasta

[SlowwHand]

Originally posted by MrFun
Someone hi-jacked into my account making up these stories that I am gay!!

And this must be Fez?

[Skanky Burns]

Big Crunch: Dr Spike's post above was pure spam.
Dr Spike: Ahh, meta-spam.

Dissident: I saw a woman doing an impersonation. I would do her if I could.