Ah! - So Jim doesn't like seafood of any kind, and therefore mustn't be too keen on Adam Sandler movies, right? - And no, I didn't know who Adam Sandler was, but IMDB came to the rescue! :) - Please accept that gap in my education! - It certainly didn't go over my head humour-wise, (I'm quite aware of and have always welcomed Jim's keen sense of humour. He, Doc, and Klynt, were the first ones I recognised as having one! ;)) ... but that statement could have been negative or positive, depending on his penchant for fish! :)

So, - he's not keen on my Playlist comments then? - Ah well ! Perhaps I'll have to join the, "Everything's always awesome!", brigade? ;);)

Now, now children – play nice. :)

In Cliff's defense, I had to read Jim's statement a second time to determine if he was being facetious or not.

In regards to Adam Sandler - if you were born during or after the "MTV generation" you would have some appreciation for Sandler's type of humor. As for myself, I have watched one of his better acclaimed movies - never again! :eek:

Cliff - I believe that Adam Sandler will be personally responsible for the fall of Western civilzation. And I don't eat anything that's ever been wet. As far as rotating clocks, the idea is that the user would pick their favorite style of clock, and put it into the logo rotation every once in a while, not rotate through the different styles.

Neil - Your list is the basic order that I have planned, though fully-animated corals will be an ongoing enterprise. The clams are already underway, but there are some features which will need never-seen-before technology, and those will take a while (the anemone at the far right, for example).

Putting 3D objects on top of a 2D movie has not been done very often. The best example that comes to mind is the Final Fantasy VII game.

That would explain why the pics on IMDB have at least one with Adam Sandler and Russell Brand together in the same shot!

..... Thinks! ... That places me in that same category! :erm:

Ha, ha - No, it places you in the same category as me - someone who hates something so much they can never have anything good to say about it :) Perhaps the analogy would have been closer if I had worded it this way: Asking Cliff's opinion on what the Music and Logo interfaces need is like asking me what Angelina Jolie's next tattoo should be.

Morgan - I wish it was as simple as placing a movie on top of the object (that's what I had originally planned). But in the midst of all that movement, there must also be individually-modeled tentacles for the clownfish to play amongst.

Now Angelina Jolie I have heard of! ;)

BTW, I Apparently belong to the Silent, :erm: or Air Raid Generation. ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Generation

Can't get any clearer than that statement! It leaves nothing open to interpretation. ;)

If you can believe it, reviewers have stated Adam Sandler's comedy as comparable to Jerry Lewis. Even the stange humor of the late Benny Hill is far superior. The comedy greats like Jerry Lewis, Three Stooges, Laural and Hardy, and Abbot and Costello - those are comedians.


Cliff;

This is the first time I have heard of that term. It is one you should be very proud of!

I wasn't familiar with the term, either.

Regarding the dreaded Adam Sandler - A few years ago, Jerry Lewis apparently wrote him a letter advising him to keep his humor out of the gutter (and the bathroom). It went unheeded. Posters for Big Daddy were all over the world. No wonder everyone hates us. http://www.impawards.com/1999/big_daddy.html

Don't forget Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and Bob Hope - and I totally agree. :TU:

And don't forget... Frasier, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Barney Miller, Bob Newhart, The Odd Couple, Burns Allen, etc. :)

.... AND "Dad's Army"!

Minn - The technique we are referring to is not the mixing of 2D and 3D animation, but the projection of a 2D animation onto a 3D object. There are some good examples of this at Disneyland, in the Haunted Mansion. There are some sculpted busts in the "graveyard", which appear to come alive by the projection of a movie onto their blank faces.

Ordinarily, the texture of a 3D model is static and just stays glued to the skin of the model as it bends. But that texture can also be made of many cels of animation, so that the picture on the object is constantly changing. My texture for the anemone is actually one frame of a hi-def video I took. If I were to play the frames of that video onto the texture, it would be a pretty convincing moving anemone, with a very simple underlying object (as long as the campera angle didn't change much).

The problem is, how to allow a clownfish to interact with it, and move among the tentacles if they are just projected onto the object?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (originally Who Censored Roger Rabbit?) was a film. It was a combination of 2D footage + 2D hand-drawn cel animation + some 3D animation and computer effects. It was played in theaters on a standard projector.

Final Fantasy VII was computer game that, in real-time, using all the processing capability of the 1997 Playstation hadware, to keep a 2D movie in synch with 3D objects on top. This included changing camera angles and camera dollies, pans, etc. There are also transitions between 2D prerendered movies and 2D still images (typically framegrabs of the movie). The 1997 Playstation hardware was only capable of playing 320 x 240 video and only generating 180,000 lit polygons per second. It was a technical tour de force when it came out.

What Jim has to do is somehow mesh his 2D movie of the anemone with 3D rendered tentacles seamlessly overlaid on top. The clownfishes need to seem to interact with the anemone.

Jim has a few technical hurdles:

• Display this movie without bloating the filesize of the Aquarium dramatically. Use of optimized video codecs such as MPEG-4 will help.
• Seamlessly loop the video. As the tentacles of a moving anemone have no discernable pattern, this will probably be a nightmare. I would imagine a traveling "matte" being used to composite parts of the video onto itself to take advantage of loop-like trends in different parts of the animation. In other words, if the upper left part has a distinctive loop and the bottom right has a distinctive loop, but these do not have the same timing, then cropping the left part and right part and then recompositing on a different time scale along with speedup/slowdown would allow the loops to line up.
• Finally, he has to create 3D tentacles which look indistinguishable from the filmed specimens. They need to move similarly and be able to "interact" with the clownfishes without significant passthrus.

It is an unenviable job to be sure.

You got that right.

Morgan has correctly listed most of the challenges in creating the anemone. One minor point is the use of a travelling matte. I'd love to be able to do this, but alpha channels are not available in MPEG4 (or JPEG or anything else with "PEG" in the name). Looping the video sequence is one of the hardest parts, since the tentacles are just going everywhere, and don't conveniently all return to their starting positions at the same time.

I would build the anemone loop in Adobe Premiere or other such powerful video app. Then you have one seamless video to play. No way it could be done on-the fly.

With Premiere, it's easy to play dozens of versions of the same movie on top of each other, using mattes to only reveal parts of each "instance". Start/stop points can be changed around and frames can be duplicated.

When I first filmed the video a couple of years ago, I spent about 50 hours with it in Premiere, trying to find a reasonable loop. Failing that, I came up with the idea of have "mini-loops" where there are separate movies for each of the three major parts of the anemone. It still doesn't address the problem of the clownfish, though. Ironically, a clownfish swam into the anemone while I was filming it. It looks terrific, but I can't limit it to just that one movement sequence.

There have been many times when I've used sleight-of-hand to simulate complex effects with a minimum of resources, but this one time where I have to bite the bullet and put in the hundreds of hours required for realism. That's why it's 'way down the list.

Jim:

Trying to understand what you two are talking about is giving me a headache. :(

I'll bet some of those technics you are talking about, and the knowledge learned from future aquarium animations can be used in the movie you will produce. Have you decided what category the movie will be, i.e. fantasy, adventure, science fiction, etc?