Rodney

Hired a lady to model some hairstyles... Her hair consists of two splines. GoldEyeLocks.prj

Same setup without being kinky...

Old Hair Renders pretty quick too. Note: I've (obviously) added a lot of kinkiness... I was going for a Merida/Brave direction.

It's that first part of the scenario that escaped me because right as I was 'seeing' that it was a girl sitting in the lotus position... the guy was doing something (jumping) that distracted me. So I didn't really know it was a girl sitting in a lotus position. (Hope my thoughts make as much sense to you as they do to me) If you plan to open with a shot of her sitting in the lotus position then you may achieve a higher degree of clarity. IMO it's the establishing shot that needs a bit more clarity. You can get away with delaying that establishing shot but it still needs to be there. Again... just my thoughts on this... confusion is not always a bad thing. Mysteries are made of these. I like to understand (and analyze) what I'm seeing.

You are off to a great start Dan. Post one is only minutes old... and you've already got a fan! Keep track of your processes... some anime fans are going to want to follow your lead. P.S. If that is particle hair... I am very impressed. If it's not, I'm just as happy. That's a very cool look either way.

Yup.... Old Locks still work. If folks are struggling with this I'll wip up a video that shows the basic setup. Because no one has used this in years... it's a new feature all over again.

(Split this off another topic so as not to hijack that thread) The trick... to old style Locks of Hair... is to apply the Material to a single spline that drives the hair. Note: I am only assuming this still works in current versions of A:M. Will have to test to be sure. Still works! Here's a basic write up on the process: Locks_of_Hair_Project.pdf

Yes, indeed. IMO it's the primary thing that makes the old hair worth keeping. There are rotate manipulators that appear to allow you to twist the the hair around the main axis of the hair. Edit: Exploration of Old Style Hair Lock now in new topic: HERE.

My feel is that the sequence is too confusing to follow 'as is'. It's possible that sound might remedy some of this but here what I would suggest. Here's a breakdown of what I see thus far with suggestions: Establishing shot Right now your establishing shot is of the character who is walking, rounds a corner and sees the girl sitting on the floor. At this point that character knows something the audience doesn't and in this case... it's not yet a bad thing. Note: An alternative establishing shot (which I am NOT recommending but would allow complete clarity) is that you first show both characters on screen). I think you can successfully sell this without resorting to this. Cut to (what the first character sees (which is the girl sitting on the floor) What seems to be lacking to me is a short glimpse of the guy, perhaps poking his head around the corner behind her in the background. This would connect the second shot with the first and we would understand that this girl is what he is seeing. Now we would have an idea of what is going to happen in the next shot... the sneaking... As it is, even with a general idea of what was suppose to be happening from seeing your previous WIPs, I wasn't sure what I was seeing. The Sneaking I think Robert or someone else mentioned that the light should probably not follow the guy... I'm not sure but the light seems a bit odd to me. it's following him here but then lights up the girl's face in the next shot. Not sure what the purpose of the light is here except to vignette and force a focus toward the character we are suppose to be seeing. As there are no other elements in the shot that draw our eyes someplace else there is less of a need for the light as it is in the sequence. If you are going to add a lot of detail to the background (texturing etc.) then the light might work okay for you. The Jumping and Ducking. Some of the animated action needs to be refined or trimmed here. As it is it seems to me that the jumping guy is levitating (too long a delay in the air) while the girl is taking a bit long to duck out of the way. My suggestion: Animate two balls moving instead of the characters to establish the timing. Then replace the balls with the people. Timing-wise, as an aid to smooth animation, you might want to animate the two balls instead of the people throughout the whole sequence. Recovery and Finale Nothing really to add here especially as you suggest you are already going to work on this part of the sequence (i.e for lipsync). If your were to quickly animate this with two balls here is what we might expect to see: Boy ball moves around corner... Boy ball reacts to seeing something... (we begin to anticipate what he might be seeing) Boy ball (in background) is seen peering around the corner at the girl ball (in foreground) who is sitting motionless... Boy ball begins sneaking up toward girl (who is now once again unseen) Girl ball is seen as Boy ball leaps toward her Girl ball moves out of the way Boy ball flies past Boy ball lands on the ground Girl ball seen smiling (Says 'Boo' as a means to deliver the punchline/final beat) Something like that anyway. I was tempted to dive in and edit a few frames out of the ducking/jumping shot because I thought speeding that up might salvage that part of the sequence but hopefully by what I've written you can tell what I'm after here. Tighten it up. Make it clearer. Get that movement fluid. You've got a great sequence in the making if you can really nail it. At any rate... thaz my suggestion.

I can see where the two different types of hair can be confusing. Truth to tell... we haven't ran into this problem that I can recall so... it's good that we've stumbled upon this issue. The older type hair isn't used as much but still can be used in current releases of A:M. Creating the old type hair requires either grabbing it from a model or library or using the Shift key when creating the Hair material. Of course the new type hair is also great for feathers, grass and a variety of other effects.

Very cool looking toon hair! As a guess I'd say that is the ground plane clipping the toon render. Try either removing the ground plane or putting some geometry/model/grid behind her head.

Happy Birthday Marcos. Thanks for being such a talented guy.

We probably need to rule out that you are using the old type of Hair as well. That type cannot be groomed (at least not in the sense that we are talking about here).

My first impression is that it looks like a lot of work. How long do you expect to have the film in production?

Nice one John! I prefer the second one but not sure why. The first seems to have a more classic feel to it.

The late great Paul Forwood did exactly that: South Park style (although he bypassed the drawings and used 2D objects in A:M) He then went on to add more of the characters and test some animation with them: South Park style animated

You must have saved over the top of A:M's default Choreography. There are a few different approaches to setting things right but the easiest would be: Create a New Chor and delete the 9mm from it. Save the Chor in the A:M Installation Folder (Usually similar to: C:\Program Files\Hash Inc\v17) over the file default.cho I believe if you simply delete or rename the default.cho file A:M will still generate an empty Chor for you as well. If it sees the default.cho file in the directory it will use that.

Mystery solved. Thanks David!

Narrowing it down... A likely candidate from Noober: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=32129

I don't think the model was ever shared but it was rendered in the timeframe when the Bradbury boys were active... Can you share the source from where the images are derived? That would give us some clues. Here are some bathrooms that do not appear to be that model: bathroom_top_small.png 332.41k mouseman Bathroom Modeling Challenge 29th September 2012 - 04:15 PM bathroom_modeling.zip 8.31mb mouseman Bathroom Modeling Challenge 29th September 2012 - 04:15 PM elf_walking_from_bathroom.mov 7.79mb thejobe Santa's Little Helper 25th September 2012 - 06:38 PM bathroom_sink0.jpg 159.03k thejobe Sink 24th March 2011 - 02:16 AM bathroom_sink.zip 41.78k thejobe Sink 24th March 2011 - 02:16 AM basement_bathroom0.jpg 311.03k thejobe virtual to reality 20th March 2011 - 03:17 PM Public_BathRoom.zip 250.7k DJBREIT Bathrooms Public 23rd October 2010 - 12:00 PM BathRoom0.jpg 85.47k DJBREIT Bathrooms Public 23rd October 2010 - 12:00 PM mario_bathroom.mov 6.86mb Jequed Super Mario film (continued) 4th October 2008 - 01:19 PM bathroom2.mov 2.18mb Jequed Super Mario film (continued) 17th August 2008 - 07:00 PM bathroom1.mov 2.64mb Jequed Super Mario film (continued) 9th August 2008 - 05:35 PM BathroomScary.jpg 200.46k MattWBradbury Super Mario film (continued) 19th May 2007 - 06:32 PM BathroomBigNeat.jpg 132.66k DanCBradbury Super Mario film (continued) 19th May 2007 - 01:08 PM Bathroom2.jpg 139.38k MattWBradbury Super Mario film (continued) 18th May 2007 - 10:40 PM Bathroom.jpg 61.43k MattWBradbury Super Mario film (continued) 18th May 2007 - 10:40 PM bathroom.prj 1.78mb Chrury Sanson Super Mario film (continued) 17th May 2007 - 07:44 PM Bathroom_Stall0.jpg 14.1k thetanman Super Mario Film 4th March 2007 - 01:33 AM Bathroom_Stall.mdl 64.28k thetanman Super Mario Film 4th March 2007 - 01:32 AM Bathroom_Stall0.jpg 11.64k thetanman Super Mario Film 4th March 2007 - 01:32 AM Bathroom_Stall11.jpg 14.1k thetanman Super Mario Film 4th March 2007 - 01:32 AM Bathroom_Stall0.jpg 14.1k thetanman Super Mario Film 4th March 2007 - 01:32 AM BathroomAgain.jpg 134.09k MattWBradbury Bathroom 5th October 2006 - 01:29 AM BathroomQuality.jpg 65.88k MattWBradbury Bathroom 5th October 2006 - 01:02 AM BathroomRender.jpg 140.38k MattWBradbury Bathroom 5th October 2006 - 12:35 AM BathroomScale.mdl 51.97k Gene Bathroom Scale Model 23rd April 2005 - 10:12 AM BathroomScale.jpg 30.16k Gene Bathroom Scale Model 23rd April 2005 - 10:11 AM bathroom_from_doorway.jpg 39.27k luckbat Public bathroom WIP 31st January 2005 - 10:57 AM bathroom_0.jpg 78.68k luckbat Public bathroom WIP 30th January 2005 - 04:06 AM new_bathroom.jpg 51.49k luckbat Public bathroom WIP 29th January 2005 - 11:50 AM My memory says that it was not the Bradburys but rather someone who was modeling their 'real' bathroom and the creator went to the extreme of modeling the whole thing to see what it would look like when the contractor finished.

Regarding the downloadable resources... We'll have to clean up the links a bit as these have gotten lost. Look for some refreshment of the New Users forum area in 2013... it's long over due. The basic data/resources can be found on the Hash Inc FTP site for downloading: ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/misc/Data.zip (this is a 158MB zip file containing all the basic files used in tutorials and the Libraries. For the real basic assets used in the tutorials you could just download those (but I recommend the full Data file as it has more fun stuff to explore. It's in the same FTP folder as above but is called LittleData.zip: ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/misc/LittleData.zip (This is a 7.5MB download containing the TaoA:M tutorial resources) Regarding rendering... it's almost always (95 percent of the time) a good idea to render to sequential images. You can then convert that sequence to other formats via A:M's Save As Animation feature (Right Click on the images folder in the Project Workspace). The primary reason to render to individual images is that it doesn't require as much computer memory and if something goes wrong (you lose power for instance) you won't have to rerender everything but only those images that did not get rendered properly. When rendering to AVI/MOV it's usually best to render to uncompressed and then compress them later with a decent codec. (You can do this with A:M but it will tend to be faster with programs that are designed for optimizing that specifically. Quicktime Pro is a good example of such a program.

Well, it's good to have you here with us now.

Looking good!

The late great Paul Forwood was doing some pretty magical stuff with SSS, FakeAO and such. I sure wish he was still here to answer our questions. Here's an example of Paul's experiment with FakeAO, SSS, 3 Point Lighting and Raytraced Shadows: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=a...st&id=53708