Rodney

Oooo! Nicely done John! I love the first two. The third betrays its effect a bit more readily... but still nice. Here's hoping your computer stays online!

Yay! Yves's website (which when last I checked was offline) is currently online: For those of you that really want to look deeply into A:M's lighting his site is well worth your time. http://ypoart.com/index.html Here is a link to his now classic tutorial on lighting: http://ypoart.com/tutorials/lighting/index.php You'll find lots of useful information and resources at site. This may be old news to some but if it serves to help even one person improve their 3D rendering... Just go now and visit his site.

It is. Of course the time will vary depending on the length of your sequence.

Dan, You can use A:M (the 32bit version) to perform your conversion. The steps are: - Open A:M - Make sure your Project Workspace is open - Bring in your image sequence via Right Clicking on the image container (Don't forget to select the check box that says "Import Image as Sequence". - Once the sequence is imported Right Click on the image set and Select "Save Animation As". - You can change this to any available movie format or image sequence. Done. Prior to v13 you had to use the alternate method (still also available in A:M) of bringing in your sequence as a Camera Rotoscope and then re-rendering that out to the .MOV or .AVI format. A little background to help you better understand: I was under the impression that Netrender could render to .MOV but I was resently corrected on that. Netrenders focus is distributed images and it needs separately rendered images to do that. The fact is that *usually* you *always* want to render to sequential images. (There are a lot of good reasons for that) All versions of A:M up until the 64bit version can render out to and save to .MOV format but due to issues with Apple Quicktime 64bit there is no option for that. The good news is that you can use v16 32 bit to convert your sequence. There are other options to convert images sequences outsideof A:M of course. More about those as needed. Hope this helps.

Hey Bobby, Did you find the solution to this problem (or manage to find a successful way to get your Sprite System to freeze)?

Is anyone familiar with the Lightworks video editor? It went open source a year or so ago and phase 2 of their release is to provide source code to potential developers. http://www.lightworksbeta.com/ Windows only at this time. Sorry.

That is looking awesome Marcos. Dare I say much more than I anticipated!

Here is something of an extension to Robert's Project file. The attached Project file consists of 5 (very) rough poses. These poses are not fully refined but form a starting place from which to work. There are several things which you may find worthy of noting here: - The Poses are set on Frames 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 - The Chor length (in this instance) is set to 3 Seconds. - Stretching these 5 poses out from 5 frames to the full 3 Seconds (90 frames) would have Shaggy moving but not 'animated'. This is the point where the ideas of animation really start to form and transform mere movement into motivated performance; character animation. - Perfecting these (storytelling) Poses helps determine how the final animation will read. Proceeding on before these Poses are finalized will likely produce frustration, especially if anyone else has to work with the scene. For instance, if the hands aren't properly placed on the door handle... if the feet don't stay planted firmly in place. Smooth and effectively communicated animation begins here in the Blocking/Posing stage. TaoA:M's earlier exercises deal with creating strong Poses that 'read' and yet those who work through TaoA:M often treat each exercise as completely separate, as if they have nothing to do with each other, when in fact they've set in place the building blocks with which to proceed. At this stage it will be well worth the time to consider what will be moving and what should be steadfastly stuck into place. To my way of thinking these Contact Frames are critical to the scenes timing and therefore need your undivided attention and emphasis. Consider also where each item is coming from and where it will be going to in the scene. Rather importantly, these contacts form the timing of your animation. If you need to snyc your animation in any way (sound track, music, lipsyc, dancing to a beat, etc.) you'll be needing this. If Poses and placement are the keys to effectively timing your animation (and they are... literally) how something moves from one place to another is the where the actual animation will be. It's the interpretation, interpolation and inbetweening (the spacing) of the scene. A thought for your consideration: In traditional animation we could probably get away with having three keys but with CG it helps to have five in order to assist with our analysis during playback of the scene. Note: At the last minute I adjusted the first frame of this project file (frame 0) to have both of Shaggy's feet on the door. Originally I had him posed with one foot planted on the ground and one on the door as if he was in the last stage of stepping up onto the door. My rationale for the last minute change is that it'd take Shaggy a lot more than three seconds to transition and then finish out the scene. The_Door__s_Stuck_ShaggyAtDoor__5_Poses_.prj

Only if you compress them in a .zip file. .MOV format is acceptable and preferred for uploading movies to the forum. There are several reasons for this but I confess I don't know them now. One might be that AVI isn't a online streaming format... so it to be served up by the server in a different way... retrieved from the server but not for viewing... only for downloading. A small quibble: It's free to download.

I sympathize with you. Long long ago... after my boss promoted me out of job I looked forward to doing every day to one dealing daily in the deepest and ugliest elements of human nature, my boss asked me, "So, How do you like the job." My reply was along the lines of, "It's a love/hate relationship; sometime its the best thing that ever happened to me and sometimes it's the absolute worst." (Actually, I probably said, "Chief, it's a love/hate relationship." and he supplied the rest of the conversation. He knew exactly what I was talking about. I'm glad your wife is supportive (if not sympathetic) of your need to pursue something you enjoy doing so much. It's sure to be a sacrifice for her, so remember to thank her in little and big ways, often. ...and smile a lot.

You could accomplish that by selecting the forearm bone and moving that forward. That will make Shaggy's arm muscles appear to stretch against the pull of the door. This is an effect you cannot get by merely aligning Shaggy's arms and placing his hands on the door. The other classic method is to animate the Door knob being pulled outward. Either way the primary gain to be had is a sense of weight, solidity and force. In traditional animation this is often accomplished by drawing straights verus curves. In this case the straights being observable in the upper arm, forearm, hand and doorknob being pulled. While the curve is demonstrated in the curvature of Shaggy's hips, spine, neck and head as he exaggerately pulls back and yet somehow... ridiculously... still fails to open that C@#$&! door! Added: Nice demo Robert!

It is likely you have run afoul of two Pose Sliders that control the balance of the character. They are named Balance and Balance Rigid. You'll find them under User Properties in most of the characters used with TaoA:M. To locate these: - Select the Character in the Project Workspace - Open User Properties - Open Rig - Adjust the Pose Sliders to 0 Percent on Balance and Balance Rigid. This should free the character up to (properly) defy gravity. In the attached screen captures I've used Thom but Shaggy's setup should be similar.

Back in the olden days before the PNG image format there was only one format that could effectively be used on websites that allowed images transparency. Nowadays most digital artists take this format for granted but many still don't realize the extent of it's utility nor how to take advantage of it. Each image format has it's strengths and weaknesses but when dealing with web graphics PNGs are quite powerful. For instance, some people render or save to the PNG format but don't take the time to bother with it's ability to set areas of the image as transparent. And of course this is accomplished in A:M by rendering with Alpha Channels (i.e transparency) on. I don't mean to distract you from more important work but... way back in 2008 I put cobbled together some random musing on this and related topics. PNG images were rendered out to formatted HTML which automatically organized and layered the output. I experimented with some of the basic options before getting distracted by something else that was new and shiny. For a variety of reasons I termed the process Lendering. Be careful, even three years later this stuff is still state o' the art. These days formats such as flash/swf have produced pretty awesome stuff but... with the advent of HTML5 and other technologies who knows what could become of PNG art. I'm not sure I answered your question... despite it's wondefull attributes PNG is probably not the best format for digital art. But it can do some things other formats cannot.

Someone will be along shortly to ask for view of your model's mesh/wireframe. So... heads up!

Very Nice! I've got to say... that is the first model of Sonic that has made me appreciate the guy. And because you are posting PNGs you especially rock! I really enjoyed your latest videos on Epic Gamin'.

Kat, My apologies. You were volunteered for a test. Just say the word and we'll change it right back. If you'd like to change the artwork up top as long as we some 'Just a Wooden Sword' imagery to modify that can also easily be done. Perhaps a scroll instead of a wooden frame and a few occasionally changing characters overlaid at the far upper right?

Looking very good thus far. ...and I see you are taking advantage of the PNG format: Nice! I'm going to suggest something but just file it to wherever appropriate... there is a lot I don't know about your project. You might benefit from working only in shades of grey (that is grayscale from black to white) at the initial stage as that will help tremendously when you later focus on texturing and lighting. One of the major benefits (there are many) is that it will help to allow focusing the attention of the audience. One of the reasons texturing can be reserved until the last stages is that it can be approached very straightforwardly and logically; leather has a specific look as does steel and flesh but all will react differently in the context of your lighting. You can augment your composition and focus a lot before you even apply any texture or lighting. You are doing great stuff and this is just what I thought as I looked at images from your project... use only where it might apply. The girl in this last one I really like! I look forward to your next update.

Is the interior set also a part of the exterior model? I only ask because if it is... you can cut down on a whole lot of splines by having them as separate models or projects.

These 'little' projects really show where the Anzovin's took a simple straightforward idea and used it to perfect their production workflow and raised the level of storytelling quality to new heights. The results speak for themselves and we are entertained in the process. ...and you can tell they were really having fun!

Impressive Rusty. You've got a lot of great stuff on display here. I really like your music too. The highlights for me was where you did the little demos of equipment moving into configuration. I was really captivated by those. It looks like you resolved those crawling texture problems too! (I'll have to search out that topic to see if you posted on the solution there) The Spiral Slayer is an intriguing concept (as is your whole idea of virtual storybooks... you started the trend long before the current fascination with such books). Congratulations on your inaugural HD youtube post! .

Great set to have the characters running through. I need to simply my big ideas into a workable plan and posting these images helps me do that. Thanks Mark!

At this moment you have a few manual options. - Drag and Drop - Manually add the shortcut in the Libray (via Right Clicking and selection) - Edit your Library directly (Library files are a text files) If you (or anyone you know) has any programming talent you can grab a list of A:M resources from your hard drive and format that into a Library. (and you can use most text editors to do it) For the sake of discussion, I'm going to walk through a brute force method of creating a Library on a PC so that you and others can better understand the underlying process and formatting of A:M Libraries. I apologize in advance if I'm unclear or if this gets anyone lost. If I were to go to the command line and type in the following: Dir H: /s /b *.mdl>models.txt This would create a directory listing of all models on my external drive in a textfile name models.txt. The listing would look like this: H:\Mycoolmodels\awesomeman.mdl H:\Mycoolmodels\basictree.mdl H:\XtraDVD\Data\Models\GuyNamedFred\Fred.mdl etc. The standard format of a Library file (which is a simple text file) is as follows: So... if we start with a raw file that has the following: The model listing we've created for the H:drive is the data for Models. We just have to format it right. So for a library that will be at the root of the H:ddrive we could parse/replace elements of the text listing to form what is required for a Library: H:\XtraDVD\Data\Models\GuyNamedFred\Fred.mdl becomes: FileName=H:\XtraDVD\Data\Models\GuyNamedFred\Fred.mdl Note that in this process we've replaced 'H:\' with '[carriage return]FileName=H:\' and '.mdl' with '.mdl[carriage return]' We would likely reserve adding the Header and Footer until after we also add in Project Files, Materials, Actions for merging with this (correctly formatted) list of Models. Header file content: <LIBRARY> ProductVersion=15.0 Footer content: </LIBRARY> Now... anyone who can make sense of that is equipped with the knowledge that will help them write their own A:M Library creating utilities. My suggestion would be to find a way to do it on an iPad and then move the data files back and forth to your A:M system as desired. The Library discussion will continue until we perfect the product. On the PC, Rusty Williamson and (I believe) Glen Anthofer put this basic process together into a separate Library generating utility. Perhaps if the code from that is shared and a feature request prepared in A:M Reports we'll eventually see a file-sniffing Library generator as an A:M standard. There is however, no particularly good reason it can't be programmed as a separate application and even move over into other operating systems. Libraries are flexible like that and we should be able to sort and organize our A:M Libraries anywhere... even on an iPod. *If anyone sees any mistake in my brute force process please identify it* Note: A:M's current Library uses images contained in each asset. This image is then associated with the shortcut and displayed in the Library. If there is no image it is because no one has yet added it. If you see an error-looking icon assigned to a Library shortcut it means that there is no asset at the specified location. Future stuff? An enhanced Library might provide additional means to enhance the visual interaction with the asset by looking for an external image saved to a specified name and format. For instance: icon.png and if not present the image would default/fall through to the standard user created icon. If no user created image was present the icon would default to the asset's default icon (i.e. the established icon for models). This external Library image would then be used as a means to create future enhancements. But of course, understanding how Libraries work in the here and now helps us move foward to ever more useful enhancements.

Ah, let me introduce you to the TaoA:M tutorials! Exercise 12, "Lip Poses" just happens to be about creating phoneme shapes (Poses). It's complementary to Exercise 7, "Can You Say That" where Keekat uses similar phoneme poses via A:M's Dopesheet. http://www.hash.com/index.php?pcode=video_tutorials

Hey Rusty! Nice looking model! One small thing you might do would be to paint/darken the texture under his hair so the flesh color doesn't show through. I know one technique (I believe it's on one of Bill Young's video tutorials) was to use an image of the hair itself (standing straight up and rendered from the top) as a decal for the skin underneath. This makes it appear as if there is more hair follicles growing from odd render where the skin underneath shows through. In some cases you can even make the particle hair less dense too. Edit: I seem to recall someone narrating the tutorial as I can almost hear him talking about single random purple hairs mixed in with the other hair strands to complete the effect. Perhaps it was Hash Inc's Tech Talk video on hair.

You know... about 100 years or so ago (in the 1800s) some guy invented this thing called photo compositing. Some years later another guy used the same thing on his computer. Your project uses A:M and some images created with another program. Everyone is cool with that. The key is that your project is being created with A:M and of course that remains our focus here. All this to say... You and Chris K should take advantage of that compositing thing. As for the movies... looks very nice. I like his lighting effects. I also like how you've forced the movies into full screen mode (assuming you did that and it's not something on my end). That immerses the viewer in the imagery and... I like that. One small critique (and it is a little one): The file size could be smaller given there is no audio in the video. It's fairly high quality so perhaps that's about as good as it gets? Someone recently posted a link to a video utility called HandBrake. I haven't spent much time with it but I believe it'll be well worth investigating. Hey, it's free. The highest quality compression would probably set you back a few pennies. Keep on keepin' on!