Rodney

Yes indeed, Robocat is Robert's cute little metallic assistant that zips around doing various errands for him. You don't think Robert does all that super-geniusing all by himself do you? Try to look past the motion blur and you'll recognize him by those distinctive ears. Look closer and you'll even see the precision of the arcs in the motion of his tail. Imaginary assistant or otherwise, Robert Holmen has proven to be the greatest thing since animated sliced bread. Thanks for all your efforts here in the forum Robert! And as for you... keep up the good work Hazard6211!

Perhaps the most simple way of creating terrain is to use the Grid wizard combined with Magnet Mode. In a Model window Right Click Go to your Wizards Create a Grid Make sure Magnet Mode is on Pick a Control Point and move up/down Watch as the adjacent splines and CPs follow Its handy to do this with two Windows open. One showing the Top View and One the Front. (Or better yet, Drop the grid into a Choreography and then adjust the Model) You are only out of luck if you give up.

Superbly designed character! Really wonderful Serg!

To combine two Choreographies most people: - Save Both Chors (Actually, they don't do this but they SHOULD!) - Either Create a New Chor or open one of the two - Right Click in the Chor window - Select 'Import Choreography' - Import the desired Chor(s)

Don't underestimate the value of the assets you have already. Any reuse will make a collection of useful imagery handy. If there is a lot of reuse you may wish you'd saved more of your renders in Targa or PNG. I'm thinking not only of the strip of course but of promotional work and other venues that will appear. If you at least have the art available you have something to work with when crunch time nears. If you don't you have the resources you'll spend your time tweaking and rendering. Why render an image again if you already have what you need? (rhetorical question) Here's a minor example: Lets say you have something that will reoccur in your strip; an environment, characters, props or other things. Or you've got Flemm holding a crummy soup spoon when you need him to hold his favorite ladle. You could go to all the trouble of posing and constraining or just position the image and erase those parts of the image not needed. Perhaps you'll find out you need to do a special Pirate's Tools page for a magazine. If you've got all the props rendered as PNGs with Alpha Channels you can just import them and drop them on the page. Since there is no need to rerender you can move on with your storytelling focusing on assets that are really needed. ...and of course some of these assets will be useful later for 3D. Edit: Perhaps the focus for animation can be on Ads.

Mark, Two words... Amass a collection of stock images with Alpha Channels (preferrably in PNG format) to use in the comic strip. Okay, that may be a few more words than two but I hope you get the picture. Its okay to think in terms of Hanna Barbera here. As the strip will consist of many of the same images anyway it'll be good to have a library of assets available should you need them. Yeah, I know you know this already but this is just to make sure. In twenty years I'm gonna want access to them.

Color me shocked with a tint of speechless. I've got questions. Yes I do. Thanks for the update Mark. I'll try to recover and formulate those questions into something other than gibberish. That's some serious breaking news!

Bear with us here. We are trying to understand. The way A:M use to handle pivots... Pivots are saved only in Named Groups. Assumptions Work from Named Groups that have been saved. Do not save over the top of these previously saved Groups. (Note: This does not appear true in your case. It looks like you are saving over the older named Groups) Thoughts Instead create a new Group. Name it something different. Delete the Named Groups that store the incorrect pivots. I noted a little over a year ago that in some cases the Pivots were not being saved. I'll have to test this to see if that is still the case.

There are at least two direct ways you can approach letting your underlying materials show through. - Add transparency to the color map. (This can be done by cutting a checkerboard pattern out of the color map allowing the underlying image to show through) - Adjusting the Color map's transparency. (a percentage in the map's properties setting) Or you could use both. To be effective layering requires and implies using transparency of some sort. Layering can be a challenge but the results are definitely worth it.

You guys are out of control. A cult classic for sure.

Ahem. Coff Coff. Figit. Anyone know wht those Wannabe Pirates have been up to? I for one would love to see a pencil sketch or two (hundred).

You are a madman for the details Stian. I noticed the windows up on the top left of the attached image are all different. Wow. I've been thinking a lot about animation backgrounds of late and so I grabbed your screenshot to do a test. Apologies for that but it did satisfy my curiosity while allowing me to further enjoy your extreme detailing. Just like with the real building I'm sure... words fail. Perhaps the best way to complement your incredible work is to use it to illustrate its own detail. Edit: With regard to the pan background test. You have to imagine a character or two being over the top of the background. The characters appearing to walk stage right out of the darkness toward the light (head an shoulder shot) while the background is moved stage left.

Really beautiful work. It keeps getting better too!

Another 'A:M can't do this?' (sigh) In v15 we can get some pretty precise measurements of a spline. Perfect? Never. But perhaps we can discover enough to get by. Take these two example of the same spline (one smooth and one peaked). Using Snap to Grid on the model first helps us get a little more precise. (All measurements must have an origin... a standard to begin from... something we can use to determine 'precise') Measuring a spline is simple enough to test. When peaking a spline that is snapped to a grid one would expect the numbers to get all rounded and nice. ...and when we measure the peaked spline we find out it does so quite precisely. So, how do you get scale and size dimensions in A:M. If you need precision... build it to scale from the beginning. Scale is just a percentage of the original. (So build the original really precise) To measure a spline: - Select the desired spline - Hit comma key to select the whole spline - Right Click - Select 'Measure Spline'

In looking at this sequence I've got to say... The texture (red leaves?) on the ground, the trees, the dragon, the egg, the animation (both on the dragon and egg rolling) All are wonderful. You are getting really good at this Katt! My playback isn't working right on my end and the movie starts out a little choppy so I can't really comment on your change in timing but it looks good from here! (probabaly need to clear out my browsers cache or something) You're characters and story have got me intrigued... again!

Where possible you should consider rendering your larger scene and using that as a background. Then you can focus on the detail of the 'hero models', the ones that will need to have greater detail because they are up close to the camera. A:M does a pretty good job of determining what in a scene to render but there are things that can complicate the process. For instance, if you have a lot of reflectivity on your objects. When in doubt its a good idea to hide or inactivate unnecessary elements in a shot. Interestingly, this brings us back to the subject of instancing. You may find it easier to build your set in separate sections (saved as different models), combine what is necessary in a sequence into one Choreography and then as you need them turn them On/Off. In the TWO and SO movies pretty much everything needed in a sequence or shot is saved in separate Choreographies. You can have as many as you want.

Hehe. He's talking about Decals here. Instead of having dozens upons dozens of giraffes in your scene... try decaled buildings instead. Seriously though, think about it. If you had to model in every spot on a giraffe's body you might want to map, slap and bump them on too.

The experts will have to weigh in on how using instancing versus additional models effect render time but my opinion... You should see a significant enough increase when using references/shortcuts to the same model versus separate models to make it worth your while. Don't forget also that once you've got all these instanced models into the Chor you can Save them out as a new model incorporating all of the referenced resources. Where I would expect you to see the biggest savings in workflow is when editing your models which is likely to happen at the most inopportune moment. If you've used instancing... when you change one model... all of the instances will automagically change too. (Tip: If you need to change one of the instances for the sake of getting a perfect image you can adjust them separately by adjusting the geometry in Muscle Mode (F7). If you want to adjust them all at the same time while in the Chor go into Modeling Mode (F5). I'd suggest trying not to think here in either/or terms. You can get the most bang for the buck by using both.

I'm glad you found your way here to the forums. We've got some work to do to get it done but we'd love to see every A:M User here in the forum. If you've got the software... use the forum! One A:M user down... millions to go. And... for those just starting out... if you haven't already, you definitely want to work through the exercises in TaoA:M.

Its been awhile since I've been able to look in on 'Just a Wooden Sword'. LOOKING GOOD! Watching these short clips is tough as it doesn't give us the bigger view. As it stands alone though I really like this one. You've expertly drawn our attention back and forth from the dragon's face to the egg (nice roll!). Its a painful... yet I get the feeling by the wobble of the egg... a promising moment? Nicely done. Now I'm off to track down some of your other recent shots! Edit: In looking again... there does seem to be a little room for improvement in the timing. The dragon's facial animation and the rolling of the egg start at the same moment. If you are able perhaps the egg roll could be delayed just a moment? This would allow all attention to remain on the dragon's face for a moment longer which I think is important. When the egg rolls our attention definitely goes with it.

An additional note for those new to modeling with patches. Watch out for 'internal patches'. Internal patches are areas that become valid patches due to the surrounding geometry allowing valid but unplanned patches to form. This usually will occur as we try to keep our patch counts low. An example would be a cylinder or tube with four cross sections. As the tube extends in length internal patches will form. One way to keep internal patches from forming is to keep your cross sections at 5 or above. For the simplist geometry I like 5 cross sections as its easy to cap with a manual 5 point patch. Six and Eight cross sections is more likely the norm. A tell tale sign of internal patches is odd artifacting on the surface over where the internal patches are formed. Bottom line: Avoid internal patches.

Hey Eric, It looks like you missed Will's last couple of posts: Link to your previous discussion on 3D milled models Very cool skull William!

Impressive Gene! With you moving into texturing and lighting you`ll soon be the next best thing to unstoppable. Keep up the great work.

Beautiful work. Beautiful render.

Very nice Robert. Well done. That 2D thing is really starting to work for you!