Rodney

Please don't make me beg! rodney.baker@gmail.com You sir are a saint. With your addition plus other cool sets we are getting a very good variety collected. Link: See here for more info

Tom, I like it. Very moody warehouse. I've gotta ask... if you aren't going to be using it in the game... would you consider donating it to the Extra CD? The CD is about to get locked down and I think it would make a great addition. I hadda at least ask.

If you've been lurking that long then its more than time to welcome you to the A:M Community. The educational interest you show is a growing concern that is shared by many A:M Users. You mention 'the bootcamps' so I assume you are more than familiar with the Student Forum. That's an area where I personally hope to see teachers and educators from all walks come together and share experiences in applying what we learn to the benefit of students everywhere. By all means work through the exercises in The Art of Animation:Master. They'll help refresh your skills and interest at the same time. Now that you are no longer lurking we hope to see a lot more of you so... Welcome!

Rigging and constraints has just moved on to my interest list. Hopefully others more knowledgeable than me will lead the way here but I'm all about sharing what I learn. Any experts in rigging/constraints care to team up for a tutorial or two?

You may be stuck then my friend... unless you can ferret out a freeware/shareware applicaiton that will do the job for you. Sometimes solutions cost a few dollars. Sometimes they cost $30.

Seven, There *should* be a way to loop *embedded* quicktime movies within HTML code. The quicktime site is hard to navigate to get to help files so I'm not finding specifics. Basically, once you embed the movie in the HTML you designate loop=true and that does the trick. Short of finding the info via the net or finding a site that has implemented it I'm not sure how to get you the required HTML syntax. It use to be possible though. Rodney

Ken, I think what Colin is saying about the cap/funnel hat has merit. When I was sketching the Tinman and the Scarecrow the other day I noticed I was making both of their hats too much alike. There are a lot of characters with big floopy hats in Oz I guess. Keeping the funnel hat fairly close to his head will create more of a difference in look between the scarecrow (big floppy hat) and the Tinman (funnel). Just a though atcha...

Very nice working those ears into the design... I only just now noticed that. Very impressive.

Very funny and very nicely animated. Get those on A:M Films!

I can already see the merchandising possibilities. Where are all our toy manufacturers hanging out.

Nice update John! Whoa... great way to make my day.

Very nice! You just have the fever or are you planning something with this guy? (Looking forward to seeing SW III myself soon)

Ah... I understand. You'll probably have to have a MOV editor to select 'Loop' as a default. Otherwise the viewers settings will take control... and most are set not to loop by default. I'm sure QT Pro would do the job nicely though.

Seven, You mean you want to loop the movie you are creating? or some movie within your movie? I'll guess the former as you know the process of looping movies in layers and even did a tutorial on it. To loop an animation you (obviously) need to have the action start and stop in exacly the same place. Whatever is looping must be in the same place it started from. In most cases copying the keyframes from one end of the animation to the other will do the job but without some good planning the loops will look bad. You can use 'stride length' for such a thing with good results. Stride length need not be walking of course. The only tutorials I'm aware of regarding stride length I'm sure you are more than familiar with. They are the ones from The Art of Animation:Master and the 'Walk and Wheel cycle' tutorials. I see you've already visited Zack's jump cycle post as well.

..or if you have access to the most current CD (Sorcerez) you can render out to JPG. Version 12 has JPG export/conversion native. Irfanview (www.irfanview.com) is the freeware PC utility I use to convert images.

Jeff, Where to start... There is an incredible amount of images out there that can lead you and inspire you in your effort to discover the ideal leg. Here are some sketches (not necessarily what you are after but a sample of a search): Example page returned from a Google search on "lizard man character sketch sheet reference" You can narrow the search down a lot more I'm sure. Click here for the actual search results

Wow... I missed this post. As has been said already... great modeling detail. I love those diaramas from the scale modeling magazines. That's what your model really makes me think of. Here's hoping that you have something like that (a diarama) planned for this one. Bravo!

You definitely got me thinking about rocks. Here's a 30 frame test w/ rocks reimported in place. Some deletions and distortions later of course. Since you have Sweeper... that might be a great way to go to. You can always place your 'Hero' rocks in exactly the position you want. I highly recommend using the distortion tool to quickly place the rocks. That'll save you a lot of time.

There are a couple attacks most of which would probably be more time consuming to get right than just placing them all manually. What might work well is to create a new model and copy/paste rocks in a row... scaling some up, some down, distorting some... lowering and elevating,etc. Then duplicate that row into several new rows... Repeat for even newer rows... Then go back in and delete and move to taste. The trick is to get as many different rocks created as quickly as possible. You can move and distort later. The method I've been hoping to perfect entails moving one rock in a choreography or action distorting etc along the way as discribed above. Then you export the action to AV2 models. A 100 frame sequence would give you 100 rocks of various size and location to reimport into a new model. A:M currently can import multiple models so this can be pretty quick as long as the geometry is low and there are no bone naming conflicts. I like what you have now though. Looks like a Mars operation to me.

Michael, Try right clicking with Save Target As on the following link. That should get you a download. Phil's In-camera smartskin tutorial

Thanks Phil! Smartskin has always been something of a mystery to me. Probably because I've never really explored it. You've got me looking forward to it now.

That will make a difference.

Love the detail! Keep tweaking the light settings. I hope you keep this project for the inevitable compositing with v12. Adjusting light levels will really make your scene/project zing! Rodney

Too kewl! Good choice Ken.

Stian, My initial tests aren't promising. A:M apparently closed on my first render wiht frame 271 being the last successful frame. I was rendering to LOW setting just to see if it would render through. Rendering one frame with particles (cannot recall the exact frame) ended with a fully rendered frame... however it was strangely cropped to include mostly sky... with no particle area shown. I need to check this again to see if rendering in the background had anything to do with it. Realtime met with a reintroduction to my desktop. I can continue but there are much smarter people than me out there. Perhaps this file should go to Hash Inc (with images) for testing. Best, Rodney