swooster

Thanks for the info! I probably should have clarified that the foot wasn't modeled using Hash patches, but it's helpful to learn that Hash patch modeling is different from subdivision modeling. I do have one more question... On page 128 of TAOA:M, it says: But the Giraffe exercise has you create two adjacent 5-point patches and there don't seem to be problems... How many adjacent 5-point patches is it ok to create? (I tried creating a long strip of 5-point patches, which seemed to work ok) Or does it depend more on the geometry than the number of adjacent 5-point patches?

I was wondering what is considered good spline and patch design in A:M. So far I'm up to exercise 11, and it seems like TAOA:M always has 2 splines running through each control point - as a result, 3-point and 5-point patches are necessary. I have an acquaintance who is very experienced at modeling, and he claims 5-point patches are a bad habit and should be avoided; according to him, models should be made entirely out of quads to prevent creasing. However, he works with LightWave, so I don't know how applicable that advice is to A:M. Here's an example of a foot he modeled: (copyright oDDity) Although it's made entirely out of quads, that seems to necessitate occasionally having an odd number of splines meeting at a control point. Is that ok to do in A:M or is it generally frowned upon? Also, is it ok to have more than 2 splines passing through a control-point? Thanks!

Thanks for the advice Rodney! I'm currently up to redoing exercise 6. I figure I'll post all the exercises at the same time once I complete them. Hi Rheanne!

I'm assuming you mean the button to the right of the play button? That doesn't do what I need, because the second half of the animation needs to be mirrored along the X-axis. (the animation I've done is a single step forward, and a full cycle is two steps with different feet - the same as exercise 5)

I'm trying to do exercise 5, except I'm customizing the animation some. Since I have many keyframes, I'm looking for a convenient way to quickly mirror a range of time without having to cut/paste-mirror each frame, so I can quickly and easily preview the animation after making minor tweaks to it. Does anybody know how to do this? The closest I've come, is that I've figured out how to copy/paste a range of control-points in the timeline window. Thanks for any help!

I'm going through the animation exercises, and one of the biggest things that would be helpful to me is if there was a way to visualize which bones are keyed when. Something like, if a bone has any sort of key during the current frame, it changes color. You might even have the color depend on what kinds of keys exist during the current frame (translation, rotation, etc). It would make it so much easier to find and delete keys, and to figure out which bones are keyed in the current frame. Does anybody know if such a feature exists? Thanks for any help! Edit: After doing some searching, I found some instructions on how to set this up in V14, but they don't seem applicable to my copy of A:M... Is there any way to do it for V13?

Hi, my name is Steve. I got A:M this Monday and have been enjoying learning it. I did "Anyone Can Animate" before finding out about TAOA:M certification, so I hadn't saved anything except the walk-cycle and stuck door exercises... on the bright side, I bet the exercises will go much quicker the second time through, and it'll be good practice for me. I'm learning A:M as part of a potential internship, but I'm also looking forward to trying to use it for some personal projects too. For a long time, I've had a huge phobia of high-end modeling software despite wanting to be able to construct models/animations. I started to learn such software twice, but both times I ended up very frustrated. Fortunately, this hasn't at all been the case with A:M and so far it's extremely easy to learn.