itsjustme

Happy Birthday, Stian!

He looks great so far, Mack!

I like something about all four of them, Robert. Great stuff!

Great stuff, Mark!

Happy Birthday, Paul!

As usual, it's been a very busy couple of weeks. I've been bouncing around to a bunch of different things...research, working on a rig update, etc. However, my major accomplishment this week has been getting the first draft of three Bertram shorts written...I've got a couple more that may get written this weekend. Of course, they'll probably be revised a lot, but I'm getting the ideas I've carried around in my head for years put into a more coherent form...so that's a good thing. I decided to use Celtx (free) seriously for the first time...no complaints, so far. I used to just use a text editor like AbiWord, but a friend of mine convinced me that I should follow the advice I gave him and see how Celtx feels. At this point, I'm glad I went that route.

Great stuff, Robert!

Looks great, Robert!

I believe they can but I think their best use might be for heads which don't move much from their original location. Anything that ventures outside the bounds of the box jumps back to its undistorted position. If you tried to use a d box for an elbow you'd need the d box to also encompass the rest of the arm and hand. If anyone can show me to be wrong on that, that would be fabulous. I'm pretty sure it can be done, Robert. I've got some distortion box things I'm going to be messing with soon, but I've found them to be a little clunky in the past for an installable rig...maybe I wasn't approaching it the right way. For one-off rigs, I've seen them used very effectively...someone made a frog that had mostly distortion box deformations and it looked great. ----------------------- EDIT ----------------------- I think it was Phillip Leavens' frog in this thread...unfortunately, all of the image and animation links are dead now.

Makes me very curious, Steve! I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product.

Great stuff, Marcos! Very cool style.

"Animation Master: A Complete Guide" is helpful...you could also download the Technical Reference and The Art of Animation Master. As for video tutorials, here are some that you might find useful: Will Sutton's tutorials Jim Talbot's Decaling a Face Duplicator Wizard Tech Talk Marcos Rezende's tutorials Robert Holmèn's tutorials Holmes Bryant's "Building Your First Rig" Part 1 and Part 2 Hope that helps, Edward.

Congrats on a finished project, Mark! Nice follow-through, very inspiring.

I finally got some time to do some more tweaking on the generic character. I beefed him up a little, opened the eye sockets up a little, thinned the nostrils a little, put in more details in the neck, shoulders, arms, legs, abs and face and added soles to his shoes/boots. Most of the changes are pretty subtle, but it looks a lot better than the last posted images to me...so I think I'm making progress. I've still got more to do...a little tweaking on the ears, mouth and probably a few other places I'm forgetting at the moment. This time I used Jason's default Choreography and light setup...the AO render didn't show the details as well. I'll put this guy down for a little while so that I can make some changes to Sam's modeling and then work on the rig additions I want to get in before I finalize everything.

Looks great, Matt!

Happy Birthday, Jeff!

Great stuff, Dan! Some shifting of his weight and a little head movement would go a long way in selling this further.

Looks great, Gerald!

Well, for one thing, other software spends a lot of money advertising, so their overhead is pretty substantial. I'm not sure if you have to use a credit card...I did, but there may be other options. The characters, Actions, Choreographies, Projects, etc are all saved where you want without limitations of any kind. Hope that helps.

You should add your tutorials to A:M Films, Robert. Lots of great information that tends to get buried in the forum.

Congrats, Marcos!

I've had an extremely busy couple of weeks, so I'll have to use a "stay alive" post again. I think I might be able to get something accomplished this week though. I'll put a couple of experiments aside for the time being and do something that will yield results I can show.

Sorry to hear about your spill, Rusty...ouch. Dislocated anything is not fun. I'll throw some positive energy your way...can't hurt.

Weird. Haven't received it yet. I just sent myself an email, not there yet either. You can try rusty@znet.com --proceed the comment with about 20 underscores so I can pick it out quickly from the hundreds of SPAM I get. Thanks, Rusty Resent it to the second e-mail address with twenty underscores preceding the comment. Since I haven't heard back, I'll assume this one is buried somewhere in your e-mail as well, Rusty. I just resent again to both e-mail addresses. If it doesn't make it after three tries, then there is something wrong with your e-mail accounts. My comments are just my opinion, so they aren't necessarily valid and it's no great loss if you don't receive them. I'm sure you are getting enough input from other sources, making my assessment redundant.

Weird. Haven't received it yet. I just sent myself an email, not there yet either. You can try rusty@znet.com --proceed the comment with about 20 underscores so I can pick it out quickly from the hundreds of SPAM I get. Thanks, Rusty Resent it to the second e-mail address with twenty underscores preceding the comment.