thefreshestever

yeah, more voluminous lips would help, bigger eyes, softer cheekbones, a rounder face... take a look at female cartoon characters, you will see what´s missing or is too much on your model. the softer and rounder the face, the younger she will look... at the moment it could either be a 30 year old man who didn´t get enough to eat or a 50 year old woman when you just look at the face... the thin hair even supports the impression of an old woman. other than that - nice model.

Aah, yes. So I'd have the option of using the decal method or do as John Bigboote suggested in his tutorial and use an additional higher density mesh dedicated to the hair. Well, it all sounds so obvious when you say it like that! That makes perfect sense, thanks Nancy! I think I might try out hair in my next project. (Which will not involve a shaggier Shaggy!) not nescessarily "OR"... you can also use an extra dense mesh for the hair AND drive the desity with an image, if you want to make the hair less dense on the edges for example... you will only need the extra dense mesh if you want collision detection anyway.... if you have relatively short hair on your character, there will propably be no need for collision detection, for those purposes you can use the characters original mesh.

Ah. An actual DOF filter will have settings to adjust the "focus" point without needing to alter the depth map. If you are using a depth map to drive a more general purpose blur filter (less desirable) then you'd use something like Photoshop/AfterEffects "Curves" to remap the original grayscale to new values to move the white to black point to new values as needed. ok, didn´t get that because after effects built in DOF filter doesn´t have the feature to define the focus. there´s a plugin called lenscare from "frischluft" where you can adjust the focus, but ist´s 199 $... a little bit expensive for a DOF plugin i think i´ve downloaded the demo, but there still is a problem, because a:m´s depth buffer is´n antialiased, so i get pixelated edges in some areas in focus after applying the DOF in after effects. i´ve googeld the issue, and it seems to be a common one. and i was really wondering why there is no general anti-alias filter available in after effects. there seem to be only one japanese plugin for that purpose out there, and that one is only for pc another solution would be ito render at 1440x1560 px with 5 or maybe even only 4 passes instead of 1280x720 px with 9 passes, and scale it down to 50% to get rid of the hard edges of the depthmap. i was wondering if maybe someone here got a better solution for this....

looking shaggy.... you can drive the hair´s density with an image, so you´re not tied to the patch geometry... just create a decal, choose "other" from the decal menue, then you can add a property... the available property-list of the hair will show up, they are "density", "color", "length", and "direction" i think... when you have multiple hair systems running on one model, all those properties will show up twice (or 3, or 4 times, depending of the number of hair systems) in that list.

the cloth simulation looks very smooth, nice job... i had to laugh when i noticed the cat

another weird thing i found out: everytime i change my project framerate to 25 fps, the hair simulation messes up! started a new project with the default framerate of 30 fps, loaded my model, made a new chor. dragged my model into the chor, moved it from left to right. the hair simulation worked fine. then i closed the chor, changed the framerate to 25 fps, reopened the chor, and the hair simulation messed up, the tips of the hair just stayed in place. then i changed the fps to 24, everything worked fine again. would be interesting if anyone is getting the same result....

thanks matt... i stumbled on this setting before and was wondering what it does... but why the heck is there a setting by default that produces errors???

that looks terrific! i like the bump map jacket as it is...

thanks holmes... i finally got it t!!! after fiddling around for hours with the cloth-hair without getting any satisfying result i went back to particle-hair... there was something wrong with the project or the chor... after saving the model without hair and doing the hair from scratch everything did work fine... there was still an issue with the dynamic constraints (when baking dynamics in the chor, some dynamic constraints didn´t bake properly, there were keyframes missing somehow), but i was able to work my way around for now by baking the dynamics in the action and the particles in the chor... that won´t work for everything, let´s see if i can find a more satisfying solution...

sweet... the clouds could use some more variation though, they look a bit too similar to me... i´m a bit jealous, i hope fakeAO will be available soon for mac, too...

yes, but how would i animate the focus then? that´s why i thought the thing with the material effector would be a cool thing to be really flexible... this way i could animate the near/far focus and the focal point very easily... or does the depth buffer react to the DOF setting of the camera??? i´ll have to try that... and yes, that rendering was with the null shader on....

the first one "depthtestnew-DepthBuffer0.jpg" is the png i rendered out like nancy suggested, with the top still white and with the material effector overwritten... the second one "depthtest_materialeffector.jpg" is the one i rendered out by removing all materials and decals manually with the materialeffector working, and with the result i want to achieve... ignore the leaves of the tree, i added them later to that model, so it has nothing to do with the shader or something

i´ll have to try that goup thing, i´ve tried to set the null shader for the whole model before, that didn´t have any affect... i´m a mac-user, so unfortunately fakeAO isn´t available for me yet (or is it??)...

yes, i tried... the problem here is that those depth maps are just partially correct, for example the character in my test has a white top, this still appears white, while the rest of the character is grey (it´s positioned in the middle of the scene)... and the biggest problem is that in those depth buffer renders the focus is always in the front (or back, depends on how you will use it later in post), but the material effector, which enables me to position my focus where ever i want doesn´t display in those depth buffers... it makes sense somehow, since the null shader overwrites all the materials, so i guess it overwrites the material effector, too. but i know mark (mtpeak) got it to work on his landscape scene, so there must be a way, which i just can´t see right now

i wanted to use the null shader to render a depth map for adding DOF in post. the problem is that the null shader does not do what it´s supposed to... the null shader should overwrite all decals and materials, right? the only thing it does for me is rendering everything a lot darker. i was able to render a good usable depth map by removing all the materials and decals, disable all lights and placing a material effector with a gradient from white to black in the focus area. this way it´s pretty easy to animate the focus... for testrenders it was ok to make an extra version of the project and remove all decals and materials manually from the few models... but if i imagine a complex scene with a lot of models this will be a bit of work, and i will have to do everything again, when i might have to change anything later. i´ve tried it in v15 and latest (at least i think so ) v16 on a mac. and yes, i enabled plugin-shaders >> diffuse render shaders >> null shader in the render dialogue. it would be really great if i could get it to work properly. thanks for your help....

haha, that lion looks great. some sort of pug-lion with that much left-over skin.. the dynamics look great, i´ll let you know if i ever get it to work.

hmmm.... exactly what i did... 1st problem is that after baking the particles, the movement of the dynamic constraints is gone. the channels still exist, but there´s no keyframes in it anymore. 2nd problem is that the hair systems mess up sometimes in a weird way: the end of the hair just stays exactly in place, while the beginning of the hair follows the models geometry. so short hair just straighten out... maybe a mac-bug? i might give it another try sometimes with a very simple, new model with new hairsystems from scratch, maybe i can figure out what went wrong.

i can´t get hair to render AND the dynamic constraints, no matter what i do. so i made some kind of "hair-helmet" with cloth-simulation... sinke this is a cartoony character anyway, i´m pretty happy with the look so far. the simulation works fine, if i don´t have too much fast movement... in previous simcloth versions there was a setting for the collision-detection distance, i can´t find anything like that, so i´ve build a deflector slightly inside the body, because the deflection-range seems pretty high, about 2-3 cm or so... or did i just not find the setting??? also if the cloth is deflected, there´s always some kind of weird jittering, so the hair looks sometimes more like a fidgeting fish than hair... any advice?

I don't know what version you are using, but in previous versions there was a problem, just as you describe. However in later versions, one can right click in chor and "simulate springs - or something like that " (with hair off) first, and the dynamic bones will get "baked". Ie channels will appear. Then turn hair back on and render. Also sometimes dynamic bone movement will look different in real time then after it gets simulated/baked. thanks nancy.... unfortunately this doesn´t do the trick... now it´s just the other way round: dynamic constraints render properly, but the hair just stays completely in place. i´m using v15j on a mac... same problem with v16beta... After simulating springs, you can also "bake hair" - separate file(s) are then created for the hair system(s) dynamics. The file names will show in the chor... this would work in 15e (PC) ... I am not sure about later versions, nor the Mac. Not sure how it is determined where the hair file(s) are created. I believe they show in the same directory as the project file. Unfortunately that means you have to make a project. Which I don't, I only like to work with chors, because I don't like how saving a project will save everything that has changed. I prefer to save things individually. I wish there was a way to set the destination for the hair file. (probably could change it in a text editor) hmm... tried that, there´s nothing showing up in the chor or prj... just some .pai and .par files are created in the same directory as the prj-file, like you said... but i don´t know what to do with them... anyway, i think i will give the hair a different approach, i´m not completely happy with the behaviour (can´t avoid the hair going through the shoulders sometimes) of the hair system... after robs amazing tests with cloth i think i will give simcloth a try to do the hair... seems to be much more accurate in collision detection...

I don't know what version you are using, but in previous versions there was a problem, just as you describe. However in later versions, one can right click in chor and "simulate springs - or something like that " (with hair off) first, and the dynamic bones will get "baked". Ie channels will appear. Then turn hair back on and render. Also sometimes dynamic bone movement will look different in real time then after it gets simulated/baked. thanks nancy.... unfortunately this doesn´t do the trick... now it´s just the other way round: dynamic constraints render properly, but the hair just stays completely in place. i´m using v15j on a mac... same problem with v16beta...

I sent you an e-mail, Sebastian...I think the address is current. If you have my e-mail address, you can shoot the model at me if you'd like. thanks david, i really appreciate your help

i would never have imagined that cloth can do that, awesome!

hi at all... i have a model with hair, the model also has some dynamic constraints. when i´m rendering with the hair turned off, the dynamic constraints work fine, but when i render with hair on, no dynamic constraint movement shows in the render. the hair dynamics work fine, just that the hair seems to prevent the dynamic constraints to work. any clue? i have another little problem with this model, maybe some rigging experts can help... the model was rigged with the squetch rig, everything is working as it should, except one thing: the ring finger curl isn´t working, all other fingers are fine though... i noticed that in the "relationships>bones" folder are smart-skins for the fingers curls, only the ones for the ring fingers are missing... i tried to fix it, but i can´t get it to work right, because i don´t really know what these smartsins do... i would go back to a previous version of the model and rig it again usually, but i just got aware of this issue after completely weighting the model, and believe me, i don´t wanna do this again thanks in advance...

very impressive results!!! looks like "big boy stuff" to me

there you go... http://www.sendspace.com/file/blovfp