thefreshestever

i cant tell, dont have mavericks installed, but i also intend to.... but steffen added a "fix" for the menu dialogue issues in v18. it´s actually more of a workaround than a fix. whenever a menu is stuck, you can now press command "Q", to get out. that´s mainly for the dialogue boxes within a:m, such as the edit cp-weights menu, or the options menu, things like that. that menue then just simply closes, and you can try again, hopefully with more luck this time . this has been a pain in v17, because it happenend a lot, and one couldn´t use the workaround of hiding a:m and then go back to it, because you were really stuck in that menu. for the "save as", "import" menus and stuff it´s more convenient to use the old workaround, hide a:m and then go back to it, so the dialogue will remain open and be active after that. however, i don´t know if v18 even works on mavericks. steffen said he can´t really fix that dialogue issue, it would mean to re-code a:m completely for the mac, and that there are several system files on apples list of things they intend to neglect in the future that are necessary to run a:m in the first place... so it seems to be only a matter of time

thanks... jost, it´s just a simple sprite emitter, using this image:

Yeah, I figured you probably had thought about it, and that you had deliberately done it that way...I probably shouldn't have said anything. I have found (and I believe have read other opinions the same) that if you have text, it will distract the viewer, unless they can read it. It seemed like thetext was very much part of the animation, as the main part ends at around 39 secs and the entire piece takes about 1:17. So the credits/text is taking up almost half the screen time. I don't want to give the impression that I think it is imperative to change...It is an absolutely wonderful piece...no question about it. And again I say: Bravo! please NEVER shut up, nancy i appreciate ALL your thoughts about this!

thanks everyone... @ nancy: i thought a long time about the credits screen with the points and decided to make it very subtle... i did not want to make the credits longer than the actual clip. the story has already been told when the viewer gets to the credit screen, anything after that is just a bonus, like a hidden track on a music album. i figured if someone really wants to read it, the person would simply hit the pause button.

thanks this is completely set up in animation master, i explained it in this thread. the only thing added in post is fog with the use of depth maps, grain, a little color correction and flickering...

finished. https://vimeo.com/77494185

good start. animating a dance is one of the hardest things to do. i´ve tried it several times and always gave up at some point. maybe i will try again soon i´ve noticed that the reference footage has much broader movements than your animation, since your character is a cartoon character, i´d suggest to even go further, to exaggerate the movements beyond the reference footage. try to find significant key poses and see how far you can push it.

this looks great, rodney! love the characters!

very nice! love the look! great camera work, too. if you want to get smoother DOF blur, render without DOF, activate the depth buffer and add DOF with a lens blur effect in post with the use of the depth map. because the depth map will not use passes it´s completely unalialised, so i always render double size and half the passes and scale it down 50% in post to have smooth edges between sharp and blurred objects.

hmm, i run a:m on a mac book with 10.6.8, too, v17 works on it, but i´d recommend installing v16 anyways, much more stable on a mac... v18 will run smoother again, but you will have to wait a little for it. unfortunately i actually can´t help with your problem, everything i would have recommended you´ve already tried.. what do you mean exactly by "no longer active"? it just quits after the splash-screen?

thanks jost! i´m animating right now, i have about 2/3rd of the animation already done and rendered, but there are still 2 scenes (each one only 2-3 sec) i´m not sure about yet. i might need a few days to think about it.

hmmm... thanks for testing... must be a bug in the mac version then i guess... for me it doesn´t work. when i use something else as a simple box for a static object, its even worse. for my current project i just took the time and animated everything by hand, was a lot of work, but at least i had full control where everything was falling.

could you try that with a boxobject or a free form? i have very accurate experiences with sphere-objects, too...

just discovered this... really awesome character!!!

yes, the low delay version of the aac codec was selected... maybe that´s why some of you have issues watching it... here´s one with just regular aac. don´t ask me about the difference of low delay compared to regular, i have no idea 02_supermarketentryscene_lower_2.mov

guess who´s face is gonna land in the soup?

this gets more and more impressive!!!

i had the suspicion that this was your reason, and i kinda get it... but when i first watched this, i was surprised when the first female character showed up, because i expected something more like her: http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2010...e-MuppetsTV.png

i don´t get why rigging a character with tsm2 should be such a huge advantage over other rigs. don´t get me wrong, tsm is great, but one still has to position bones, weight cps, define facial poses etc... and that´s the most time consuming and complex part of rigging. it´s been a long time since i´ve rigged a character with tsm2, but i remember it not being such a huge time saver. but you´re right, some other software packages do have some pretty neat rigging features, where almost everything is automated. but you have to keep in mind that there are most likely a bunch of people coding full time to make something like this possible.

there you go

did i already mention that i love this? even though i´m not a star trek fan at all, never watched it, never liked it. ok, as a kid i watched it, but only because there was not much of a choice to watch when i was a kid. i loved star wars though, even so much i have the suspicion watching to much star wars might be the reason i´m still wearing hoodies. greatest respect for making a such a long piece of animation all by yourself! it´s funny, the dialogues are great, and you did catch the visual lighting mood of the original. i guess that´s what i like most about it. but there´s one thing i´ve asked myself right from the beginning: why don´t the females have puppet faces like the male characters?

the clip is 5 seconds, that´s all...

thanks everyone... nancy, i don´t know what´s going on, it´s just a regular qt-movie, exported from qt7.6 pro... so your player should be able to play it properly... it uses the h264 codec and aac compressor for audio, nothing fancy. but: there is not more to see, the video stops anyway 2 seconds or so after the doors open

i can´t help myself, but every single cell in my body is shivering when i think about installing windows on my mac. it just doesn´t feel right.

thanks here´s a scene when he enters the supermarket. tried to make it as heroic as possible. 02_supermarketentryscene_lower.mov