pixelplucker

Trouble with a texture or deformed shape on a path is they would distort when stretched. Not quite sure how you would go about doing this in AM but if you could animate the path of an extrusion it would look better. At least that is how I had done that in other programs.

yup looks good

Looking forward to seeing the finish movie, looks great! On the intro you might want to drop the text down so it doesn't wash out over the glare from the window. Dropping it down will draw a little more attention to it also.

Illustrator has an ok auto tracer (basically Streamline), not great but can do enough to get by. There is actually a more precise auto tracer that is free called Potrace that is now included in Inkscape which is free. I use Canvas 11 and Imagaro Z Professional for my vector work because of the speed an accuracy. Vector lines won't give you a "chalk look" because they produce hard edges. The main purpose for vector art is for clean edges when printing where bitmaps will create haltoned edges when printed. Vector objects also have a good advantage over raster images for trapping, chokes and spreads so if you want something to have a particular look then raster to vector conversion may not be a good choice. I have had great success rendering out toons in AM and auto-tracing them into vector art. You really don't need a super large image to get good results because the dithered edges are consistent unlike a scanned image. 2000x1000 pixel image is usually more than enough. Keep in mind you may have to tweak the levels on an image prior to tracing to keep some details.

An extract along edge plug in would be nice. Superb work Dark, ship looks awesome.

Happy Birthday!

Amazing details! How many patches?

Pretty slick model and very nice conversion. Another option is to convert the dxf to obj and import it as a prop. You can apply AM materials to props. I recently had to render out an stl for yag laser engraving which had around 22,000 faces and it renders very fast. Downside of props is you need to have 1 prop per material since it sees the whole prop as a single object.

Can't wait to see the finished movie!

LOL

Just watched the tutorials on the base rigging from HomeSlice. Absolutely some of the best tutorials for AM and really gave me a nice overview on how AM ticks. The rig tutorials should really be showcased. Going to try to rig that squirrel model from scratch. Interesting that the balance and steady rigs are being abandoned, why were they made in the first place?

Thanks for the link, I'll check that out. In a long shot I had an idea on a rigging system based on joints to create containers for the bones and adding specific bone types would generate the balance and steady rigs. Now if I can sucker someone into programming a plug in it could be pretty cool.

Not sure what the update was from MS last night but it hosed a slew of preferences and screwed up admin access for some other programs I use. One of them was my type management. Fonts I had installed 2 days ago were in my system but the programs didn't recognize them and I had to install over them to get them to work.... Very annoying. Anyways the upgrade is well worth it if anyone is running xp 32 on a 64bit system. Performance overall is much much better. I was sweating not having tsm2 :0 Can't imaging how I would rig creatures from scratch.

Got it working. Had to make sure all remnants of the previous install were removed, did a clean install and all is good now. I had a couple of other older programs that lost admin rights after an update that came in last night, could be that. Thanks for trying to figure out what was wrong.

All the other plug-ins I use load fine and work fine. Just the TSM2 seems to fail. The only executable I could find is the installer so I don't think there is a way to change compatibility mode. Older models that have been rigged in TSM2 seem to work fine. Anyone else have TSM2 running in 64bit anything?

I was running XP pro 32bit. Just upgraded to w7 pro 64 bit this last weekend. Did the install as "run as admin". Wondering if one of the billion updates might have nerfed my install.

I finally upgraded to w7 64 and after installing TSM2 for AM the plug in doesn't show. Is there a compatibility issue with it? Is there another rig that works for at least bipeds if this doesn't run?

Settings are pretty simple, thanks for posting.

Can you post your render settings? I used to use 2-4% noise on my renders back in my old EI days. Your images do look better

Looks Great. Nice film grain to the image, was that done in the render?

I forgot what film boxes looked like.... Used to run a big stat camera here in the mid to late 80's. Fond memories when the help dumped the waste fixer in with the waste developer in the recovery drums. Ahh such good times :0

Thanks, I modeled the iris so they can be animated but of course i've always been too lazy to Actually animate them my self.

Thanks, I had eye lashes at one time but think I deleted them for some stupid reason I can't remember..

Here is some eyes on a fly I hadn't had time to finish. Your welcome to do some surgery and transplant them. There is a bitmap in there you can change the color in photoslop with hue and saturation. fly.zip

They beefed up the fins, probably because the resin might be too weak at the original thickness. The missile is 6" long.