pixelplucker

very cool, i did notice the bottom right back leg does clip the middle right leg towards the end, maybe kick an elbow up some?

You can rig by hand from scratch but you will spend an easy gazzillion hours because you need to created balance rigs and all their relationships as well as the controllers, fan bones and so on and have the ability to switch from ik to fk. The idea behind having rigs such as 2001, 2008 and TSM2 is to speed up the process that is often redundant. The 2001 and 2008 rigs have fixed bone names and allow actions to be transfered from one character to another though the 2001 and 2008 are not compatible with each other in that sense. This means if you use the 2008 and make a walk cycle, run and so on in actions you can use those actions on other characters with 2008 rig. You may have to tweak them according to the character but the base work is done and can be recycled. The TSM2 is a unique rigging system that directly addresses the problem with rigging anything other than a biped. It is a specialized system that allows tails, wings, various number of appendages and so on. I don't doubt your abilities I would suggest rigging it in the 2008 first and get the weighting down pat and familiarize yourself with how it is constructed before leaping off the ledge and trying all from scratch. I thought I could make a rig from scratch and found out it horribly complex, time consuming and the tweaking involved is immense.

The TSM2 rig or 2008 rig can work well for the dragon and if you used cfa on the model so that it is symetrical then the mirror bones should work perfectly. Simply rig one half and do the cp assignments and weighting then mirror the bones. 2008 rig has a nice easy to follow instructions and is actually easier to use than the 2001 rig that comes with AM. TSM2 uses double bones that translate into single controllers and can be a little confusing if your new at it but has a big advantage for rigging non-biped creatures. With both rigs it is important to use the transform tools when told to do so in the instructions so that the balance rigs are in the correct spot.

WOW! Makes me want to finish off my low patch pigeon so you can add them to the roof tops

Right again, I must have wiffed on the corner when scaling or transforming. Seems to be fine now. Sorry to bug ya.

Pretty sure I did that, I'll redo it then.

The priorinstall is the backup of the model before I right clicked and installed rig through the wizard. I used AMv13_2008_Rig_INSTALLER_update8.mdl under 15.01 on xp pro 32 bit. This is the first time I've used the 2008 rig under 15.0i. Previous version went pretty smooth and I don't manually transform any of the bones unless specifically called to do so in the rigging doc. Am I doing something flippin stupid again?

I like the reaper

When I "Install Rig" the Hand Geometry Bone appears and points in what looks like the wrong direction. See attached files and image. Should I just ignore this and pretend it's all ok? priorinstallrig.mdl Zerohead_2008r_error.mdl

Technically what the optimizer does is it dumps unused cpu calls and fiddles with the time it stores used calls in the cache. I'm guessing it probably works better for server type work rather than 3d work where moving files around rather than number crunching is more of a priority. There is some utilities on Intel's site that they probably built it from. Guess we could pressure Yoda to make AM multithreaded and see if his head explodes with all the work he's been buried with hehe. I still wouldn't mind a separate application that could just be the renderer and even if I had to purchase it as an extra it would be cool. The built in render is nice but would be handy to have something I could toss on another machine that is multi threaded and just grunts out the finish product.

Was that modeled in AM or imported from a sub-d surface? I don't seen any hooks or 5 pointers. Looks good.

Might be a good time to make a restore point on your system hehe. I emailed one of the legitimate companies to see if it would help on render times, haven't heard back yet but probably will after the holidays.

I don't think those are legitimate copies of the Multicore Optimiser. They show up as torents or cracked versions. Most likely they are bootlegs from the one made by Excludus http://www.jrti.com/products/software/exludus_index.html Thanks anyways.

Thanks, when I googled for it, my AV warned me on most of the links, little bit scary. I'll check this out.

Very nice, I like how you laid out the patches in the face, very clean!

Cool do you have a link? Does it support the itanium chips? Oh yeah, does it actually work? Part of my slightly slower rendering is I have a 64bit system running in 32bit mode, even though AM is 32 bit the overall system isn't running at peak until I can muster up an extra grand or so to upgrade all my software and even then I will loose a couple of programs that have less than slow development and rely on 32 print drivers.

I definitely need to slow down the beginning and make it more like an everyday casual routine that the first character goes through. The drip does seem off too, thanks for the extra eyes on this.

I still need to smart skin Thom and maybe slow up his picking up of coffee cup. My audio is also kind of crappy. Other comments? allin1.mov

wow nice

For kicks you may want to make sure you have the latest video drivers for your system. Most of the time the base drivers that come with the video card usually have bugs or are poor performing by the time they hit the shelf.

Here is one site that many of my customers seem to like: http://dreamstime.com/ Another is stockbytes but they tend to be pretty pricey. You can also take the images and isolate eyebrows etc with alpha channels and use them as decals and/or apply them through AM Painter. Also check out some of the darktree shaders that are available, some of them are incredibly realistic and coupled with the bake texture feature you can add to them. http://www.darksim.com/index.html Hope these links can help.

I did another quick test and set AM's priority to real time from the task manager and knocked 3 sec off the render time. I saw that there are some utilities out there that do multi core optimization and clustering, wondering if one of those would speed up the render times since they change the update speed of prefetch data and dump unuseded computations opening the cpu usage for the task at hand. The utilities seem to be used for the real time visualization, workstation and servers but I can't seem to find any sales of where to purchase them. http://multicore-optimizer.com/exludusflash.html Same software used here http://www.jrti.com/products/software/exludus_index.html

9:34 on this system with 15.0i. I didn't test it compared to previous versions but gained 2 seconds after a clean reboot. xp pro 32 bit with sp3, quad xeon 2.66, 4gb interleaved memory. 34 processes running including AM.

Lettering can be done with a bump map or displacement. Make sure you make the letters white and background gray so that it raises and not indents. Used a decal for that will allow you to better blend the letters to the tire rather than just plopping letters as a model on top. Very nice looking model.

Ever consider making an am plugin for Ultimate Unwrap 3d? UU3d has pretty much all the uv mapping techniques available as well as edge matching, stitching and uv island management. BTW I believe the reason you have trouble with hooks is because in AM they allow an edge to end on a spline without a cp. This may not be exportable to something that converts cp's to vertecies.