Rob_T

Well, I tend to stay logged into it. And as evidenced by Fuchur popping in today and scaring the crap out of me (I asked him if he was the Matrix) you can start a conversation with anyone logged in... even if they have the community window closed. I can see how that cold be really distracting if it happened while I was working intensely and focused on important stuff. Still, as a newbert I think it's pretty cool.

Ok. I'll do that. Frankly I'm shocked with all the help that you provide the company doesn't keep your versions updated. You are a true A:M Ambassador.

I just got around to checking out the chat room for the first time and there was no one home. The last few messages were from some dude plaintively mewling for help with rigging and a bit of a troll correcting his spelling. LOL. But those were days old. I'm surprised such a neat feature gets so little use. Does anyone know if the Hash, Inc. reps still do a once a week chat in there or not... and if so when?

Wow. I could barely pose the thing without the leaves popping off and you did that? Amazing. Robcat also mentioned the model bone. Thank you for that. I did not however, change the scale of my flower during this process. I don't know how that bone got so big but I'm about to go invest some time in finding out. I'm going to download your project file and take a look at it and see if I can tell what you did differently. Thank you so much for the help.

I'm posting a little help notice in here because I need some help with lesson nine and other than Robcat and Rodney I haven't seen too much of anyone else in the TAO area. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm real stumped on this one. My bones just wold not stay together and when they came apart leaves seperated from stems... it was madness I tell you; madness! http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=300932 EDIT: Yes apparently I'm in such a twist about this I can no longer spell "could." Super.

I have a friend who's an author (his 12th novel is coming out in July) and he has told me that working on your own, from home, is a very precarious thing. If you don't get yourself into a schedule and stick to it with the same discipline you would have if you had a job and a boss you can lose yourself very quickly. One thing I've learned from being unemployed for the last year. If you have the time there is always, always something to fill it. You have to force yourself to do the important things. I struggle with that all the time.

I don't know who does the video lessons, it's a shame they aren't credited especially if the person who did them is part of the community. They are for the most part quite excellent. But has anyone else noticed how much his voice sounds like "Reverend Lovejoy" from the Simpsons? It makes me laugh sometimes when I should be paying attention. I'm up to lesson 9 now and I noticed that with the exception of the giraffe lesson all the forthcoming lessons are pretty short (in estimated time frame for completion). There are several under 30 minutes. I'm pretty psyched about that. The more I learn about this program the more I want to learn. It's like throwing gas on a fire. Repeatedly. I'm happy to know that I'll be done with the lessons soon and will be able to start working on my own stuff. I'm a little nervous about the modeling. I'm not a good artist. Can't draw for crap. And the artist I have working on my webcomic is disconnecting and becoming less involved by the week. I hope modeling is easier than drawing. Otherwise I'm going to be making some pretty ugly people soon. And animals. Ugly animals. I've also heard a lot of talk about plugins (the guy who sold me this assured me that there were no plug ins or extra programs to buy... that I got it all except an actual hard copy of the manual and digital is fine for me), different versions of the program and After Effects (which I not only have but have a tutorial program for that I never used). This makes me more nervous as I know that even after I learn the lessons I will still have so much to learn. I love learning but there is nothing.... nothing like completing a project. I hope I get to start some soon.

Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. I missed your edit and didn't see I had been acknowledged. Yes I picked up Animation:Master at New York Comic Con and I tinkered with it a bit after that but since I got back from a trip around the country a few weeks ago I've been burning through the TAO lessons and learning as much and as fast as I can. So generally, I've been driving poor Robcat and Rodney out of thier minds. Fortunately they are both patient and live outside stabbing distance. I'm up to lesson 9 now. All previous lessons posted in the TAO forum. I may be delusional but I'm hoping to have something related to my comic to show (as far as animation goes) by the time Connecticon rolls around near the end of July. I am of course assuming that animation willl make my small webcomic wildly succesful and me rich and famous. I will make sure to thank Animation:Master at the Oscars.

It is a complicated thing to express. Your diagram helped me tremedously. If I may put my two cents in as someone who just"got it"; if someone had shown me your diagram when I started working on keyframing and said 1) a channel is the grey bar and white line that appears (usually under bones if you are working with a rigged model which, this early in your training you will pretty much always be) in your timeline or Project Work Space. 2) Keyframes will appear, as they are made, on the white line (channel) of the corresponding bone or bones in which you created a keyframe. 3) A channel usually will not appear in the timeline or project work space unless a keyframe is made on that bone. Once you keyframe a bone and the channel appears that channel is "Pre-Existing." 4) When forcing a keyframe on multiple bones you can filter the bones that are keyframed by choosing whether they have a pre-existing channel or not. Many attributes of a model may not have channels and choosing to keyframe these attributes en masse can have unexpected consequences and is usually unnecessary. 5) You can also choose to filter the way a bone is selected for keyframing by using the buttons at the lower left of the A:M interphase (See image) to choose whether the bones chosen will be keyframed for scale, translation, rotation, constraints, as well as several other options that you won't be using for awhile. 6) Lastly you can also choose to focus the area (of the model) in which you intend to force keyframes by using the bone, the bone and the bones locally connected to it, or the entire model buttons. By selecting the model's (for example) left ankle control point you can choose to keyframe just that control point, the control point, leg and foot, or the entire model by utilizing these buttons. If someone had given me this information, along with your tutorial and diagrams I would have understood much better and sooner what was going on. I still would have had the problem with the hidden control point channels popping up on me later, but I would have understood this stuff just fine. I also would have tried selecting just the hip control point and forcing keyframes on all filtered channels to see if it keyframed those hidden channels for me. As it was, the only time I ever tried using that selection was on the whole model... which cause over a thousand keyframes to be made and generally screwed the entire project for me. There are lots of other things I might have tried to get around my problem if I had understood this better. As it is, I'm very grateful to the info you gave me and the efforts you have made to refine it as I can pretty much guarantee I would be lost in the woods still and stuck on lesson 2 or something without it.

I said it before in the Exercise 6 thread where we are discussing this in excruciating (LOL) detail but I thought I would thank you here as well. Thanks for the diagram. It really helped.

Very nice. I'm going to show this to my Nephew tomorrow. He loves this kind of stuff (he's almost 5). Great work.

I actually saw those linked elsewhere and they are excellent. I actually know Largento a little bit as we are both Webcomic guys and I bumped into a lot of his posts over at the Half-Pixel forum. That forum died in a site revamp which was a shame because of how many of us used it on a daily basis but I was thrilled to find him here. I'm going to do what I'm told and go through the lessons in order. As much as I want to know how to do everything right now I realize that it will take time... but I don't have to like it.

I've made it through the first two lessons without a great deal of difficulty and since you guys seem so sure that it's the way to go I'll continue in order. Thanks for the advice. I'm not a problem child I'm just.... impatient.

Yes, it is challenging to work in 3 dimensions on a 2D screen. Have you done the modeling tutorials in "The Art of Animation:Master"? Those are an essential starting point. You know that brings up an important question that I wasn't even sure I should ask. The tutorials seem set up to teach you how to animate from the get go and I started working my way into them a couple months ago and immediately lost interest. Maybe it's because I'm so familiar with programs like Adobe Premier Pro I didn't want to go on and on about things I kind of understood like camera angles, drag and drop effects and the like. All that stuff seemed like putting the cart before the horse to me. I feel like, before I want to know how to animate and move my characters around and film and render the motions, I really want to understand what all these buttons do, I want to know how all these different structures are formed (bones, frame, hair, lips and probably a bunch of stuff I don't even understand enough to mention yet) and what thier purpose is. The tutorials have me playing with models I have no understanding of and I find that a little frustrating and I keep getting sidetracked when I find a bone joint and I ask myself "ooh what does that do? What will happen if I move that up and down? Can I sever it from the main body of the model and if I can how will it behave when I try and move it then? And what about these control points; if I break them off here will it significantly alter the look of the model? And what's this Halo of circular control points that appears around the model when I click on the hand and what happens if I grab one and drag it until the Halo gets bigger?" I think you can imagine what happens next. KeeKat ends up looking like a butchered Quasimodo and I've completely lost track of the intent of the tutorial. With all this in mind if anyone has a better idea of a place for me to start I'm open to suggestions. I really want to make this work. I'm signing off for the night but I'll be on in the morning and throughout the day. Thanks for any help.

Rodney, I'm glad you are so helpful. It's a real boon to have someone like you here in the forum. I guess I was confused. I thought the Tutorial tab was for learning how to use the program; not creating tutorials for others, you are right I have little interest in the that since I have no idea what I'm doing myself. I agree that saving is important and I think we've all lost work from time to time due to bad saving habits. I know I have. What concerned me was that I had this brand new program that was locking up and crashing on me as soon as I touched one of its features. Not usually a great sign. Since it isn't an important part of the program though I'm going to go into ostrich mode, ignore it, and hope it doesn't come back to bite me in the ass later. I was gone for two months but now I'm back with a vengeance. I really want to learn this program as quickly as possible. I've moved from my laptop to a significantly more powerful desktop so hopefully that will speed things along as I noticed some slow response on my laptop. Probably the biggest challenge I've had so far in trying to figure out how this program works is understanding the control points and splines and how they behave. It's hard to think in three dimensions when you've only ever worked in photoshop and other mostly 2d programs. I've had a devil of a time figuring out how to get splines and control points to move and connect with each other the way I want them to. Every time I think I've got a control point lined up with something I want to join it to I turn the model and findout I'm off on one of the axis and nowhere near the point I wanted it to join. My biggest challenge at this point is trying to figure out how to make a model and how to assign a skeletal structure to it. As for the HTML stuff you were talking about... are you referring to my webcomic? I think you may have lost me there.

Wow. I'm always happy to see someone reaching for a dream. WP is a great so I'm sure you'll do fine. And since I know you from the Half Pixel forums I know you do your research. Best of luck. Hope to see you around here often.

Holy cow. I didn't expect to find you here. I don't think I've spoken to you since the Half-Pixel forums went bye bye. I still check out "WP" from time to time but I've been on the road the last two months (spent a month in Mexico too) so I'm a little behind. I was planning to pick your brain about animation on the HP forum and now how lucky I've found you here. I hope you don't mind me asking a bunch of questions. I've settled in where I'm at and plan to sink deep into this program for the next couple months. I'm off to read your comic book tutorial you just linked to that other dude. If youhave any more suggestions for a complete and total beginner please fire away.

I'm not sure you understand what I mean. The tutorial is built into Animation Master. It's one of the tabs like Models and Textures. When I open it there are three tutorials. Four if you count the welcom. The first two work fine but when you click on the advanced folder as soon as it opens it crashes the entire Animation Master program with that unhandled error thing. I've got the extras disk and I'm going to try and use the tutorials off of there.... I'm just concerned because I know it happened in one other area as well and I'm afraid to get hours into a project only to have a buggy program lock up on me. Has anyone else heard of this issue? I'm running version 15.0b

I keep getting an unhandled exception 001 when I try and open the advanced tutorial. It locks up the whole program and shuts it down. It happened once when I was doing something else as well. Anyone know why this is happening?

Not to be a pest but does anyone know the best place to ask questions about the commercial use of the assets included in the program... and also I've noticed that in the first lesson there are some things that simply aren't there or are out of place in comparison to the version of the program I am using (for example it says to turn anti-aliasing on and it simply doesn't exist). Any help would be appreciated.

Hello all. My name is Rob Tracy, I write a web comic called "Remedy." I've also done some work with animation in the past, or rather I worked on a project where animation was done. I wrote the script and voice acted one of the main characters for "Halo: Unyielding Part II." www.halounyielding.com I recall the animation for that was arduous (we recreated ships from the Halo game and also created new ones that were never in the Halo universe). It took over a year to make the one episode. We were nominated for a Mackie (Machinima Award) for technical achievement. So you can imagine how surprised I was at seeing the demo for this at NY Comic Con yesterday. I've got a lot of questions. I'd love to animate my web comic characters and I hope it's something this program can help me with. I'm pretty familiar with Photoshop although I've never been great with it. I'm very familiar with Premier Pro (version 1.5) as I've used it on Machinima projects of my own. I'm also pretty familiar with Sonar as I've been using it since version 2XL and I'm on version 5 now (Haven't upgraded to seven yet.... might soon... six wasn't worth the upgrade cost). So now that I've introduced myself, where is the best place to ask questions. My immiediate ones have to do with intellectual property rights for the included models with the program and commercial uses of the program. Specifically, if I want to use the program to make short videos of my webcomic characters and sell them am I in any danger of getting sued if I use models/textures/backgrounds or whatever from this program. Thanks for any help you can offer. You can message me here, I'm always available at rob@remedialcomics.com , my aim which I am sometimes on but not always is quikthnkr117 and my twitter is remedialrob.