Meowx

All right, it's been a while. Had another project come up that I just finished, now I'm getting back on track with this. Overhauling a few things, I'll post some updates in the next week or two. Quick question, are cookie cutter maps generally unreliable? I had a badge that I wanted on the character as a c-c but kept getting transparency artifacts. Updated to the latest version, and it helped... but there are still some glitches. Just went ahead and modeled the badge, but for future reference is there a way around this? Tried both .png with transparency and .tga with an alpha channel.

You might check the ambience of the surface properties of your models. I know sometimes it gets turned way up when you use Undo too much.

I've seen posts/users deleted and banned for less than this.

Cool, thanks for the ideas!

What I'd like is a toggle switch for simple, repetitive actions - like a spinning doodad on a prop or a character breathing. I've been playing around with stuff, digging through the manual and searching the forums... either I'm missing something obvious or this isn't something that you can do. Thanks!

hahaha. All right fiddled around with the lag and settings, further tweaking to come; I tacked it onto a test animation I had done earlier. This is exactly what I was looking for. Awesome idea, Vern!! test_act2.mov

Looks pretty sweet, Vern! I'll play around with that and post some results.

Cool, thanks for the info Rodney. And Homeslice, I never thought of that - I suppose this effect would be more accurately called "simulated motion blur" than "contrails." God of War actually has some pretty good examples of the type of effect I'm looking for. Animated weapon contrails is what I'm looking at here. Skip to about the 35 second mark to get a feel of what I'm trying to simulate. It's basically glorifying the weapon movement, making for a much more interesting look than the weapons swinging around on their own. Skip to 1:35 to see a simpler contrail with a single weapon.

Thing is, it can't just be a simple half-circle cued on and off. The contrail paths PERFECTLY with the weapons through thousands of different moves. This is actually a pretty common effect in video games that I've always wondered about. Another example would be snowboards in the SSX series. Also uploaded a pretty cool example from God of War. Edit: yeah Vern, ideally it would just happen. I experimented with creating a dynamic chain, but was getting problems with it bouncing back and forth instead of collapsing back to nothing.

Well, that solves one problem! My other problem with particles is that they don't result in the desired effect. Instead of a nice smooth contrail stream, they're... well, particles. Here, I'll attach some images from Soul Calibur. The weapon contrail effect you see in games like this is more what I'm looking to recreate.

The problem with particles is that they're always active. The contrail should only appear when the object is moving.

Pretty cool! The card shifts around a lot in the 2nd guy's hand, looks like you don't have it constrained to it properly.

I've honestly been wondering how to do a contrail effect like that myself.

Thanks all! Ding! that's it! Back claw. Yeah, already flipped the normals back. It was weird, everything was facing the correct direction... except those four patches emitting hair. Fortunately, the right side was still ok - but the left side got reset. So I only had to re-do one side.

This is what I normally do; after reseting it to the default I did go back into advanced. I just can't find an "anti-alias" checkbox anywhere!

Sat down and finished the dragon model. I'm not quite satisfied with the legs, it feels like they're missing SOMEthing. Just can't put my finger on it. I'll also be making a saddle for him, but I'll probably get him rigged up first. edit: annnnd just noticed that after I re-found the normals, it flipped his hair patches around so I have to re-do all that. oops. Good thing he only had that little bit behind his jaw!

The corners of lips are the bane of my existence!! The lower lip looks good, but the upper lip's separation needs to be farther apart. You could probably do without the first spline ring around the lips as well.

I actually had this problem a little while back. Anti aliasing got turned off somehow and I spent about an hour trying to find the "anti-alias" checkbox... it seems to have been taken out. I finally turned off the "custom" render settings and selected the default "final" setting. This seemed to fix it. (correct me if I'm wrong, v15)

The breasts are quite high up on the body right now. They should probably be a few inches lower. The face is much more feminine now! Doesn't look like a dude with eyeliner at all. The main reason she looks older is you've given her very prominent cheek bones but the cheeks themselves are still pretty sunken. Rounding out the face like you said should help fix that!

Yeah, I may straighten those legs out. I wasn't sure how I would want em when I modeled it, so I'll experiment when I start rigging!

Hmm, I found no "rotocontainer" tags in either the project or model files.

Cool, ty. Attaching legs now!

I actually have this problem too, although not "thousands." When you put a model with rotoscopes into a choreography, over time the rotos just multiply. I'm using Mac OS 10.5 and had this happening in both v13 and v15.

Started working on wing and leg... I was shaking my fist a bit at the hand/fingers joint and ended up using no less than FOUR five-point patches per finger. Any suggestions on cleaning this up? (No toes yet!)

When you do copy/flip/attach, there's two things to watch out for - making sure everything is aligned (which is probably the case in the nose/forehead) and not using hooks (which is the case in the area above the lips and (I think) the chin.) Select the entire edge and use the properties window to scale X to zero. (Transform > Scale > X > 0%) When you've got a hook along the edge, it will try to find something to hook onto when you copy it. This will always end up bad, make sure all the points on the edge are CPs.