Meowx

What are you talking about, I walk down the street in a red cocktail dress all the time. er, wait

I'm actually going for the one-off reality comic-book look myself with the project I'm working on. I've found that while male faces have very easy to exaggerate features like the chin, it's a little more subtle with the female. Making the eyes bigger and the cheeks themselves (as opposed to the cheekbones) a little puffier was what made the difference in the end for me.

I remember when I first started using Maya I was just flabergasted at how much more complex it was. I had a couple years of A:M under my belt already and had kind of figured I could just walk right into it... ehhhrrrt wrong.

Looking really good! However, it kind of looks like a dude wearing eyeliner. The prominent brow, sunken cheeks, strong chin/jaw and overall tall face are all contributing to this. Check out this link for some key differences between male and female faces: http://www.virtualffs.co.uk/male.female%20...differences.htm http://www.virtualffs.co.uk/difference%20examples.htm

"It wasn't an indian who told us that so I don't know if it was actually true." lol

Had a chance to work on beasty some more today. Now just needs some legs and wings... can't wait to start rigging this guy, should be fun!

I've actually run into some rendering artifact problems with making stuff 100% transparent. It also seems to really bog down render times!

Started working on a dragon today, I'm quite liking how its face is turning out! Not a friendly talkative dragon, just a wild beasty dragon.

Reception is important, right? The rig is one I made from scratch, mostly because that's how I'm used to doing it (and I kinda wish I had just used the 2008 rig). The IK legs are based off Mark's 2008 rig with leg hinges and thigh orient bones. I put IK arms in too, but I don't really like them. The face is just a jaw bone, eyelid bones and muscle poses. Ok, this is driving me nuts - is there a key to toggle full res/half res on real-time decals? I saw the decal full res for a second, but now it's just 1/2 resolution.

Yeah, there's a couple bands on the end of the sword. I really should have used a white background for that test. I was thinking of making them a bit wider; more noticeable.

Just occurred to me that I haven't really posted any pics of the whole WIP yet. Well, here it is. This is my first serious model in about four years, so I'm a bit rusty. Between that and the fact that I was going for maximum model detail, it weighs in a bit hefty - just shy of 15k patches. The other characters I'm working on will probably be quite a bit lighter. The model and rigging itself is almost done, I'm still tweaking things here and there. The animation test I uploaded was just that, a test, so you'll see that the movement gets a bit robotic at the end. Was mostly to make sure cloth and dynamics were functioning properly. Now I'm working on the textures! ps - no, the back of the shield is not modeled in the movie. that's just the back of the front (if that made sense) test_act.mov

lol, nice! Unfortunately, that never works for me.

I actually do have a pose for all the dynamics, I hadn't thought to just turn it off after simulating. Good call! New question: is there a way to "refresh" a decal without reloading the project? Like, if I'm editing in Photoshop, can I force it to reload the decal file rather than closing and re-opening the project file every time I save a change?

Your hair work is always brilliant looking. Love it!

Every time I simulate spring systems, "Calculate on the fly" gets turned on for every single dynamic bone. In the base models, not just the action. It's getting really annoying going back and turning them all off every time, is there a way around this?

I absolutely love the stylization! Great job! I found this page quite helpful for modeling male faces vs modeling female faces: http://www.virtualffs.co.uk/male.female%20...differences.htm

Sweet, thanks!

Alright, semi-related-but-not-really issue. I'm trying to open up another project file to take a look at some rigging; however, it looks like I last saved this one with a smartskin window open. Normally I try not to do this since A:M seems to sometimes spaz when opening something that has a smartskin window open, I'll close the window and re-save afterwards. Must not have here. ANYway. What happens is once the window opens, the program just hangs. Cursor sits there spinning but never does anything. This is not uncommon for me in pose/smartskin windows when there's a lot of patches on-screen, I typically have to hide parts of the model to get the window to open. When it hangs, I can click on the Finder or another program in the background and the pose/ss window will draw some patches at random... but I'll never be able to do anything. I always end up having to force quit. I've let it sit and spin for a good 10-15 minutes, too. Anyone experience anything similar/know any workarounds?

I've got a decently fast connection, I just tried speedtest.net and it was about 5MB/second (about twice the national average in the US). Then I went to http://www.ld-premium.com/ and timed it, from the moment I hit return to the moment I could click on a menu item was 19 seconds. That's normally something you can do instantly, and WAY more than enough time for the average web browser to hit the back button and go somewhere else. Something I've found over the years is that when it comes to websites, fuction >>>>>>>>> flashyness. The site looks excellent, but the excessive reliance on movies for navigation is a bit silly.

Jeez, that sounds more like a job for the Ghostbusters.

Cool. Your tutorials are always very helpful! I was studying the awesome 2008 rig and trying to figure out how everything worked, so I was using "orient like" constraints for the thighs with thigh targets nested in a leg hinge instead of a simple knee target. KISS to the rescue. Oh, and you were right on about the joints not being perfectly in-line. The starts of the foot targets weren't properly lined up on top of the ends of the calves.

Er, yeah, kinematic. When I was a kid and first learned 3D, I always called it "inverse kinetics." It sometimes still haunts me to this day. The limits are more for reference than anything else, that and they make animating the hands a hell of a lot easier. I'm (a bit regrettably) using my own made from scratch rig. I wanted to get some experience creating it from the ground up... which I am. But I'm running into a few things from time to time. Another issue I'm having with it is that the thighs bend outward at a 5 to 15 degree angle when crouching. While it looks fine and natural, it's not the behavior I was expecting. When the feet leave their targets, the legs "snap" back into pointing forward. Animation_MasterScreenSnapz001.mov

The front of a shield, shaped like a lion crest. This was quite fun to model.

Cool site with a nice clean design, but those movies are FAR too large to be even remotely practical for professional web design. Especially since they're a huge part of every page... and the navigation to boot.

All right, found it now. Usually ctrl = control on the Mac, but it turned out to be command-d this time. (Of course, I had gone through and tried every single other modifier key combo first since typically the command key is for important program features like save and open.)