Meowx

The bumps are coming from a material that's applied globally. Would it be better to use cookie-cut maps? I imagine the highlight will still show up, even without the bump.

Thanks! Yeah, the wing surface is just a plane. No depth.

Been working on various other character and environment models; came back to the dragon this afternoon to do some animating. I'm pretty happy with the result! (5.5MB .mov file) edit: The claws digging into the ledge is intentional; I rotated the hand targets and fingers over time. However, after watching it again, I think I overdid it and they look like they're sinking into it some. edit 2: in the screenshot, you can see the highlight and bump on the parts where the wing is supposed to be transparent (opacity maps). how do I fix that?

Haha, so much this. I've been turning off auto-sleep on every one of my Macs since I first started 3D for that exact reason.

Fantastic! The subtle differences between the renders really make a huge difference between "obvious bump map" and "or is it?"

Adding an additional ring near the chest - like John's, much like you've done, is the way to go. While your initial simplistic splinage looks great in profile, having such a large amount of curvature covered by a single patch tends to look flat and angular in any other view, as you've found. I'd keep the basic shape of the breast, but completely reconstruct them. When you start adding new splines into something like that, particularly with all the bias tweaking going on, it starts looking pretty messy pretty quickly. Make a copy of the model, delete one breast and then lock that side start and rebuilding based on the shape of the other one.

There's a lot of different reasons frames can take longer to render. It's a flyby, perhaps you're rendering part of the flyby where the ship is really close to the camera? Shots with objects close to the camera generally take longer to render than ones with objects a distance away.

There's quite a selection of Spartan armor (especially now with Reach), so liberty-taking isn't a bad idea. That said, jaw part of your helmet should probably be a bit bigger. (of course, still very early on so perhaps you just hadn't gotten that far yet!)

Nice! Looks like a the start of the Mark VI helmet? Haven't seen an A:M Master Chief yet, should be a fun project!

Drat. Guess I'll be making a big tile and using bitmap plus. There's no way to fix this? Is this a... (known) bug? I mean, it shows up perfectly fine in real-time view.

Ack! Now, after adjusting the points of the stamps, I'm getting MASSIVE texture distortion when rendering! I've seen this before on 5-points, but never 4-points! It looks fine in real-time: But when I do a trial render, it spits out a stomach-churning mess: Render to file doesn't fare much better:

I'm in Nancy's boat; synced version never starts up but the original works plays.

Cool ideas, guys! Thanks! edit: trying Homeslice's idea with the grid, it's working quite well.

Been working some more on terrain texturing today, trying numerous techniques and still coming up pretty blah. You can't really see much here since it's a low-res preview, but there's not much to see. Just giving you an idea of a section of ground I'm working on. Basically a large grid pushed and pulled into terrain shapes. Now, how do I go about texturing this properly? I can't figure out a good flattening technique; endless decals-on-decals to patch stretched looking sides are starting to look pretty lame, porjection mapping a material doesn't seem to be going anywhere useful... suggestions? Thanks a ton!

Ah, gotcha!

Your right screen cap shows the "Lock CPs" button on. The one with the picture of a lock on it. ^^ this. I'm surprised rebooting A:M fixed it, because A:M saves what points you have locked. This is actually a ridiculously useful feature for assigning bones to CPs - just select what you want, lock, then go into bone mode.

I had created an action for it and didn't see any change; hadn't tried a Chor tho. Watching wedge's now! edit: watched, that cleared quite a few things up. Thanks a ton! The process is actually even easier on the current version, but the basics were what I needed. Swirly dust clouds here I come! edit again: now, is there a setting to just have the animation loop? or will I have to set that up in a repeating action?

I've been tooling around with the image sequence option for decaling, and simply can't get it to do anything. I've imported as a sequence, and they have little movie clip icons next to them in the timeline - - but I can't seem to get them to actually DO anything when I apply the decal. I've messed with the settings, looked through the manual... nothing. Help!

I learn something new in A:M every day I didn't know this It's great for making negative values as well; if, for example, you want something like a smile/frown pose. No need to zero in the pose at 50, you can just have the min value to -100.

Just watched your tuts on a walk cycle, not sure how I missed them before. Those are absolutely fantastic, especially after coming off Animators' Survival Kit and having your vids to apply the stuff directly to A:M. Cheers!

One thing to keep in mind when modeling is to think about how it works and looks in real life. This even - nay, especially - applies to "cartoony" characters. You still want to have the basic structure of the body correct or it doesn't look quite right. When in doubt, google! Type "penguin" or "bird beak" or whatever you're looking for into a google image search and you'll find LOADS of reference pictures to help you out.

I've got a long, flow-y robe-like skirt that has a trail that drags along the ground. Is there any way to do this with cloth? I've been experimenting around and always just end up with the cloth catching repeatedly on the ground.

Awesome! It's very well designed for an original ship; fits right in line with the rest of the Federation.

While I'm not a big enough Star Trek nut to know exactly what class of ship that is, it seems pretty glowy when compared to, say, the Enterprise-E: Looks like there's also some detail breaking up monotony of one having big glowy engine:

!!!! That's an impressive amount of splinework! ...and that's an impressive amount of impudence! Noone's under any sort of obligation to share their work with the entire world simply because they made it with A:M.