dblhelix

oh that was good. associated to wind traveling on a desert. or an ocean.

the bouncing lights are perfectly executed. they could so easily take over, now they just blow up not only the spatial experience but they actually add to the general magicalness of motion. the film has the one flaw all the best ones have: too short! seriously, is there a longer version?

that was valuable information! just like the compendium on PWS/chor/model/action windows you guys made when i first came here. it's always the "little" things! after decades in PS and one in AE, saving is second nature. in a:m i save everything everywhere. models, chors and prjs. it was the embedding that was new. coming to this thread A.D. (after disaster) Fuchurs sentence on re-embedding was the only thing i had not done. i embedded only once, maybe in prj 2. i thought i'd gotten it's function backwards. but the situation was far from that simple. for those with lab-experience and a fondness for white mice, i'll recount, others: proceed ony if you already brushed your teeth and changed into jammies. tried to re-hair a modified Gala with a hair model stripped from a previous version of modified Gala. begun to hide parts to access hair only to assign it to head bone. something went wrong and the shift clicking in hierarchy did not take, but the entire model flickered in an ordered succession from head to toe. maybe the hiding should have been done in model window......... but i didn't think of it 'cause i was just orienting in the PWS. i knew what the flicker meant. revert, reboot. by an absolute, sheer coincidence the first thing that happened was i selected group "Head/no tongue" and in the window the entire body got selected. newbie goes to Panic Room: "oh no there was no undo on this!" clicked the chor open and allrighty mess it was, the visible bones were in the right pose but the entire body had gone another route, and her dress a third. Baz Luhrmann might find the hour that followed inspiring but he's not here. tried previous Galas, and here my reasoning is fuzzy due to trauma. i tried the previously faulty "Head/no tongue" in others, because i deducted that to be the obvious reason for the separation of bones/geometry in chor because (by sheer coincidence!) it was the obvious visible connection between the two! - and clicking "Head" etc, the entire body got selected. in all versions. "i've assigned her entire body to her head bone. in ALL versions?!" as it turns out there's a mistake in the original Gala. the group "Head/no tongue" is her body, or, most of it. not her right eye. and my shift click assigned her entire body to the root bone. what a mess, eh? and if you see the weirdest continuity in the underlying logic of events, today i find the project ""crashed"" in another way. even though robcat saved me with Gala. as if it was an omen. All Saints Halloween to you too! robcat, the book clears like a half of my backlog here, and last night you got me to put all the sharp utensils back into the kitchen drawer. it's lucky for me we don't live in a just world

and to no one's surprise, it's robcat to the rescue. thank you! got you the Infinite Jest from your list, delivery round Nov 9. you life saver, you!

this is a surprisingly important thread, thanks Vertexspline for bringing this up! i read it when it was going on and misinterpreted everything.. have just touched ground after one of those memorable newbie-moments where i've wrecked an entire project when just wanting to add final touches. it seems a good idea if there was a pdf for the progression, explaining the different varieties of saving and their consequences, starting from detail going upward to project. i re-read this now and while helpful, it goes back and forth quite a bit. i could describe what i did, but that would only be one specific situation of all the possible ones. incidentally, could someone be so kind as to mail me a Gala from the am standard models to %doublehlx%at%yahoo%dotcom (without the '%' of course), mine's, errrhmm.. all face now

so one hunch, correct. thank you for speedy expedition!

i'm working with a modified Gala. did something to her hair, it suddenly displayed double layers intricately woven into the geometry. decided that the fastest way to solve this was to make new hair model from the original Gala by deleting all but the hair. dragged the new hair model onto Gala v. 6 in a model window, styled it and of course it didn't work. in chor, the hair model now trails 20 cms behind Gala 5cms to the side. due to many versions, opened the original to compare with current Gala, both are positioned the same. opened current new hair model to compare its position to hair placement on original and current Gala, no problems. now open her in an action or choreography, and the hair gets willful and naughty. how do i troubleshoot this? mousse, spray, serum?

terminology snubbles, yes, that's what i meant. ok, simulation doesn't take long. there's something else haywire then, taking time. more probing needed. i'll be back.

was there some smart solution to rendering cloth in stills? once again i know i've read something about this on a couple of occasions and now can't find anything in searches. something about preroll, how not to render animation and use the last tga, but a different solution? i'm just dreaming?

hmm we travel in same circles?

if you're experienced in decaling&such, you might find inspiration in the decals for Gala in a:m models. she has really nice helmet hair.

seriously! when do you ever sleep?! i was trying to position a hand, it looked good. render from cam view showed the hand had errr.. quirks modeled in. repositioned the hand to hide the quirks, switching between modes to also move cp's. this had to be done from cam view, very close up, and the hand disappeared. also, i found working the moves in cam view very burdensome, my brain kept "doing it wrong". for whatever reason, i had no problems with the other windows and am looking forward to solving the posing/modeling there, choosing that view to render upping resolution, making a TGA i can crop for the right composition. go to bed now, i'll sing you a lullaby?

it said to in cam view choose any of the other views to become cam view and render. did i get it wrong? EDIT: while too lazy to set up the other laptop with a:m just yet, i'm sure this is valid. you could toggle any view, even a light, to be your view to render. i accidentally found the light views earlier so that must be true.

a-ha, thanks! guessing there's a reason for lack of visual indicators for this as well, as complicated as the math involved in general..

not urgent, just curious. if doing a close-up real close up, something makes the model partly disappear. parts closest to camera just vanish. i first thought it's about the FOV tool in camera - that anything between that line and camera didn't render. but no. moving that line didn't help. then i thought maybe patches actually interfered with "camera", so i moved the camera. no change. too close was too close. i read stuff back to 2004 and found a solution, change the camera view to match another view, so you can do the pose wherever it works. (haven't tested yet.) but does anyone know what's behind all this?

now what am i doing right (in racking up a fresh batch of newbie points); light affects model but not a prop. last time it was about light lists, so now i tried every option and ended up having to create a whole new light to believe that this is so. the prop does not receive light. and no, it's not black. the chor is saved as from another chor, prj from another prj that already rendered just fine. only thing i've changed is "lens" from 30 to 50, so that's hardly the solution. how do i troubleshoot this one?

hard to stop watching that! here i was, wondering how to achieve "fog with spikes", and you say it's called flare on a light. thank you! (try time-reversing that TGA sequence? =)

documenting; it's a virus. opening a pdf (techref, tuts) tunes the program in to Twin Peaks. suspected as much earlier, but there were too many emergencies to be sure. today it disabled view toggling; all views 2-8 zoomed out to infinity at every change. rebooting a:m didn't help, rebooting pc did.

well i got to the deleting right after posting, and the only other .prj version was pre-problem. no point in guessing, unless i get a chair and a drink? all lights are functioning perfectly now. all 60 of them.

documenting: the roll handle turned out to be an indication after all. in the image, take a look at the yellow square at the bottom of the pic. venture a quick bet what that could be before i tell that it's... the "rotate object" handle for the light. seems if a handle gets going it doesn't travel alone. going to delete the thing and start from scratch..

thanks, progress report: the cone problem turned out to be a mirage. once the "shortcut to" was chosen, the light size became small, looking just right, indicating complete adaptation but was not. so i neglected to scale! scaling made all params correct. happy now. just reporting: i was so sure the roll handle behaviour would lead to some kind of action, but it remains a sidenote. i discovered, that in the one perfect light group used as original, the shortcut values "transform rotate" in the properties window were different from "transform rotate" in the shortcut>action>chor list of changes made. when copying these changes onto other lights, the copypaste refused to stick! at the moment all properties windows numbers are identical but the cone angles differ. don't remember how many (2? 3?) lights were made before i unearthed the "shortcut" system. when that happened, i changed all lights (with different values&such) into shortcuts of the first light. then tried to copypaste the values from the 1st light's shortcut onto other shortcuts. guessing there's the reason to problems. very confused, will adjust manually. haven't even gotten to the fill, mine is at 2%, and it lights up the entire chor with that amount though its size is a tenth of the area and is directed straight down. this is actually just what is needed (comics graphics, not pure 3D) but it was unexpected. checked the glow values, and in chor settings i'd changed the first default from 50% to 3% and the second default from 200% to 100%. and the scene turned romantic. lights look good, but there's a bit more model detail needed. i'll get back if i can't best it.

lesseee... 1. is there a way to simultaneously (=identically) change light cone values on a group of lights? it could be just me (this pc), but shift-choosing is problematic due to the refresh freezing. any tips/workarounds appreciated! 2. how to grapple with the oddsy roll handle - it changes when rotating the.. hmm the yellow balk? indicating light direction and gets in the way. if i delete the entire param in pws this changes xyz rotations. this is not serious but a bit of nuisance at larger quantities of lamps/lights. 3. the fill light is a bit of a performer isn't it? one fill just needs to be present and on and the entire chor is awash with its influence? not a problem, just trying to understand. 4. is the glow somehow similar to unsharp mask in PS? in my crisply lit chor, i'm pretty sure all i did was 0% chor values for glow (to see what it was already doing by default) and everything went all fuzzy and dreamy? maybe my question here is about the relationship between the different places to control glow, how they interact. done the usual spacebars and rebooting a:m. thanks!

*spits duct tape* ha! found some murky orient-like business going on with the stone being scraped against the other stone=surface. and that became clear now that we have a plain tutorial in view. thank you Rodney - i might return about the other constraint though.. John Big--Vern? sympathy much appreciated; i knew the only way to feel more stupid was to ask and read the answer. was correct. til your post! itsjustme - those prjs didn't come up when i did searches, wouldn't have found them without help, thank you!

thinking out loud here: we'd need a tutorial on surface constraint on the site. please nobody say techref, i did look *HURTS*. long enough to know we need a tutorial. how about a fun penguin sliding downhill, up a bump, in the air, then down again and sliding on. no fancy animation, just the direction change, constraint on off, basics.

wow. i really like the hips. it has to do with large high-contrast areas - you see that motion even when you're not looking. it makes her come alive very effectively. the sword no longer attracts questions. i like the way he goes down backwards, there's stealth in it, makes him more dangerous. can't go frame by frame, which is where the comments are now. looking forward to some weaponry sparkles!