Ross Smith

Was gonna say... 6 point patch? No such animal. What did the original mesh look like?

Noel, that sounds like a perfect solution. Thank you! I'll get crackin' on this distortion objects business. It looks very promising. Also, your examples are very helpful. This is just the sort of advice I was looking for. Thanks again.

Parlo, that's positively awesome. As an SF fan/historian, it's great hearing the intro to WotW. =) The new render looks good, too. Really brings out the colors.

Thanks, Modernhorse. Aye, the jaw would change the design a bit. If this challenge defeats me, I'll probably go with a new method like that. The problem is the implementation of the idea in A:M. I would like to make the transforms of the lips and face planar in nature, but they are "mapped" onto a conic segment. If the face were a decal, I could just literally map it to the geometry, but the face is itself geometry. So, has anyone ever come up with a process to do that sort of geometric transformation? It's the A:M specific part I need to know now, the actual tools that would make this idea work. Or, if someone has a different method of doing the same thing. That's why I posted. I thought first that I could flatten the facial area in a pose and do the facial transformations on that flattened face, but the flattening itself stays with the pose... so that's no go. Unless there's a way to make new poses with a separate pose turned on. Then it might work.

** UPDATE: 4/15/04: scroll down ** Hey there, hashin' community. I'm in a pickle with a new character model. I'm making these fat, bean/potato-shaped robots. Their bodies have a very smooth, regular surface, which is the source of my worry. Have a look. (Hands and eyes coming soon.) Belly Bot, body Belly Bot, mouth My problem is with the mouth. Victor Navone's posts on Giant are really awesome. I wanted to try out his system, but I think it demands more skill than I have at the present time... So I'll stick with poses. Anyway, you can perhaps see my problem. This character's mouth adheres to a surface that is best described as conic -- it curves around a radius (so it isn't flat on the X and Z axes) and it falls on a slope (so it isn't really flat on the Y axis, either). Lots of talented folks use this forum and may have solved problems much like this in the past, so that's why I ask: how in the heck do you make poses with this sort of mouth? Any kind of point manipulation I've tried so far results in badly deforming this mesh, which I want to keep smooth. I realized that the mouth should move in a basically planar way, but attached to this "conic" surface, However, I haven't come up with a solution to work with that. If anyone has suggestions, ideas, or excellent problem-solving methods, I'm all ears. Thanks for reading. --Ross

That's the truth. I lived on those books.

Wow. Gorgeous character. Something was nagging at me while I watched the test anim on loop, and I couldn't quite place it. Then I realized what it was -- he looks a lot like Calvin. I really think it's the spherical head and the eyes. But that was already mentioned, so. Considering the rig you have for the mouth, I can't help but wonder what the bones for the rest of the body will look like.

3 hours? Out of town, you... get! He's very cool. I don't know if that pose was altogether intentional, but I like it. What color would this space-mongerel be?

Where's my popcorn? This show is awesome Take your time with design sketches, I say. I love to see how it gets figured out. And, about the whole "AM CG teams" thing... yeah. That sounds really, really cool. (Maybe I think that because I can't texturemap for a dang.) Someone oughta enterprise on that idea... Anyway, keep it up, meisters.

Wow! There's more brain in this thread than you can shake a stick at. Where do you guys learn about this stuff? Are there classes, or landmark books? Or just magi that pass their secrets through the ages? Seriously, it's very interesting. And as a digital artist of some flavor, I feel like I should know how my technical tool operates.

Right, so. My advice: you have some patches on the torso that need to be disposed of. They're the ones that would be between the arm and the torso if you closed up that joint. You don't want those there -- you'll never see them, and they'll make the splines of your model flow badly. Here's what I suggest you do. Go in and delete the CPs responsible for just those interior patches. Once you do that, the torso will have some splines that just end abruptly around the hole where you want the arm to attach. Those splines will flow smoothly into the splines of your arm if you use the Attach tool. It'll look and function a lot better. As for why the 5-point patch button isn't lighting up, I'm not sure why. Try my advice and see if that fixes anything. (Sometimes you have to break and reconnect, or destroy and remake CPs, to get A:M to do something sensible. I'm not sure why.) Here's a pic showing the splines that I would try to get to flow smoothly into each other. Highlighted in green. Best of luck! Edit: Whoops! I spoke too soon. Heheh. Or too late? Well, either way, here's a second post that says basically the same thing.

Wow! This has real potential, Mike. It looks like you're running with a style. Keep at the modeling; that's just a skill that comes with time. It's that creative style that a person can't really learn or teach (at least, without a hell of a lot of trying). Keep us posted!

I get the same feeling, looking at the work you guys do... hmm. This sounds like a trend. Perhaps A:M should be shipped with a light scourge for new users to self-flagellate. Limited time only!

Dang! That's a beauty. Don't give up on posting updates, I want to see what happens to this model. She's so pretty she could be a... no, I won't say it. It's too easy. Could we see a wireframe of this hair?

Um... so. You use five point patches under special circumstances. When you have your splines all laid out to make quads (patches with four sides), that's great for a surface that adheres to a flat or cylindrical shape. But when you need to make an unusual surface, like an opening (mouth, eyes) or a joint (attaching arms and legs to torso), it usually involves five point patches. My modeling isn't the best example, but here goes. Observe. Those arrows are pointing to five point patches that help the eye area on this face "fit into" the head. Since the eye is basically a widened opening that splits the surface of the head, five point patches can be appropriate -- they let you deal with surfaces that are unusual or transitional. They also give you some ability to control where splines should be in your model. Making a lot of splines that run the circumference of the head may help you sculpt the face in detail, but they can pile up on the smooth back of the head pretty purposelessly. Five point patches can help eliminate these, and so can hooks. Be careful using five point patches or hooks. They're modeling "short-cuts" that can really help you, but only if they are used under the right circumstances. That's a hard thing to teach, so best learn it through trying. I hope that helps some.

Rob, Arms are tricky. They fit in that category of "long cylindrical objects that attach into other objects", like legs, heads, tentacles, the like. No one ever told me how to model a body when I started my first one, so I just modeled the parts independently, then brought them all together and figured out how to create the torso from that. In the end I think you'll need to use five point patches. That was my solution, and it works fine. I recommend you practice attaching things before you try your luck with a model you want to keep. I repeatedly modeled cylinders and attached them to each other, figuring out the splining of the joints. So ja, experimentation is key. And try the ARM, it's always handy (no pun intended). Good luck!

Criminy! You modeled that in four days? I mean, I could model that in four days... if there were, like, sixty hours in a day. Really awesome model, man. And moreover, it's a nice render.

Great model. I like the angularity. I would say, though, to broaden the head and face a bit. The words "aquiline" and "hatchet-like" spring to mind right now. Keep up the great work. :-D

Dang, man. Your style is great! I'm curious what kind of camera-work will be done in the animation. When I see bendy/cartoony buildings like this, I get the impression that people don't think too hard about how they stay up there (part of the humor). In 3D we've got the freedom to do fly-arounds and stuff -- that might throw people off balance. But I dunno, you're a clever guy ( I guess ). Have you given much thought about the camerawork, or is that a different department?

Great model! In more than that "babealicious" way. The lip-synch and her expression were great. Gotta say, though... she's got some impressive forearms to resist the kickback from those guns. Cool-Hand Luke's got nothing on this gal.

Thanks for that note, Rodney. I was wondering if there was a better way to link within the forum. That script is a TT-font called Cthulhu Runes. Having plucked this character idea from the canon of H.P. Lovecraft, it seemed fitting. It also looks neat. Not my own creation, I must confess. I stumbled on it long ago. It is a post effect. I'm too fond of tweaking my art to let a one-frame render escape unmolested. In Fireworks, I typed out a bunch of nonsense into a text box, set the font to the runes, shrank it, screened it, and made a copy that was offset and blurred. (Yep. Meet my best friends, Screen Layer and Gauss Blur.)

Dang! I like him. Looks like a mech/suit of armor hybrid, what with the gauntlet-y arms and all. With joints like those, this guy sure as heck looks like he was made to be animated. He'd be great to see in action. Do extra joints make his motions robo-jerky or fluid and controlled?

This merman will eventually be duplicated and distorted in some ways to make a school (herd? pod?) of mer -men and -maids. They'll be an important part of a short student movie. Heh... that'll be a while in the making, though. Thanks, Grubber! There'll be more soon, school permitting. I do plan on blending the scales into skin. That blending has been giving me trouble. It has to happen on a few channels (spec, highlight, etc) to work, since skin and scales should appear differently. /me is also a fan of IRC. There's a very handy thread here that gave me the idea for the lighting. I kept the render camera still while I played with a white key light and a bluish fill light (the defaults), getting some different angles and intensities. Then I layered with screening in Photoshop, played with their various opacities, and there 'tis. I'm more used to layers than 3D lights, so for me, it was a much more natural approach. I also took a copy of that finished merman, set his layer to screen, lowered the opacity, and did a fat Gaussian blur on it. That's why it looks sorta like the Dreamy Photo plugin. I need to get that plugin, come to think of it.

Hey all! Well, this guy isn't completely finished, but man is he close. Modeling, rigging and smart-skinning are all done. I just need make some poses for his hands, a bunch for his face, and... oh yeah, um, texturemap him. I know the showcase is for -finished- stuff, but I really like the color scheme as it is, and decided to try it out. Made something enjoyable, so I brought it into Photoshop and Fireworks and did a bunch of post to it. Thanks for looking! -- Ross

*piles on some more compliments* Furthermore, good Foley. Adds a surprising dimension to the visuals. Very fun stuff!