MMZ_TimeLord

What robcat means by a fuzzy klieg light is that you replace your 'sun' light with a wide klieg. (I'm pretty sure that's what he means) When you do that you can experiment with the width of the light so get your shadows softer around the edges and darker under the vehicles. Robcat, please correct me if I'm wrong here.

The cylindrical application will attempt to apply the decal around the Y-Axis. You will have to do two things. 1. Rotate your decal 90 degrees in your graphics editing program and duplicate it so it's a longer tread. Right now it tries to stretch it all the way around a wheel. 2. Rotate your wheels 90 degrees and apply your decal, then rotate them back. EDIT: Here is the tread after I duplicated it in Photoshop 10 times across and after application on a quick tire. I followed the directions above exactly. The tire was created with it's axis of rotation along the Y-Axis and the decal was applied that way, THEN it was rotated 90 degrees to orient like a real car tire. Sorta like a mechanic having to mount your tire then put the wheel back on your car.

bit of a pause during his transition from sign to 3D... I'd suggest cutting out a few frames there... otherwise it looks good.

Nicely done... Excellent details... Way to go Slipin_Lizard!

Interesting, that could be used on space ship engine flames to vary the glow (flicker) ... hmm

I don't believe there is a limit, but someone from Hash (Martin) would have to answer that for sure. It could be that your realtime rendering is set to limit the frame rate time. Check this in your 'Tools->Options' under the 'Global' tab. Make sure that the 'Interrupt drawing' setting has the 'Limit max drawing time' unchecked.

Your pencil art is always top notch Will! I like the look of the characters... look forward to more progress.

I'm sure it's possible. I don't believe anyone here has done one that realistic. There is a tutorial on A:M Matrix for lightsaber with fanning effect. This is probably the same tutorial you have been pointed to in the past. I have not seen a light saber done more real than that in A:M. I would grab the project from the tutorial and see if you can make it more 'realistic' (seeing as how a lightsaber is fictional)

I went through the site, you and your peers have done some fine work to date. I really like all the ship designs. I can't wait to see the trailer... then maybe, the movie!

It's not the warehouse, I used that for my walk lesson and it showed reflections just fine at 640x480. Rendered pretty fast too... under a minute per frame. I believe Stuart is correct, you have WAY too many lights in there to expect it to render quickly. Mac platforms historically render slower (not my fault, just what I read) I would say open the properties for the lights in choreography and turn all the streetlights to 'Active = off'. Then do a test render of a few frames to get a feel for it. You also have two other lights, the fill light, rim light and the key light. For my own projects I get rid of the original key, rim and fill lights.

Wires of updated "AL" and... Wires of the raw DXF in A:M

I was digging around the old hard drive and found an old DXF model of "AL". I had played with him before back in the version 8 days, but it was just too much work to remove all the extra splines that resulted from polygon models. Low and behold someone posted a link to "AccuTrans-3D" and I decided to save a quads copy of "AL" and import him and see how much work there was to do. Sure enough it made it bearable. So I've done some significant cleanup. Split his mouthline and given him an inside to his mouth, cleaned up the face, touched up the ears (A LOT) and completely merged his jacket with his biceps and forearms and his pelvis with his thighs and calves. I decided to see how much progress I had made and figured I'd give Ambiant Occlusion a try while I was at it. (AO settings are Render Option AO=ON. Choreography settings = Global Ambiance Type = Global Color, Ambiant color = White (255,255,255), Ambiance Intensity = 100%, Ambiance Occlusion = 100%) Looks a lot better even with just simple surface colors and the mesh cleanup. I think I'll touch up the hands some more and add teeth, then I'll rig him. This could bode well for fairly simple characters such as this.

Excellent work serg! I love the style. Good smirk too!

AND... always remember to do an in-choreography render (final using 'render mode') to make sure you are getting what you want BEFORE you commit your machine to hours of rendering time.

Yeah, congratulations! I've seen your work here over the last few years and it just keeps getting better... Cheers!

Margaret, Here's a familiar place to get your astronomy animations started... I'll try to post my other planets of the solar system as well. There plenty of resources out there... Welcome to the world of splines!

Well done! I am impressed about the face not having too many 3 point patches or at least they don't show. Good work!

Welcome aboard... more new artists, more content, more diverse examples of extraordinary animation! I can't wait!

Congratulations AVI... Nice to see a professional give a rising animation artist kudos and inspiration!

See my reply to your first exercise please... Rodney has threads going for these so he can review them and give you credit for your exercises.

kanime, You should post your results in the 'Exercise 1' thread. Make sure you read the first post for instructions. Looks good so far!

Check this out... Specifically this part ( I realize this is an older FAQ, but it is still relevant. ) And another... JPEG With all of that said, I stand corrected. PNG or TGA would probably be the way to go if you want or need a truely 'lossless' compression. The images I was working with on 'Project Earth' were very high resolution and downsized from even higher resolution TGA images, therefore I felt that maximum quality JPEGs would do just fine.

You are partially right luckbat. You will only see artifacts on JPEG images that have quality settings on anything but 100%. I always set my quality to the highest when dealing with photoshop or paintshop pro. If you turn the compression up, you will get more artifacts, that's the trade-off with JPEG. It's the same as using a lower quality setting on a codec for a movie file (MOV or AVI). The lower your quality, the worse the artifacts. Again, if you are never close enough to see artifacts a slight compression may be acceptable. All the textures I did for my Project Earth were saved in JPEG, but the compression was set on 100% quality (lossless) so my JPEGs were a bit large but WAY smaller than BMP or TGA files.

Glad to be of service...

Post your decal here so we can be sure it's not that. I still say if you scale the image to cover your object and make sure the scale percentages are the same in the X AND Y and it just covers the cone in the Y direction, when you apply the decal it should be fine. If you still have trouble, try making a brand new project, create just a quick cone (like I did) and import your image and make a new decal to get the hang of how it works.