MMZ_TimeLord

Two things to remember when you are cylindrical decaling.. 1. Make sure your horizontal and vertical scale are the same and the vertical scale just barely covers the area you want to decal. 2. Make sure that cylindrical mapping is selected and you DO NOT change the repetition. Cylindrical mapping will do this when it is applied so that you get a seamless texture on your object. Last thing to note, if you double click on your 'stamp1' after you have applied your decal, you will see how the model is mapped via the UV editor. When I did this with your texture it mapped properly onto my quick model of a nose, but your map is not seamless and I saw an ugly seam.

A set of three bones in between each of the loops on the rod could be your line going through there... with the dynamic chain on it... you can shrink the bones or expand them to make the line tight or loose. As to the line from the tip of the rod, you could do a similar dynamic chain, but it may have to be very long. Vern has good ideas along these lines although I'm not sure the cloth one would work, I've never tried a single spline with cloth applied, although it sounds very possible.

Korken mentioned that he needed to get the LED to look more convincing. So this flashlight has no lens, it is an LED flashlight therefore the LED is open. Right Korken?

Funny this should come up... one of my fellow MMZ members was working on Futurama at the time of its production... I'll miss that show...

Excellent work... the final render came out beautifully! Way to go Patrick!

Looks good so far... keep going! One thing of note... on the pupils, if you delete the center CP(s) and draw out a four point spline outside of the model and attach the two middle points to two points on the edge of the pupil that are a total of four CPs apart, you can create a four cp patch and make the front of the pupil flat. Once you have the four CP splines attached, you can delete the outer two CPs and then you have a single indpendent spline that bridges the gap straight across. Like so... [attachmentid=13805]

Awww... poor little guy... I'd let him in... Excellent animation! Great work again shaun!

That looks really nice! I especially like the way the rocks splash back down. The water looks really like water before the flood too... and looks like raging water when it comes. My only critique is the last rock falls a bit slow... Otherwise EXCELLENT work!

Okay John3D... I am officially blown away... again. I really need to start playing with sweeper...

That was a problem with the model on a specific A:M CD (I forget which one)... there is a a corrected model in Hash's site. Maybe that should be edited into the first post of the thread so that folks will be aware of it immediately. Other bugs/model discrepencies like this should also be edited into the first post so that beginning students don't have to struggle, thinking it's something they did wrong.

Yeah, check the Project Earth thread for further developments... back in 2003 when I originally built this model, I made the mistake of cylindrically mapping the decals... DOH! The fix will be posted in the next release of the models.

Found this thread (dunno how I missed it) did you get this lovely android to print? If so, do you have a final render to share?

I think that we could recommend specific codecs (standard ones) that allow for good compression. Resolution recommendations for each project are probably a good idea too. Based on machine specifications of course too. i.e.- I rendered most of my stills in my choreography window and just did a screen capture (Alt+PrtScreen on PC) and pasted into Paint Shop Pro and saved with a high quality setting (Any paint program that can save JPG is fine, GIMP is a freeware Photoshop clone for example). For the animated tutorials I generally went with 320x240 or 640x480 and used QuickTime with Sorensen 3 compression on low. (Had to resample the sound bite for 'Can you say that' so the quicktime would come in at under 1MB. I don't like AVI files as much, so someone else would have to make a recomendation on the codec for that one. If you are running on a slower CPU, say around 1Ghz or slower or you don't have time to wait for renders, then 320x240 stills (size your choreography window down) and 160x120 movie files would be acceptable too. Should be about a quarter of the render time. As to the 'simple' things such as Robert-Jank was mentioning on getting the keyframe. A lot of these little tips are in the video turtorials. Maybe they need to be compiled into a 'quick-tip' list along with the latest and greatest keyboard shortcut list (I know I can never find one when I need it!)

Excellent John! I'll have to start using that again...

Yeah, but you know some nut (like me) is gonna get close to Mt. Everest or something with the camera and complain that it doesn't have any height.

Julian, You must have the search gift, I was looking for those images most of the evening last night on visible earth... GEEZ... I'll compile those with the land, ice and sea color original images... for all 12 months of the year in different target resolutions. Thanks again for the links Julian!

Quick update... I got all the images I need to create the set for the project. I've given up on trying to find totally free images that are ready for putting on a globe at the resolutions I want (up to 4096x1536). So, I'm going to make royalty, license free ones (with the appropriate Terms of Use agreements from NASA and the National Geophysical Data Center, yes I checked they just want credit for the original data) just for all the Hasher's out there... okay everyone else too... but just this once. I've already gotten the displacement/bump map converted from a colored topographical map. Now I've got to color the oceans properly from another image from the Visible Earth site and last, create the specular image. Then, I'll re-render this thing, make multiple projects with different times of the year, and resolution targets and zip it all up and send it to Hash (if they still want it for the next extras CD).

Thanks for the search on that Julian, I was at work (oops four letter word there! ) and didn't have time to dig into it any further. I'll see about getting the NASA ones to work for the project too... Thanks for the links! EDIT: Funny, after looking over this catalog again, I realized that I have the city lights at 30k and the clouds at 8192 already and that is what was used (although I sized down the city lights some). I'll grab one of the color JPGs (or maybe all of them!) and include those in my project along with a readme to give credit to NASA!

Here's the rub to putting this on ANYTHING that hash will be providing WITH it's product or to promote it's product. The site where I got my initial images is: http://www.space-graphics.com This run by a graphics hobby artist in Italy. The 'Rub' comes here. So, Hash Inc. would have to work out the legalities of putting his older and lower resolution bitmaps in the provided project for general consumption. I have used them to date with no problems because it's for personal use. Putting them into even a 'Bonus CD' that anyone can download but also comes as part of the product would be a 'Business' use. I am now saddened...

Thanks for the comment Ken... I'll be happy to donate the project. A little tweaking left to do, but I'll post again when I'm finished and I'll put the project up on Hash's FTP (incoming directory) if they want.

This was done in V13 Alpha 4... There was a boo-boo when I attempted a 2048x1536 render last night... I'll post both let you figure out which is which. But before you see the finished works, take a look at my project window... note the texture sizes involved here. (And, no, I don't think I can reproduce what happened... I'm clueless. It occured both render to file and in the chor window until I restarted A:M) I will attempt to re-render at 2048x1536 or higher tonight and post the results.

Thanks Anders! I'll put that in my V11.1i install. I do keep at least 3 or more working versions of A:M around for just such an occasion!

I want that footprint plugin!!!

That's SOOO awsome... heheeh... I KNEW that hiding some patches would help... now we need that 'bake'.

Dan, I don't have the close-up images, but I have the 8000+x8000+ images of earth (bump, color and specularity + cloud layers, and city lights) I'll have to post an image in the showcase when I get it re-rendered with the new displacement maps.