pdaley

Rob - Good to be "back"! I'm getting back up to speed so I can mentor my 11 year old son. Doug - that'll work. Just a basic head will do the trick for this.

You might make a copy of what you're doing and put some bones in it.Don't worry about "if it's right" or not. You'll want to see what happens when you bend a joint and then decide if you're cool with that or if you want it to be smoother. (there's some other stuff in the middle there, but that's the high point)

Have you done any rigging on these guys yet?

Are you staying at a low patch count intentionally?

I just happened by the forum today and saw this thread as I snooped around the new forum. Even though I haven't been around here much of late, I thought I should say, "THANKS!" to Rodney and Mark and Rob and anyone else that still has any idea what Rodney was mentioning in his very kindly worded post. I still can't say if I can be a stready part of the community right now, but it is sure nice to see I'll be welcome back when I can.

Happy birthday, Mark!

Hey, thanks everybody!

Set the camera size to be the hi-def size that the client wants: 1080 or 720. This is a LOT bigger than DV size. You'll need a lot of RAM to do it, as well as a lot patience. NetRender was built for just this kind of job. As an aside, content is what the 'war' boils down to. Game consoles cloud the matter a little, but the number of studios aligned with blu-ray outweighs hd-dvd. Sony alone owns the rights to the old Columbia, Tri-star and MGM titles, not to mention the newer Sony branded stuff (Spider-Man). Don't know what MGM owns? Try James Bond. As hefty as the porn vote is, I think it was motivated by the fact that hd-dvd discs are cheaper to reproduce than blu-ray, not because of any concern over the superority of the disc. I think the mainstream content is going to win it for blu-ray on this one. Sony will be vindicated for the Beta debacle and Microsoft will have to spin why they will eventually retire their interest in HD-DVD.

HAven't you heard? HD-DVD is losing the format war.

you mean you are trying use the 'weathering' feature? I've never actually seen anyone do that. If it doesn't work it might be worth reporting as a bug to hash. If no one has used weathering in a while, then they might not actually know that it's broken.

Really great improvement there, Matt.You really challenged yourself with that background. Maybe a picture of your driveway would be a little easier to start.

Thanks! I just ran a pic of myself through simpsonizeme.com and tweaked it a little. So, I can't really take credit on it, but I will anyway.

It's very much the same as any mechanical modeling. Look at the cars that are included with AM. Not the cartoony ones. I mean the ones that Stian did. You can see that he has a lot of splines where he needs a lot of detail and only a few splines where he doesn't Here some ideas off the top of my head: 1. Bevel hard edges. They will look better when rendered. 2. Work from reference. Either try making a ship that already has some drawings and pictures out there, or draw your own. Either way, it's easier to work from that then trying to just come up with an idea in AM. 3. Add enough greeblies, nurnies and other little details to look good. Think of the Millenium Falcon. It's got a ton of little bits and parts the help add to its authenticity. 4. Use bump, normal and displacement maps for details that modeling would just be a totel pain to do. That's all I have for you this morning. Good luck.

Jon, Being able to enjoy little ironies is also a part of this board. Like me posting this pointless post. Welcome to the board!

Importing OBJs is a pain. First, it takes forever. The more edges and verts that need to be converted so splines and CPs, the longer it will take. Sometimes, it takes so long, you'd swear the computer was locked up. Second, the result will require reworking. The splines that get created will not be laid out in the continuous fashion that creates smooth models in AM. You'll have to figure out how to reconfigure them so that you can keep the shape, and also keep the splines laid out correctly. Third, materials will get messed up when you do all this reworking. You are better of importing it as a prop, but only if you don't need to change it at all and can live with simple transform animation. If you need to animate it with bones, make good rotoscopes of the OBJ in it's original program and use those to rebuild the model from scratch.