JTalbotski

Doesn't anyone use Marcel's Treeez plugin? I would (and will when it gets ported to OSX). Jim

Cool stuff, Matt! Your Gurly Girl is starting to look a LOT like Tina Turner with those dance moves and hair! Jim P.S.Firefox on my Mac didn't like your site very much but I saw everything fine with IE. Go figure.

Oh, yeah! It's good to see more of your work, David. Very nice! Did he miss getting picked up by a car at the beginning? Is that why he looked depressed? I love the snappy poses and little details like his toes wiggling when he jumps. I'm really looking forward to the final animation, Jim

Nice character! Looks like he can eat, too! Maybe have him leaning back to balance his belly. Jim

Looks very good! I can almost hear it coming down the street. Jim

I found that if I tweak the bias handles of the cp's on the timeline spline at an angle, I can get the thickness to be zero. I did that for the eyelashes that I added in this render. I did a few other little tweaks, too. Jim

Thanks, William. I did try that but the input number would always switch back to 0.01 once I hit enter. I could never get it to stay at 0. Maybe it's a Mac bug. I'll keep trying. Thanks all, Jim

Colin, Yes, I think that is very similar to what the dreamy photo does. The presicion of computer generated images can be too raw and cold looking, especially with skin, so I'm also looking forward to the ability to tweak renders in A:M. It will alleviate the required "post work" footnote that I sometimes forget to add. I'm trying to avoid the long nose look that I tend to give most of my characters, but maybe I went too far the other way here. I'll tweak the nose some more. Thanks, Jim

Hey, don't be sorry. And your correct, the head is too big. I've taken an older model and tweaked it substantially, but I'm only focusing on the head at the moment, so I haven't tweaked the body to match the head yet. Jim

Here's the raw render. The hair looks good right from the render, but I just prefer using the Dreamy Photo filter for the skin tones. It sort of mimics the SSS effects to a minor extent. I agree about the nostrils. Thanks! I would increase the head size and the density if my system could handle the load better. As it is now, trying to style the hair can be a slow process, waiting for the screen to redraw. I don't want it to get any slower. Thanks for the kind words and suggestions! Jim

Hey, that tree is dancing! I love the look to this project. Very retro-funky. Jim

Here's an update with some changes to the hair length, color and coarseness. A lot of the earlier coarseness was from my sloppy post work. There is still some roughness in the hair which will be taken care of by multipass. Jim

Thanks for the comments. I do have to confess, that I did a tint and bloom tweak in Photoshop, using the Dreamy Photo plugin from Auto FX. I think some of the transluceny of the hair is from that process. And some of it may be the face decal having hair painted on it that blends into the particle hair. Yes, the hair is pretty coarse, but unfortunately it's at it's smallest size right now. The decimal places in A:M will only allow 0.01" as the smallest size. Hmm, maybe I should try centimeters instead. Or just create large characters. And some of the aliasing was caused by me copying the character using the alpha channel and pasting her on a painted bg layer in Photoshop. Jim

Hi all, Here's something I've been working on in my spare time. I'm trying to go a little more realistic to see what I can do with the v11 hair. It's a pretty boring hairstyle at the moment, but I hope to give it some shape eventually. Jim

Ah, just as I feared ...another rant thread on the loose. Sigh.

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You've got a nice head model going there! Congrats. Trying to get a likeness, especially of an attractive person is very difficult. (It always easier to make an ugly model.) So don't put down what you've accomplished. To get the likeness takes a great deal of time, even if you use rotoscopes, which I will only use to get proportions right. Then I tweak and progressive render hundreds, if not thousands, of times to get the model looking like the real person. Sometimes what we think a feature looks like in our head is quite different than what our reference shows. So learn to really see what information the reference has to offer. Jim

Yowie! Beautiful! Great feeling of weight and balance and proper rocking motion. Did you study physics or is it just by eye? Thanks for sharing, Jim

Hey William, Great! The hair really makes a big difference. That is definitely King Kong now! One crit, the solid gray of his skin is looking a little fake to me. Possibly you could try adding some subtle color variations in the gray to simulate blood vessels or fatty vs. bony areas. Nice job! Jim

Hi Doug, This all looks great! It's good to see all your hard work coming together. I like the first image you posted. For some reason it reminds me of the Beatles/Peter Max/late 60's style of animation, which is cool. The second rocket ship landing clip is really good, too. And your main character is pretty funny. I'll keep an eye on this thread from now on. Jim

Hi Matt, The file is named STONES.mov, but Quicktime can't read it. If it's an avi, you might have to change the extension. I can't download the file because it's presented through a Flash page. Windows Media Player can't open the url to it either. This is on a Mac, by the way. Jim

Holy smokes! That's an amazing effort and a great short, Zach. Very funny! Congrats to you and Jeff! Jim

Very nice, Shaun! It's great to see some of your new work. High quality work as usual! Thanks for showing us. Hey, Stephen! (pequod) How about you? Do you have any new Briar Rose tests or clips? Jim

Okay, which one of you supplied the singing voice? Great quality, as usual. Thanks for giving us a look. Jim