Paul Forwood

Happy birthday, Stian!

What about a crumpled heap of bungee jumper in the background, balanced on his head, teetering a little. Then when your main character climbs the ladder the figure in the background topples over? Very little animating for the extra dimension.

Terrific! I particularly like the posture and acting when he says, "Well... it's dead exciting". I'm not so sure about the gestures when he says, "Let 'em fly", but that is probably just because I would expect him to make an upward gesture there. Of course from his pov he would be watching the bungie jumpers fly beneath him so you really do have him gesturing in the correct direction. Best of luck with voting!

5 point patches are very stable these days which is just as well because they are pretty much unavoidable.

Cool! Newton physics? Lights! Lots of flashing lights.

Wowzers, Fuchur! You did a great job on that cow, the anatomy and the effects! Nice, clean and well illustrated transfer of information.

At this resolution I prefer A for it's clean sharpness, though the aliasing on the grill is rather obvious. B just looks like it has had a little gaussian blur applied. You could get the same effect much faster by bluring the frames in PS. I thought multipass was supposed to have some intelligence to it, focusing more on highlights and edges but this just looks like the whole image has been blured, at the cost of much higher render times.

Oops! Thanks for clearing that up, David! Petokosun, sorry about that. As Robert has said, don't use the Animation codec unless you want uncompressed movies. I usually render to QT (Sorenson3) for all my test rendering and TGA sequences for finals.

There are many formats and codecs available, depending on what you have installed on your machine, but I believe A:M defaults to "Animation" when first installed.

Beautiful model, as always, Eric, but... 49 passes... and aliasing around the lighter areas like that!!!? What does it look like with 1 pass, for comparison? I very rarely use more than three passes, because I can't stand waiting that long, and if 49 passes doesn't eliminate aliasing then what is the point?

You've got some lovely modelling going on here, nino banano! I love the new creature with the BIG eyes!

Absolutely! Here is a rough for another part of my "Pass The Ball" contribution: BoyHides_A00b.mov This is just a proxy set and some of the poses still need tweaking. I had the ball working well when I closed this project the other night but when I opened it again something had changed and I spent a few hours tweaking the poses to get them back. As you can see the mouth poses are still not where they should be. This is something that really needs to be fixed in A:M. I assume that it is something to do with A:M's reluctance to update in Actions and Choreographies. Even though I save and reopen projects to force them to update I think that there are some things that don't update properly until you shut down and reboot. The spacebar doesn't seem to refresh everything. Anyway, it is what it is.

Ah, yes! Is that Strauss I hear?

Ha! Nice one, Myron!

There are no particle attractors in A:M so you would have to fake it by creating the effect in two or three parts and then compositing them together. Much depends on how much detail is required in the shot. If you have an apple that you want to disintegrate into particles and blow across to a new location and then condense into an orange the effect could be achieved by obscuring the emitting object with particles as you fade the object out. Do the same thing for the apple and the orange, reverse the footage for the orange and composit with another particle cloud in the middle to blend the two parts together.

Can you explain a little more, Robert? How can I correct the path to a bvh file and would that actually have any effect as the data should all be located in the bvh container? Each of these bvh containers has it's own full collection of keyed bones. They all hold their own copy of the data. Perhaps it is necessary to convert Actions with BVH data so that when the project opens it doesn't automatically import a new set of data into a new bvh container. I don't know though. Yeah. That wouldn't surprise me. Thanks for the encouragement, Myron, and for the other song too! ----------- Here is another rough for the Pass the Ball collaboration. I have a slightly more advanced version but it is over 10MB so I'll tweak it a bit more and then send it to Matt with the other/s. Are these PTB contributions all due next week? I better check that. Ball_B_Bounce_A00_10secs_.mov

I had some problems with the rig so I had to go back and start again. That put me back a little so all I've got for you at the moment is the prototype bug from which all others will mutate. These bugs will just give the camera something to follow as it sweeps through the first 35 seconds of intro. They will help take the emphasis off of the landscape, enabling me to stop worrying about it for now.

A:M exports quite well to both 3DS and Obj format. Here you can see my alien model in XSI: Alien_360_rotation.mov This was exported as a 3DS model and imported into XSI. Nothing has been altered and the mesh is pretty good, though the bias isn't exactly as you you would see it in A:M. Obj files are good too but I find that they sometimes have splines running in places that don't make sense and this means more cleanup work. Sometimes they are just too scrambled. 3DS is the most reliable I find.

Ha! I like the ending! Morph was the British equivalent of Gumby. I don't know which came first.

Looks pretty good to me, Mark, though I agree with Michel that for such a relaxed walk his arms could could relax more too.

Nice Teddy, Chris! Being a replica of your son's Teddy do you intend to have some fun with live action footage? I sure would. The hair glitch on the foot definitely looks like the problem you get when using 3 point and 5 point patches as hair emitters. You could remove the offending patches from your emitter group and then insert a small mesh of 4 point patches inside his foot to emit the hairs in that area. You could also compromise your model a little and change the layout of splines to only include 4 point patches. It's a bit of a catch 22 situation. Are you using MuhHair? MuhHair has a number of properties that affect the speculars. Have you tried turning the Blend value down to 0% in both the diffuse and specular properties. I believe that is what they should be set to for short hair. You could also try turning down the primary and secondary specular values and then gradually bring them up until the desired shinyness is reached. Just thoughts. Anyway, great looking Teddy! Hope to see him in action sometime.

Myron, no fish yet but I am working on a few insects for your song. I'll post something later. Fish aren't biting at the moment...

Funny coincidence #1: Last week I posted my caveman with BVH motion here in this thread. The following day there was a knock at the door which turned out to be two Jehova's Witnesses. We had the usual conversation which led to talking about evolution and mutations. I usually enjoy these conversations, if they don't go on too long, and this was no different. Before they left they insisted that I take one of their books. The book is titled, "Life - How did it get here", and is more than 150 pages of evidence, from various sources, puting forward the argument for creationism. Before we parted company it crossed my mind that I had my caveman model open on my computer and that I should ask them to come to see what a funny coincidence this was. I thought better of it. I accepted the book and promised to read it and then they left. I took the book into the kitchen and just flicked through the pages to see what I had let myself in for and noticed that the corner of one page had been neatly turned over. I naturally opened the book at that page which turned out to be the first page of chapter 7: "Ape-Men - What Were They?". The top of the page is illustrated with a picture of a man contemplating a picture of an apeman. Ha! He looks a little like me contemplating my caveman model. Wow! That's a cool coincidence! In the past week I made a few improvements to the animation of the caveman's companion, the creature that leaps onto his chest/shoulder. When I made this proxy model I had it in mind that it would be a lemur-like creature but with a very colourful coat. I thought a prehistoric lemur would make a perfect pet for this guy and would have the right amount of flexibility to handle the rapid movements that would be required as he scrambled around trying to fit in with the bvh motion of the caveman. The proxy remains a proxy at the moment but I will get back to it sometime. Coincidence 2: I noticed this news story yesterday:Prehistoric Lemur Not wanting to start the old creationist/evolutionist debate again in these forums. Certainly not in this thread! Let that happen in another thread, if you really must. But beware! It always ends in tears. I just thought it was an interesting collection of events, representations of opposing views, and which relate directly to the characters I have been working on over the past week and the stories that could be told. It was like having representatives of both views tapping me on the shoulder to say, "Hey, don't forget about our point of view". The coincidence will stay with me whenever I work on those characters.

Very nice indeedy!

Thanks, David and Matt. Just trying out some antennae. I'm not sure if I'll keep them yet. I tweaked the rig a little but I think that I made the foot problem worse. I do have an old copy to go back to if I completely mess it up. I have noticed that there is a glitch with BVH files in A:M 15e. It looks similar to the problem with rotoscopes where they seem to multiply every time I open a project. There is actually only one BVH file in the project but look how many there are in the PWS. Any thoughts?