Paul Forwood

Shelton, when you groom the hair make sure that you turn off dynamics and reduce the density as low as you like, raising it when you need to check it's final look. Also use only four point patches on your emitter. That should help make grooming a bit less arduous. When you have hair looking the way you want it you can start playing with the dynamics.

Cool models, Shelton! PM looks too level headed for his name but perhaps there is another side to him, or maybe he has the super-human power to balance his own chemistry.

That looks really good, Mark! Nice suspension!

Very graceful, Nancy!

Amazing project to set yourself, Stian! You are the man to do it though. I'll be watching. All the best!

That first image looks like he could be related to Mr. Burns. Are we talkin' cowboys again? I know that Myron has some more fun songs of the "wild" west. Have fun!

You'll have a whole album animated before I have finished one song! So who's making who look bad? Good luck with it all!

I'm also unable to see the "Pass the Ball" topic.

A handsome couple!

Beautiful, Luuk!

Ha! HA!! That IS funny!

Nice one!

Very nice interaction there, Jaff!

Mad!!! But it it does fulfill the brief .

There is some very cool stuff going on in there! A bit heavy for my rather sluggish connection at the moment but maybe others, with faster broadband, can comment on that. It is fast once you have visited every part of the site because everything has then been cached but initially it does get mildly annoying waiting for the graphics to load. Nice, clean looking site though.

Thanks, Jirard. I enjoy seeing your progress too. Thanks to you too, Jaff. A:M may not have all of the bells and whistles that the big players have but it is still capable of producing some amazing work. It takes much time to know what you can and can't achieve realistically and that is where these forums are so helpful. Enjoy the journey! -------------- It's been a funny old week. I haven't moved ahead with Fishin', short of working a few thing out in my head. I am off to the science museum now to take my daughter to Wallace and Grommit's "A World of Cracking Ideas". My son will be coming back from university this afternoon, for Easter, and it will get a lot noisier around here so progress may be a little slow over the next few weeks. We'll see... I am going to have a break from thinking about the set for a while and start on some of the characters. There are quite a few so the sooner the better. I will attempt to update the blog over the weekend. Also I must write to Myron!!!

Very good indeed! Just watch his balance though. There are a couple of places where he would have fallen over but, hey, I've seen worse crimes done in professional animations. Bravo! Keep pumping!

Got it! Ha ha! Well done on putting up with the bull and getting on with your own vision! Next?

Two models, one of the human the other of the text. Create an action for the human shape that morphs the mesh into a mess. Create a second action that morphs the text from a mess into legible text. Drop these models into a choreography and move to a frame where the models should be broken, (the transition point), and align the objects. Drop the actions on their objects and set their "Active" properties so that the human object becomes inactive on the same frame that the text object becomes active, (the transition frame). Scrub through and tweak until satisfied. -------------- Edit: Sorry. Just read your post again. Transporter...as in Star Trek! Ohhhhh. You could use a volumetric effect on the models to create the fizz, (interference look), and fade one model in as you fade the other out.

My connection is way too slow today. I'll try again later. Congratulations on finishing!

He/she looks great, Nancy. If you invited that bird around to your house for tea and dancing you wouldn't have to worry about doing the dusting.

All good suggestions, Nancy! Thanks!

Thanks, Nancy. Don't worry about any lighting glitches in any of this early work. These are just renders done in the process of building the set and there will always be a million things that need fixing. Although I will be playing around with the lighting I won't be giving it too much attention until I have the set finalised. That could be take a few weeks. After that I can start building the characters and props, rig and texture them, animate them, etc., etc., and finally... I can tweak the lighting. That's a long way off yet. Sorry to disagree, Nancy, but you'd have to be blind to miss that. I'm not saying that you are blind but fog just doesn't work with particles as well as I would like. Why isn't the colour data from particle hair treated the same way as colour data from the geometry from which it sprouts? Doesn't make sense to me but perhaps there is some logical reason. I can work around it. I will just have to restrict the fogging to the farthest parts of the set, where no particles will be used.

I've got my ticket. Got my popcorn and got my sarsaparilla. Now let's see how those cowboys impress the girls.

Yes. All of the above. Both. Edit: (To clarify: the landscape is used as hair emitters and the hairs use hand painted tree images.) Not at all, Gene. Different strokes for different folks. Go with your flow. The energy is coming through loud and clear. As you get better at modelling, and as your focus alters, your work will show more and more polish, I am sure. I have quite a high standard for the look and feel of this piece and I want to push the envelope a little. We'll see just how much is achievable in the course of this production. Already I have had to lower my sights several times due to program glitches. Just look at the way alpha data, in the hair images, is treated by fog: AlphFogWoes3.mov The alpha data seems to be treated differently to the air around it, if you understand me. There also appears to be a problem where the alpha data of a hair in the foreground cuts through the colour data of a hair in the background. This creates a halo of background colour around the hair image which does not exist in the actual image. This can probably be avoided in most cases by compromising my original concepts and planning a route around the problem but ... (sigh)... I guess this is what Martin means when he says I have to adjust my expectations. I'm pleased that you approve, Myron.