Paul Forwood

What version of QT are you using John? The recent movies that you have posted play for me but then they freeze my PC and I have to use the task manager to close QT. This causes any other open windows to shut down too. (I haven't upgraded "Quit Time" for several versions because all kinds of issues started to appear.) I appreciate your tireless testing of new versions of A:M. I like to know what is working and what is out of action. Thanks.

This sounds like an interesting and challenging project. The only criticism I have to offer is that the girl's neck is picking up alot of reflected green from the green screen. This is a lighting problem but perhaps you could use some careful colour swapping, in post, to eliminate the green. Good luck with it all.

Congratulations on getting the job! Glad to see that you are keeping your project active!

Beautiful model, Al!

That big boy has been doing some work! You too, Stian. Excellent!

Nice work, Ben! That is the most complete piece that I have seen so far which uses Zign Track. You've got to love those archives! I have started something similar but I'm a bit side tracked at the moment.

My guess would be a Liebherr PR752 bulldozer, vintage 1999. but then I'm only guessing. PR752

Amazing as always, Stian! It's good to see that you are getting into a bit of grunge now.

Absolutely! Don't give up! (Unless of course you have another more pressing project that will outshine this one). I love what you've got going on this animation.

Yeah. Much more natural. Seeing both versions together the top one is more eye catching but the bottom one is harmonious so I guess the one that you choose depends on what the image is for and what it is promoting.

That does look great! Though I wonder if the colour of the balls is just a little too saturated. I know that you can get very vibrant colours on billiard balls so maybe, as Luuk has said, it is just the brightness. I'm not sure but anyway it is another first class image from you, Stian. I like the new website too. Did you finish the crash landing sequence that you were working on?

Awesome!

I just had pre-smoothing for the head and neck set to 1 or 2 and everything else set to 0. I have tried exporting with higher values for the neck and head now and have kept the mouth smoothing to a minimum. With smoothing set to 10 for the neck and head the results are much better. Here is an example. (No eye motion in this one): Smoothies A00 (Google Video has compressed everything out of this video. It must be due to the non-standard proportions. Play it in full-screen to see the difference that high smoothing values make to head jitter.) Next I am going to concentrate on using Zign Track's Pose Driving Actions

Here is an example of a simple flour sack which uses sim cloth to add some dynamics: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=234884 There are only five bones in the rig. A small central body bone, two arm bones and two leg bones.

Ooooh! Very nice! It would be even better with some music and maybe a soft voice introduction to what the Lorentz Attractor is.

Well, I know that I said I would use pose actions for the eyes this time but I'm enjoying using bone actions too much at the moment. This is getting closer now. Plenty of weighting issues to iron out and modelling to finish and textures to do though. (No sound - Just pulling faces) It seems that the grooming vanished from the hair somehow.

I agree, Luuk. I will try using poses next and add some smoothing too. In the meantime here is a render which shows the eyelid motion closer to the original. I Wonder 2 I was reading from a sheet of paper and my eyes were down most of the time. I need to set up some kind of auto que on a monitor so that I can read it without my glasses.

It works on A:M 14 models so I'm pretty sure that it is still working with A:M 15 models.

This all looks excellent, Mark, and I'm really enjoying watching your progress. How long do you expect this short to be?

I'm just trying tracking the eyelids and exporting as a second action. It works but this example didn't have the bones set up quite right. Also the sync is out by a few frames. Still worth a look though, maybe. I wonder. I have tried to view this on Google video but it isn't playing well for me so can you let me know if you are unable to view it. I have a better version in the works so I will replace it when it is ready.

Well, it turned out to be a little glitch in the software which was affecting the motion but it seems to be fixed now. Thanks, Luuk! This is my first semi-successful test using Zign Track to drive my own poses: Magic Poses 1 I haven't tweaked the poses at all so I am sure that I will be able to bring more life to this face when I do. I like the fact that I am able to bring more forward/backward motion to the mouth using this method but I think that I still prefer the bone driven action export to this pose driver action. That view may change as I get more comfortable with this method though. I need to add a pose for "F/V" and animate the tongue. That should help. Then I want to play with exaggerating everything. --------------------- Edit: One thing that bothers me about my pose driver tests is that my model has picked up jitter in his hands and eyes. I assumed that I must have touched the pose sliders for those parts while setting up my facial poses but I have looked at all the poses and there is no sign of any other pose being active. I'm sure it is just something stupid that I have done.

Richie, you don't put the BVH rig in your model. A BVH file comes in to A:M with a BVH rig. You must constrain the rig in your model to the BVH rig. Your rig then gets puppeted by the BVH rig.

Oh! He doesn't say, "Bill", he says, "Phil". Oh, well. I laugh alone...again. (What a dodo!) The lag looks very good, David!

The average time is the average time A:M is taking to render one frame of your animation based on the total frames rendered so far. I'm guessing that you have lots of hair/particles, lights, reflections,sss, or effects in your animation. Whatever. There are many things that will turn rendering into a long and anxious wait. Try to elliminate as many of those things as possible to get rendering down to something that you can live with. Two days isn't too long to wait if the render turns out well but you will soon wish that you had optimised your project more.

If you are emitting the hair from hidden geometry you could use seperate geometry for each side of the parting. This will give you a clean parting without influencing the hair on the other side. You should also be able to do it by assigning the hair material to two seperate selection groups but I can't confirm that without testing it. With two selection groups you can hide all the other geometry which will leave you with just one side of the parting to groom. Repeat for the other side. You could also do it by just stitching in a couple of splines to create a row of patches that don't have hair applied to them. Obviously the spline would be very close together, the width of the parting. Hope that helps.