gra4mac

If the spline is smoothe in wireframe mode but not in shaded, that is becsuse of the onscreen resolution. You can change the onscreen resolution by using the pageup/pagedown keys. I assume this works in 8.5.

Looks good, nice motion. I'm glad to hear the OSX beta is coming along.

Looks like I was mistaken about James being dead. I thought I had heard it, somewhere, but just did a quick sarch on Google and he seems to be alive, Sorry if I caused any upset. Thanks for the comment on the walk Godfrey, the bug is walking on it's knees. I need to fix that.

Hi smudge. This is awsome looking work and I hope you keep us updated on your progress.

Thanks for the feedback Saun and Ken. I will try a larger and more cartoony/human head. In A Bug's Life they did have eyebrows and they blinked too, I think. They did a good job of characterizing the bugs, but then they have had a lot of practice. I would probably have an easier task if I used a more characteristic bug like an ant or ladybug, and one that wasn't black, although, I'd love to get James Earl Jones to do the voice, if he wasn't dead. However, I chose the Ground Beetle because it's big and common around here, and the point of this is to show benificial bugs, like ground beetles and ladybugs, as good guys in the garden. Hmm, maybe a western theme, or not.

It's late and I'm tired so I'll get to the point. I'm trying to make this bug character that has an expressive face yet is still recognizable as a ground beetle. I made the face lighter so the facial features, and especially the mouth, were visible. I got the idea from studying A Bug's Life. Overall, I'm hapy with the results, but I would love some suggestions on how to make the face more expressive. I think I should make the mouth bigger, but should it have eyelids that blink and eyebrows? Any other comments or suggestions would be great. Here is the link: bug test

Thanks for confirming that this works ZachBG. I feel so pleased with my self for figuring it out. I need to tell somone else. Hay Mom! guess what I figured out... No not that kind of dope. Never mind.

I found I got a satisfactory range of mouth movemant. I am not doing photoreal stuff so close is good enough. I don't think you could lip read it. I hope to have a clip to show later today. I did a quick render test and the 3 pose method rendered about 15% faster than the PB phoneme version.

Hi. I'm working on a lip sync segment and I have a question on how others do the syncing. I stared with 3 +/- mouth poses, smile/frown, open/closed, and ooo/aaa, then used these to make the 9 Preston Blaire phonemes. After creating the dope sheet, I found it took a lot of tweeking to get it looking good and I got realy confused trying to adjust all the channels. What I ended up doing is not using a dope sheet and just animating to the sound track using the 3 basic mouth poses. This worked better and was much faster; lesson learned. I am just wondering how others do their lip syncing.

Looks like a neat project. The only adice I have about the cape is to consider not using cloth. I have tried several times to get cloth to work as a cape and never suceeded. The advice I got at the time was to animate by hand. Maybe dynamic constraints could do it, but you would need v10.5 for that. Good luck.

I finally got my first tree made. BTW, Marcel the pluing is great. It has been an interesting ride. I finally got a PC, so I used the PC version in V 10.5,. I've given up on A:M on the Mac. However, I wanted to use v 11 hair and I only have the Mac alpha 8. Also, PS elements doesn't do alpha channels, so I got GIMP on the PC to make the leaf hair. It's not a great tree, but I learned a lot about working in Windows and how to transfer files between Macs and PCs; the best way is to get a USB flash drive.

Looks like the treez are slowing down a bit. I was hoping some of the Mac users would show some stuff, but so far nothing. Personally, as a Mac user who really wanted to play with treez, I was hoping to get the treez plugin for V 10.5 not the OSX version. Fussy. The thing is, the OSX version is really slow on my machine and the interface flickers generally making it a pain to work with. Randy, if you are there, I'd get down on my kneez and eat all my peez if we could pleez get treez for the OS 9.2 version?

Here are a few leaf scans done by me that are royalty free and available for anyone to use, if you want them. Sorry, no alpha channel.

You guys sure are making a lot of neat trees. I really like the furniture and Nancy's latest looks like an under water scene with coral. Makes me want to go get a PC so I can play. I'll post some leaf scans too. Keep up the great work.

The tree plugin looks awesome. I would love to give it a try, but alas I use a Mac. I sure hope that once it's finished we get a copy ported.

I think this the general idea.

How does the surface look whith the 5 pointers? It might look ok, but you can't tell from a wireframe.

That is a very cool looking car. I'm looking forward to seeing more work for your short and the finished film. Watch out for speed bumps though.

I know you have rotos of Gollum, but I thought it would be usefull to post some images for comparison.

I worked on the hair and like it better,although, I may change the colour. I stuck the head on a body so I can start animating her. I may change the clothing and the rig needs some work, but it's nice to see her pose. I don't know if there are styles for anime clothing, but I guess I'll have a look around. Still looking for comments.

Thanks for the feedback Rodney and Paul. I need to work on the hair to get a more natural look. I'm using Voices of a Distant Star as my guide for the type of look I'm after, for the amazing backgrounds and the frugal characters. I have a ways to go yet.

I'm working on ananime inspired head, and looking for some input. I have in mind that it will be a young girl, but I want to use the same head, with changes, to make other characters. I'm fairly happy with the face, but I'm not sure about the hair. I want it to render quickly and be easy to animate blowing in the wind. Any suggestions would be great.

Hi nerrazzi. Im' very impressed by your car models and really liked seeing the WIP shots of the Subaru. If you ever had the inclination to put a tutorial together, I would love to see it. I have a lot of trouble keeping the surface smoothe. As for the Lamborghini rotos, if you could find a model kit , the instructions might have the ortho images you need. You could also make the model, then scan it. Also, some of the images on the sites listed above are very close to what you need, could you not alter them in PhotoShop to get them close enough? Keep up the great work.

This is interesting. Is there a way to get the trees on the slopes to stand upright? It looks odd with all the trees perpendicular to the surface.

3ivx plays some avi and divx clips, and is a QT plugin. It lets us Mac users see more of what the PC folks do.