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brainmuffin

*A:M User*
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Everything posted by brainmuffin

  1. Here's a rough animation test. I wanted to see how the hair moves, and how long it would take to render. (about ten minutes per frame).WalkA.mov Here's a look at the project: The plan is to update the print ad, and try for a 15 second animated spot. This is a personal projcet, I wasn't hired by Rumple Minze to do this. I just wanted to see if I could put together a professional quality project.
  2. Yup, it's MuHair. I had to turn the specular properties way down, and it still may be a bit too shiny for me. But it still looks better than the other shaders.
  3. Okay, I took some of the yellow out. There's still a little, but it's a lot closer to polar bear white.
  4. Thanks, everybody! Robcat, you're right, I must've missed it the second time around. I did learn a lot about rigging doing this. Basically, I just studied the Eggington leg on the ARM (That's a weird sentence) and based the rig on that. The spine in my bear is a variation, and there's a null that the first spine bone is aimed at. That's why it curls up when the hip is moved forward. Polar bears have hollow fur. It's how they keep warm The yellow comes from a particular breed of algae that grows in their fur. This bear is only slightly yellow. Polar bears can get very yellow. The pristine white polar bears like in "The Golden Compass" are a rarity.(But then so are polar bears in general...) It's possible that back when they actually had a habitat, the extreme cold may have kept the algae at bay. I may fiddle with the fur some more, and try to make it whiter before the final rendering, though. Here's an updated render with the fur on the paws fixed. It wasn't dense enough or long enough for my taste.
  5. I've been busy with this. Roughly 24 hours modeling, 8 UV Mapping & Texturing, 12 rigging. Here's the result so far: No matter what I've tried, I haven't been able to get the front legs to look right. I think I'm going to have to make them a separate group with their own hair system, so that I can control the density separately. I've been trying to hold off on that, because I don't want to re-groom, but I guess I I'll have to. I built the rig myself, which wound up being easier than I thought. I couldn't use TSM because bears don't have the back legs of a quadruped, they have back legs like a biped. So, with some trial and error, I managed to come up with a decent rig. Mirror Bones & Mirror Constraints came in extremely handy. Here's a look at the rig in action: Rig_TestA.mov So, what I have left to do on this bear is: fix the fur on the front paws, create some face poses, and an HUD to control the poses, and that's about it. I'll probably do some more tweaking on the fur material, too. Then I have another character to model, texture, rig and groom, and a couple of environments to set up.
  6. They also get cooler as they recede into the background. A thin blue fog would add that haze effect. Also, if you add some variance to the flowers, not just a different view or two, but also some slight color and height variation, it'll break up that unnatural, double-vision-blurry feel. Looks good so far. Does the lion have a hair material too?
  7. Actually, I put the For Sale sign in because I didn't have time for other "Little Touches" like drapes, furniture, patio furniture, a BBQ, kids toys in the driveway, Etc. Basically to explain the emptiness... Here's the Sign, BTW:
  8. Ok, This was my entry: I made it from Floor Plans that I found on the web. Had I known there would be so many great entries, I'd have used some more elaborate plans, but then I probably wouldn't have had time to finish. Here is the model with no textures, just AO: Nearly all the textures came from CGTextures.com (I believe I used 5 images total). The background image is a photo I took here in the Hudson Valley. I had planned to do some landscaping with plants, but something went wrong somehow with the choreography file, and Cookie cuts wouldn't render right. I tried to reproduce the results in test choreographies, but sometimes I could, sometimes I couldn't. I didn't have time to figure it out and model trees and bushes by the deadline.
  9. Nope. IF you had Illustrator, It has a way to turn scanned line art into vector art which could be saved as an AI file and used with the font wizard. If you have Photoshop, you can use Photoshop's splines to create an AI file, which could be used with the Font Wizard. But you won't have an actual 3 dimensional model, only an extruded 2 dimensional drawing.
  10. My main criticism is that everything looks so new. Too new. The chalk is fresh from the package (Right brand, though!) The felt looks like it's never been played on, and the balls haven't a scratch on them. Some sort of a scratch map would be great on the balls, even if only lightly. I've NEVER gotten chalk that new at a pool hall. And most of the time it seems like it's almost all used up. So again, even if only slightly, the chalk should be a bit deeper. Even the best kept felt usually has some wear around both dots, and a track worn around by the bumpers. I didn't say anything about the colors because, A, I've seen color variations even in the same pool hall, and B, the colors that are common here may not be the colors that are common in Europe, so IDK. Other than that, it's a fantastic image.
  11. Yeah give double wall a try. from JL3D's test, it looks like a double wall might forgive most of the spill through, (if not all) especially if the mesh is fairly dense.
  12. Personally, I'd like to see him struggling a little when she grabs him. Sure, he's getting what he wanted, but it's still coming in an unexpected way. There should be a little flailing on his part before he realizes exactly what's happening. I've got to say, I'm inspired to build my own stick figure to play around with!
  13. If you need the stamp rotated, before you stamp hit 'T' then hold down CTRL and drag. You can rotate the camera plane before you stamp. I remember a lot of talking about a new UV editor, but I don't know if it came about.
  14. You're better off hiding everything but the geometry you want to stamp, and then flattening the geometry in an ACTION to stamp it. try to get the geometry organized the way you want in the action, BEFORE you go into the UV editor. The rectangular selection in the UV editor is really just there for moving stamps around and scaling them.
  15. I hope so. I paid good money for TSM2, and I'd like to at least rig one figure with it... I'm taking a break from this guy for a little bit, though. I need time to *win* the architectural challenge for February... I'll be back to him soon though.
  16. you might also be interested in A:MTerraform: http://www.tachyonburst.com/software/amterraform/
  17. I managed to find a few hours today to work on this guy. He now has legs! I don't think I'll have a problem with the knees or the ankles, but the hips are always a bit of a problem rigging for me. Any suggestions? Also, I'm planning to use TSM to rig him, does it work in 14c?
  18. Two great books on cartooning, and must-haves for character designers: Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm How to Draw Cartoons for Comic Strips by Christopher Hart The first one is old, it was originally published in the '40s, so some of the clothing and hairstyles are out of date. But the book is so chock full of information and inspiration it's worth every penny. It covers so many subjects and so many different styles that it's nearly an encyclopedia of cartooning info. It even has a huge, cross-referenced guide to various expressions! The second one only covers a few simple styles, but it too covers a variety of subjects, including quite a few standard cartoon animals. The styles covered in this book are fairly easy to model in A:M, and with this book and a scanner, you should have enough reference for quite a few models. I was planning on doing this myself, but I havent had much free time lately.
  19. If I'm not mistaken, though, you can create something with photoshop splines and export it as an .ai file. I'm fairly certain I've done this...
  20. Couldn't you have saved a TON of time just making the image map in Photoshop? I think I could knock that out in like twenty minutes...
  21. You could probably get away with removing one ring from around the eye.
  22. Taking C&C into consideration, I've made some adjustments to the head: And, yes, Phatso, it's just like laying out guidelines before drawing. Only these are 3d guidelines. Just quickly roughing out form with as few splines as possible. The head, hands, chest, waist and feet are all the same deformed sphere, and the arms and legs are the same cylinder. I'm going to do the hands next, and I plan to rough out a proxy in the same fashion when I do. In the past, I've had problems getting hands to look the way I want, and by the time I've got a full, hi-patch hand made, it's too cumbersome to start tweaking.
  23. Thanks! I'll fix that spline in a bit. The body is just a temporary proxy. I'll be modeling a more detailed geometry over top of it.
  24. I'm trying some new techniques with this. My eventual goal is just to finish modeling, rigging, and texturing him. I just want to complete a character, for once. I didn't do any rotoscopes, I'm modeling everything on the fly. I started off with a rough proxy so that I had the proportions I want nailed down before I started: With the head, I did things a little different too. I made the eye and the mouth by lathing splines, and re-shaping them. The nose I started by lathing a nostril, duplicating it, attaching the two, and then modeling the bulb and bridge. I did the eye first, then the nose, and attached them, then the mouth. I'm sorry I didn't take screenshots. Here's the head in its current, almost completed state: And here's an AO render of the head: I'll post my progress here, and hopefully I'll finish him...
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