jakerupert

Well, her`s what I got so far.. Any crits welcome. Wonder how anybody else is doing?

very nice modeling indeed, still it always escapes me , why so many people put so much effort into recreating things, that already exist and especially of which they don`t hold the copyrights instead of creating something of their own design... but maybe its similar fun like buiding a Revell model in plastics and a great exercise in modeling technics as well. Don`t intend to spoil that with my remark.

o.k. cool I ll be on a holidayvacation to Mallorca for two weeks now, so you will get a chance to go ahead. But I will show you my Santa, when I am back. See you soon ;>) Jake

>reinstall A:M somewhere else , rename your original exe then replace it by your new installed one. Guess I have to wait for 15g then.....

Hi all, Long time now, since we had a challenge .... so the idea occurred to me: Why not let`s make some minichallenge for "this time of the year"? Take or build your favourite chara-model, change him into a Santa Claus and do some very small animation with him like waving into the camera, ringing a bell, presenting some gift etc. at best include some gag and well that`s it. Should be fun and not to much work and we all would have some christmasgreetings to send to our friends and also maybe get some christmas props for everybody to use. By the way, somebody has some deer or elk, he likes to share? I would suggest a deadline of 15.12.09 so we can critic everything before the great event. What do you folks say?

I must admit, that I have the same problem for quite some time now. Neither zooming way in nor way out gives me the circle back. So I decided to live without magnetmode for the time being. Maybe its some bug in 15f that should be reported?

click near a cp on the spline, hit the commakey, then that spline gets activated then hit delete. To attatch the cps drag one cp over an other and right mouseclick them. The tool you are asking is the patch select tool- lick on your mesh with it and you will activate the valid patches with it.

I tend to run into slowdownproblmes at about 15.000 patches, so I guess you should be o.k. Have you tried to change from open GL to direct X or vice versa? Sometimes that helps.

Ha,ha, excellent stuff. The count somehow looks familiar...

>If you want to see my entry video for the Aug 1st model its at the link below. Its not much animation, just showing off the model. http://awp3d.com

>So are you saying all the bones should be in the main model? or should the bones be in each model and link them together within the action? I m afraid, if you want to use one rig (like TSM2 for instance) for the whole model , you will have to put all your model parts into one model. But a model gets "hard to handle " at about 15.000 patchcount (right click in model window see "file info" ) You could make a simple stickfigure proxymodel to test your mechanical rig before you implement it into the "real thing". If you are forced to use the assemblymethod with actionobjects you could still add a rig to your mainmodel (mabe just your mainsceleton) and move the parts in the actionobjects with posesliders for these specific actionobjects/models which you can accsess in the chor window. Or maybe animate the whole thing with posesliders for arms legs etc., just a workaround and no rig but might be enough for your purpose.

Thank you for all the very interesting suggestions. I will prepare a circleshaped decal first and then wait, what factory my customer will find and what these factorypeople will say, they will need further from me.

>Can you give more information regarding how it will be printed or applied? Will it be distortion-printed on a vacuum-formed shape, or is it a shrink-wrap (like you see on a lot of drink bottles)? so I guess that makes it the shrink-wrap alternative?

This time I have a pretty unusual question. Its somehow from the field of packaging design. I have to prepare an existing circleshaped 2D illustration to be able to be glued onto a reallife halfsphere smoothly. So it will have to be distorted somehow and I wonder if AM could help me here to find out how this distortion will have to look like and/or how it can be achieved. Has anybody ever done something like that? Any ideas that could be helpfull?

>Are you using Multi-pass rendering? I ran into this problem (15e) & using bump maps & fake rim light material, only when I rendered with the default (NO Multi-pass). When I rendered WITH Multipass - the bump maps showed up. But is this some "fundamental physics" thing or could this be altered in future versions of AM?

I have run into some difficulty with bumpmaping. When I apply it on a simple grey surface it works quite nicely with 150% But when I add some procedural parameters on that surface it no longer shows up. (Same is happening when I add a fake rim light to the whole model) It`s not supposed to be that way is it? What can I possibly be doing wrong? I am on PC AM15f

>Here's an article-like view of this topic. How do you create this kind of view?

NO!!!

>If you upload the project with the decal I could take a look at it if you want, to see if I am able to reproduce the result. btw, what version of A:M are you using? I found a cure. As soon as I switch multipass on even as low as just one pass, the artifacts disappear. (15f)

>Does the problem appear in final render as well?

I put some cookiecut decals on two patchplanes and get some artifacts as the cookiecut doesn`t seem to be completly transparent. I have checked the normals o.k., alphachannel is on in the tga decal. Any possible explanation, what might cause this and some help woould be highly apreciated. Win 15f

When I want to cut a simple hole, I just use a spline which creates a fivepointer on one side and a hook on the other.

>- Add transparency to the color map. (This can be done by cutting a checkerboard pattern out of the color map allowing the underlying image to show through) Could you post an example of this please? I was believing, that when I put a bumpmapdecal onto the model and later down in the hierarchy create a group with a procedural color, that this would ly ontop of this bumpmap and then provide the color. I also dont quite understand why colormaps and procedural mat-colored groups are handeled differently in this respect. But it seems to be the easiest aproach then, to just add a colored decal to the bumpmap, like I finally did in my posted example.

Found it! Seems, I just dragged the image on top of the model without applying it. That leaves just the question: Also: Can`t I add a color by adding a procedural material? Seems then that the underlying bumpmap just keeps the groupscolor grey. LippsBumped.bmp

Again run into trouble with decaling this time with a bump map not showing up. All is o.k., when I apply it planar in model window, but when I add an image in a flattening pose relationship, the bump is not showing up neither the colormap . Also I canot change the order by dragging the decals around. What can I possibly do wrong here. Also: Can`t I add a color by adding a procedural material? Seems then that the underlying bumpmap just keeps the groupscolor grey.