Fuchur

Of course I am doing them if someone has a problem and it is often just easier showing people what they can do than trying to explain it by words... I will have a page on my new webpage where I will point to all of these little tutorials here, so that these informations are not lost somehow. Bitte bitte Jake... immer wieder gern *Fuchur*

no Shaggy at all. nose and mouth yes are parts though. Maybe Nigel (the old fellow in the suit) for the nose? *Fuchur*

Is the light in the bulb? If so, try placing it a little bit under the bulb. It may help. You can although try to change the falloff and the coneangle a little bit (just a few degrees). This may help too. *Fuchur*

Be sure to buy a 3d connexion-product. Any other driver isnt supported. So an option would be the Space Pilot or Space Pilot Pro. The smallest possible 3d-mouse available for under 100 dollars is the space navigator. It is available in a personal and a commercial edition. Personal is only for personal use but other than that has the same functionallity like the commercial one. Commerical One 90 Dollars, Personal One 55 Dollars. (April, 18th 2009, http://www.novedge.com/brands/5) See you *Fuchur*

No Problem *Fuchur*

There are several different possibilities to archieve that depending on which version you own. You could do it with a baked texture which could than be animated like I showed you before. For that use "Surface-Baking" with your material applied, delete the material and blend the texture to the base-color. However this isnt the best way to archieve such a thing but it would work out. 3 other possibilities are discussed in this little tutorial-video I am doing here. Sorry for the bad english... and the bad audioquality sometimes. It is because my computer is old (10 min, about 24 MB, download is zipped, H264 mp4 - needs VLC or Quicktime to be viewed) See you *Fuchur*

Actually any 3dconnexion-product will be supported. Steffen implemented the driver if I am not wrong. These can be found here: http://www.3dconnexion.com/ *Fuchur*

No... materials can easily be changed. Just the surface-options "Diffuse Render Shader", "Ambiance Render Shader" and "Specular Render Shader" (last entries under any Surface-Properties) shouldnt be changed. At least not to another shader. Shader-attributes arent that critical, just the shader itself. I dont think there are many people who do use the shader-attributes at all so... Most seem to be happy with the Standard-Shader (I would say it is a special kind of Phong-Shader, but I dont know exactly). *Fuchur*

Totally easy, have a look at this little video... -> Tutorial: Animate Decal-Image or Color by Pose (about 4 MB, use Quicktime or VLC to view) Most important: Use the Relationship-Action and the Show More Than Driver-Button! If you want to blend different images, use the same technik as in the video to blend between both. See you *Fuchur* PS: Don't try to change shaders with this method... that will very likley result in a crash of A:M. Everything else should be changeable.

I really don't think there has been a change in porcelain material - but here it is anyway Thank you Nancy... yes you are right, it seems to be the same but one difference: Yours had 100% as normal weight and mine had default. (I think default is 0%). However I reduced the normal weight a bit and at 85% it isnt visible but it is a little bit smoother (most smoothness will be archieved by 0%). So it helped a bit... See you and thanks again *Fuchur*

Can be helpful as a base-texture, but I dont recommend it for final stuff. *Fuchur*

Hi Nancy, could you send me that one / give a link to the material? I think that is the one I am searching for... mine is a quite old one from the last CD-version I have before Websubscription. I think it is the one I am searching for but I dont have TWO / SO access. Thanks in advance! *Fuchur*

Import these images into A:M...drag-n-drop the 'color' one onto your 'flesh' or 'skin' group in the PWS. THAT is a 'patch-image'. It applies itself like a decal fully to every single patch! Now, right-click on the 'images' under the group's new patch-image and select 'new image'... and add the bump image and set it to bump instead of color. Adjust the bump amount while zoomed in and test rendering a section. These images are directional tiles, meaning they can tile together in any direction so you wont need to go about 'rotating' any patch images. Hope you find this useful! A patchimage wont work very well. My patches are not very even sized. That will create distorted images / textures and the repeative nature of patchimages is not easy to overcome there too. I may work with a material or if I overcome the repeative-problem with a bitmapplus or directly with a large-scale decal. Dont know yet. I unwrapped my model, but there is still some distortion that needs to be addressed. *Fuchur*

Hm... the porceline-material has an effect. It is still smoother. So I thought it cant be obsolete.. Just for hooks it has a bad influence for me. Looks like it doesnt seem to recognize the transition of the hook to the "real" patch and thinks there is a normal-direction-change. Somehow I remember a porceline-material which had an percentage-value to determine the strength of the smoothness. Have to search for it. Anyway if I doesnt find it: I plan to give her fist a full unwrapping so I can give here a nice texture-combination. I will use 3dpainter for textuering her. After that I will have a look on her clothing. I am planing to use simcloth for the looser parts and cloth included in the rig for the tighter once. And if that worked out, I have a look at her haircut. I will use the Hair-particle-system of A:M. Dont know yet if it works out, Maybe I will have to use hair-tails (Shift-Key-Hair) for it and if that doesnt work out neighter I will go the helmet-hair-root. For some shots I may although play around with SubSurfaceScattering, but till now I couldnt get it to work in a good way for me. I got it working but when the effect was visible and nice it highly depended on the background-color because the light got in the object that much, that it came out on the other site (or whatever ). But lets see it as it is: These are plans... I dont know exactly if I will find the time to do all of this stuff. *Fuchur* PS: What do you mean with "Flesh-Patch"? A patchimage for the skin or is this something different?

Yes I thought of that... but as you can see in the above image (the one with the shaded-wireframe where I show the normals) it doesnt seem as the normals are flipped... the other site (where I rendered with the progressive-renderer) looks exactly the same and if I render the hook I circled it gives the exact same result -> black artefacts. And it appears on all the hooks but not the 5pointers. I once heard that Martin gave out another porcelan-material which had some 5-point-/hook-issues fixed so I wonder if I use the wrong one? *Fuchur* PS: The interesting thing about it: It looks like the creasings there are only appearing from certain camera-perspectives. Other points of views doesnt show these problems. PPSS: Thanks for the nice comments about the modeling

I am working on a semi- (to high) realistic (we will see how well she will turn out ) model of a girl. She was modeled from scratch and isn't textured yet (apart from the eyes). She needs some more poses for talking- and emotional stuff, but till now I am quite pleased with her. Before I will go on texturing her, I thought I may adress the porceilan-problem I run into. I tried using the porceilan-material, but I got a problem with hooks there. Anyone knows what I am doing wrong there? The final-rendering is without(!) porceilan which looks okay too, but I would like to use the material to make it even more smooth. Any thoughts? Thanks for your comments... See you *Fuchur*

I am always asking myself where you get the patience from to handle that many patches with such care and understanding... amazing Stian! *Fuchur*

One of the best codecs is the H264 for Mov-files. It will give you a high-quality, quite small sized file. The bad thing about it: You need to have a modern computer to show it. (It is more resource-needing than others...). Although this is a very good end-codec it shouldnt be used for editing/cutting, etc. It is an endcodec, no inwork-codec! *Fuchur*

Depends... in the 3d-world-mag (Nr. 115) there is a good poly-model which can be imported to A:M quite well. It has too many patches of course but there are only a few spots that has to be redone like the hands (worst part). But most stuff can easily be re-done with a few hooks or 5pointers and you get the really nice proportions of the human model we got there (which is hard for me to get when modelling by myself). The biggest problem I see in importing poly-models is, that the finding-patches-algorithm is too slow when it comes to many patches. (above 10.000) The image of the model I attached below has about 37.000 patches which is just too much to be handle in a useful way by A:M. It came as an OBJ-file and was modelled with very good edge-loop-techniques. However the finding-patches-algorithm is that slow on my (admittedly very old) pc, that it is not reworkable in a decent time. See you *Fuchur*

AVI? With compression? Bad workflow -> you will loose imagequality twice by that. For the next time: ONLY use Imagesequences to render and after everything is finished (post-productionwork, etc.) compress it once with the codec that suits you best for the end-use. Back to AVI: I think it is possible to reimport it (I THINK). -> Rightclick on "Image Folder" in the PWS -> Choose "Open Image / Animation". -> Get you file in the opening-browser. -> After import, rightclick on the newly imported file and use "Save Animation As..." *Fuchur*

Could someone tell me, why my solution isnt working? Can't seem to see why... it looks like the expression wouldn't run in a circle or something but that they are updated constantly by each other. As if there is an actionlistener which is automatically updating the construct at the right places when needed... For example Quest3d works in a big while-construct so that everything is repeated and will only be updated once in a circle (if you dont tell it manually that it should update constantly) *Fuchur*

Just a short possibility: 1.) Create a Null-Object in your scene. 2.) Create an Expression for example for the x-axis-value. -> Expression: If(ChorTime() 3.) Create an Expression for example for the y-axis-value. -> Expression: ..|X Now you can read the value of the x-axis (or y-axis) out and it will be set at the first frame (or whatever) and after that stay the same. Choose any multiplicator you want and that fits you there (*15 can be *2, *0.01 or *1, etc.) *Fuchur* PS: Sorry, this doesnt work out, even so it is quite logicall for me...

There is only one way for me to render stuff, you should think about doing the same thing: - Render to an Imagesquenz -> TGA (or OpenEXR, if you need to change it afterwards) - Create from the images an video-file. This can be done in A:M directly or for example in an editing-programm. (Reimport the images as sequence, rightclick on it in the imagefolder and hit "Save Animation As...") This is a much more secure workflow. Now you can easily try different codecs so you get the best for your circumstances. For a final output I prefer an h264-codec. It gives you a great imagequality, although the codec needs a faster computer to play smoothly. *Fuchur*