Stuart Rogers

I've also seen noticeable shading differences as each sub-frame accrues, more noticeable than I would have expected. Although each subframe changes the accruing frame significantly, the shading from each completed frame to the next in an animation is smooth, so I'm not concerned enough yet to report it as a bug. Besides, I've yet to work out how to define it if it is a bug.

Better. Maybe a little softening would look even better. It's odd how the shadow on the wall is so much better defined than the shadow on the floor. At the risk of being really annoying... The telescope's shadow makes me think it's a machine gun. I'll get my coat...

I fink you should play with the shadows a bit - Peg's hair is fairly dark where it's in shade, and yet the environment is bright enough to wash out her shadow on the floor. Enhancing the shadows will give more clues about the scale of the room, and pin down Peg's location in it. As for the lantern illuminating the floor below the table... Is your light size (its diameter, not the fall-off) small enough not to penetrate the table? Check both the light itself (in the Objects folder) and the shortcut in the choreography. The height of the light above the table should be less than half the size of the light. And the non-glowing flame... You do realise that the amount of glow is dictated by the object's ambience setting...? I have found in some circumstances the glow isn't as strong as I would expect. Not a problem with A:M but with my expectations (e.g. glow shows up a lot more against a dark background).

I've no idea how short a typical C-130 landing is (they can do *very* short!). All I do know is that they usually slam the brakes on with some urgency very soon after all wheels are on the ground, burying us poor passengers deep into our seats. (Yes, *into* our seats - RAF C-130's have the passengers facing backwards - you're more likely to survive a crash that way.)

I think the idea is to get the light to pass uniformly over the entire sky dome. It doesn't have to be a spiral, but with a spiral it should be relatively easy to see that you do get uniform coverage. This could be taken a step further - by modifying the spiral you could hint at non-uniform global illumination. For example, if you had a scene with half your sky clear, and the other full of brooding clouds, you could tilt the spiral over, and maybe distort it towards the brighter parts of the sky... EDIT: By distorting the spiral, I have in mind making the coils closer together at the point where the sky is to be brighter. This could also be done by not dstorting the spiral but the play with the 'ease', so that the light lingers longer at the place where the sky should be brighter. EDIT EDIT: I think my cold's starting to make me babble ... time for an early night, I think.

There are definite signs of multiple (virtual) lights there - I think you might need more lights (maybe on their own spirals, each with a rotation offset around the y axis). But it's definitely a promising approach! Is that all you have to say?! My project was going to take weeks to render as it is with a simple three light set up, and now you tempt me to use your MUFOOF - I'll be rendering until doomsday, damn it!

I hate to be picky about such a nice model, but... The shadow looks wrong to me. As it stands, the bulk of the shadow is dark with a lighter outer halo. Shouldn't this be the other way around? Here's my reasoning: light rays passing through the middle of the bottle have to pass through two thicknesses of glass, but light rays passing through the periphery would pass through one rather long thickness of glass. The periphery would, therefore, absorb more light than the middle of the glass. That is, of course, an over-simplification - refraction would noticeably complicate the shadows further.

The best way to get the impression of motion is to place things around the moving object, providing a frame of reference. The trouble is that runways usually have vast, featureless expanses of flat grass surrounding them, with no strong reference points. You might be able to overcome this by putting a slight grunge map on your surrounding grass (maybe with a corresponding bump map) so that apparent variations in the grass provide the reference frame. Your final animation might also show midground taxiways, which are usually accompanied with small signs, notices, and lights. If your camera is moving, provide some foreground objects to emphasise this. Or are you simply not sure what the landing speed of a C-130 is? (I don't know what it is, but I'm sure it's a lot less than the 190 knots we used to do our science flying at.)

Take a look (again!) at a real Manilla envelope. Notice that it's not entirely flat. You could model that unevenness by tweaking CP positions, or by adding a bump map. Possibly both. Adding such irregularities will give it a more 3-dimensional feel.

Yes. Higher pitch as it approaches, low pitch after it's gone past. As the plane will be accelerating towards you, it'll actually be increasingly higher pitched (a constant approach speed would give rise to a constant higher pitch). However... I think this is more attention to detail that you need. I would stick to a simple increase/decrease in volume and see if that seems realistic enough. Besides, messing around with pitch can give rise to phasing problems.

The Doppler effect is the shift in frequency due to relative speed. The simple answer is that sound emitted from an object that's approaching is higher in pitch than it would be if the object is stationary. Similarly, the pitch is reduced when the object is receding. (This is due to the speed of sound in air being constant. Think of it as sound waves bunching up.) Stand next to a road of fast moving but sparsely spaced traffic and listen carefully - as well as the volume increasing then decreasing as each car passes, you should be able to detect a pitch change too. As the Doppler effect depends on the *radial* velocity, from the point of view of the camera in your animation, I don't think the Doppler effect would be as noticeable as the volume variation. If the camera was placed right next to the runway, then the Doppler effect would be significant.

That's right. Once the plane gets up to speed the pilot pulls back on the controls (the term for this is, I think, 'rotate') and the nose pulls up. The plane pivots on the rear wheels - I think the pivot point is in the wheel gear, above the wheels, so that all the rear wheels stay on the ground, rather than pivoting about the rearmost wheel. I've no idea how far the rotation angle is before the wheels leave the ground. I don't know how far a C130 typically goes before its wheel actually leave the ground, but I know from experience that even for a fully laden plane it's far shorter than one would expect. It's just occurred to me that I've never actually seen a C130 take off from the outside - the only times I've been near a flying C130, I've been in it (about 350 hours in total). Usually I was one of the cargo down the back, but on a few occasions I did get to ride in the flight deck.

Not quite so far - more like 370 miles. I started sagging a bit on the train back to Fleet, but I was feeling quite perky during the drive back. I think the bad weather helped keep my attention fixed - I was driving through bands of intense rain, with occasional strong sidewinds.

On the whole I thought it was an utterly missable event (maybe Ken and James will disagree - it looks like they sold almost their entire stock of A:M). I simply used it as an excuse to meet up with the Hash guys and the (other) London A:M users, which was absolutely worth the effort. Your absence was noted! The evening consisted of dinner in an Italian restaurant followed by questionable beer in a loud and even more questionable pub. I reluctantly made my escape just before 10pm while we hunted for a better pub, so I don't know how long the others partied. I got home at 2am - it was a very long day.

Looking good so far. It looks a bit odd to me, but that's probable because the one I worked with had an utterly different colour scheme (mostly grey with a white top). Once you get a grunge map on it, and all the decals showing where the doors are and where not to stand and where emergency services should hack their way in, it'll look really nice. I realise the movie was just a test, but a couple of little things might make it look more realistic: a) some jitter on the C130 position and/or on the camera, to give the impression of light turbulence; the occasional particle zipping back, to give the impression it's flying *through* the sky, rather than flying in front of an image of the sky. Having spent many hours looking out of aeroplane windows (I was working at the time - honest!) such particulates are only apparent in or near clouds, but I think it would help sell the image. Does anyone know if the wings on a real C130 bowed up noticeably during flight? These things can carry a lot of weight, so I wouldn't be surprised if the wings flexed a lot under the load.

Ooh! I like that - the colour, lighting and shading remind me of M.C.Esher's work (but I don't think he used A:M!).

Perhaps we should swap phone numbers in case we lose people between the show and the pub... Stuart '07790 815 465' Rogers

I can thoroughly recommend NATO grade barf bags - plenty of room, no leaks, and when sealed can stand the weight of a 200 pound loadmaster. The things are bomb proof. A colleague of mine used to use one to carry his sandwiches.

Five minute versions can be so much better than the original - short, to the point, and well placed for comedy. And, much as I like the original book of Dracula, it wouldn't suffer one bit if the third quarter of it was removed. The Reduced Shakespeare Company take the same approach - they cover all of Shakespeare's plays in about two hours. The cast prefer the tragedies because they're so much funnier than the comedies. (I haven't seen their Shakespeare, but their Complete History of America (Abridged) is very, very funny.)

TA-DA! Take a look at the Apple online store - quad (i.e. dual dual-core) PowerMacs are now available, and at a reasonable price.

By having two dual core CPUs you end up with effectively a quad-CPU machine. I would be very surprised if OS X couldn't automatically make use of more than two CPUs. In the distant future, when I get a quad-CPU PowerMac, I want one with a bloody great lever switch on the front, just like in the old Frankenstein movies. Oh yes, and a pair of antennae on the top, complete with rising spark. More power, Igor! And then I *shall* rule the world - BWA-HA-HA-HA-HAA!

The Mac rumour mill reckons dual core PowerMacs will be announced on 19/Oct.

I'll be there.

That's pretty cool. I used to fly in one of those for my day job. Mine looked slightly different, as you can see here.

OK, fair enough... In which case I'll forgive him - but just this once, mind! I'm sure there'll be another opportunity to meet up.