Stuart Rogers

The visibility control in the chor is a convenience to reduce clutter while you're working in the chor. Have you tried setting the emitter's transparency to 100% in its surface properties?

With those greying temples, Jim's looks more like Superman's dad! I like the bodywork you've done - those cloth wrinkles on the hips are quite convincing. Not sure about the mouth - I preferred Jim's.

Try holding down the shift key while you're attaching splines. If you don't then A:M assumes the two splines are to become one continuous spline.

Hey Stuart .... You are one of my heroes in A:M... and i agree whit all your comments I should dirt scene before send it .... to redo the texture and render again would take another looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time .....You're obviously confusing me with a Stuart who has some talent. Time constraints also stopped me from adding all the grime to my robot too. No matter - he's due for a service complete rebuild.

That wouldn't surprise me - I've heard so many bad things about Norton on the Mac.

Wow! None of my animated movies have taken this long to render, let alone a single frame. I'm a bad loser, so I'll pick a few holes...! I really liked the brickwork. Even though the wall was square on to the camera, it still looks like it has some depth to it. I like the way you added some variation in the shapes and textures of the planks. The rusty pipework looks good too, although the rust effect was a little too uniform. The robots and their equipment didn't really work for me - the soft reflections are very, very nice, but they all look far too "showroom clean" for the location. A few dents, scratches and scuff marks would have worked very well.

There are several possibilities. You could put a step change in your camera's position to do thte cut, which would allow you to render the entire animation, cut included, in one session. A variation on this is to set up various cameras, one for each shot, and then constrain a master camera to each shot camera in turn. Or you could set up one camera for each shot, render each of these out separately, and then stitch them together in an editor of your choice (A:M can be used for this too). The latter is my preference as it means I can decide the actual moment of the cut at the edit stage, with the flexxibility of being able to fade from one shot to another over several frames. So it comes down to: do it how you want to do it!

I haven't installed V13.0c yet, so this is a random stab in the dark... Compare the spelling of the MasterPrefs.ini filename on disc with the spelling in the dialogue box, and correct it if necessary. Not so long ago I came across a similar message (not sure if it was A:M or not) and the the file differed in that it used a different mix of upper and lower case characters.

So far so good. You've kept the patches nice and square and regular, which usually helps keeping your surface smooth. You probably have more splines than you really need - I'm thinking in particular of those along the length of the upper beak - but I certainly wouldn't suggest you re-do what you've done so far. High spline density can be awkward to keep smooth when animated, but as beaks are rigid you have no problems here. And a coating of feathers will cover up a multitude of sins! Keep it up - this is a good start.

There shouldn't be a problem with this. I suggest you keep the hand and feet bone structure and even treat the ends of the limbs as hands/feet, as this will allow a little extra subtlety in gestures. Without it your character will walk around as if on peg-legs. Unless of course that's what you're after...

Nice design - it should look good fully feathered. If you're new to A:M and you're planning on animating this bird, it might be in your interest to occasionally post wireframe or shaded-wireframe images. That way the experienced old-timers here can point out any splining that might give problems when animating. It's better to get it right first time than to go back and fix so much hard work.

Giraffes have legs and bodies. Ooh look! The manual has a tutorial on making a giraffe!

The Tardis is Dr Who's spaceship/timeship. It's supposed to blend in with it's surroundings, but its chameleon circuits don't work properly which it looks like an ancient police phone box.

I was disappointed when Christopher Eccleston pulled out after doing just one series, but his replacement (David Tennant) has been doing a fine job.

And for an encore do we get the Cybermen or the Daleks? Last Saturday's episode (in the UK) had both!

Looking good! I particularly like the way you keep Ebon moving in the background while we're focussing on Monk getting to his feet. I have two suggestions you may wish to utterly ignore... 1. It might be more dramatic if the umbrella ends up closer to the camera. Make the viewer recoil from the impending impact and he'll feel more involved. Don't worry if Monk can only reach the tip of the umbrella from where he stands - a lot of people won't pick such things up directly but will grab the tip end and slide it closer before taking a firmer grip. 2. When he stands up, have you considered letting him stagger back slightly, to rest his weight against the wall for a moment? The previous action would have played havoc with his blood pressure, and getting to his feet after such exertions could leave him momentarily dizzy. (Well, it would leave this out-of-shape critic very dizzy!)) I look forward to it!

That one would actually make me less sympathetic to the driver of the green car. She appears to veer sharp left *after* the truck is back on the right side of the road, such that she increases the chance of an impact. Maybe that's how it really happened...

That's because we all thought it was a time travelling truck similar to the car in Back To The Future. Hey, that could be a great defence: Defendent: I was just coming back from 1953 and it's not easy to keep on the road as the earth's rotation has a slight random wobble that accumulates over all these years. Prosecution: You have a time travel machine in a truck? Why d'you build it in a truck? Defendent: Cuz DeLoreans are hard to get a-hold of these days!

Good! We can discuss the subtleties until the cows come home and still be able to pick holes in each other's work, but the bottom line is whether or not the customer's happy.

'/'

A little too much...? [sFX: Stuart slinking away]

If you haven't yet created a choreography, do so by double-clicking the choreographies folder in the Project Work Space (PWS). This should open a window showing the camera's view of the choreography. To place your model into the choreography, drag and drop it from the models folder (in the PWS) to either the open choreography (in the PWS) or onto the choreography window.

If there's a way, I don't know it. Maybe it can be done with materials, but materials are a bit of a black art to me.

None of that looks horribly wrong to me. The only part that I find doesn't ring true is the veering of the green car before the impact - it seems to accelerate once its front wheels have crossed the yellow lines. (But then, maybe it really did that.) Nice lighting - a touch of film grain and blurring (on the vehicles, not the real-world imagery) would really make them blend into the scene.

Make sure you have the 'advanced properties' option set, so that when you click on a chor object in the PWS you get a little triangle. Clciking the triangle reveals various properties for that object. One of those properties is the 'Active' flag. Add keyframes for that - an active object gets rendered, and inactive one doesn't. Add magic fairy dust to hide the transition...