Stuart Rogers

I'm a stationary engineer too - so stationary my colleagues often think I'm asleep at my desk. How do water smears affect efficiency? If it's noticeable you could always guide the waste water down the wheel channels. (Maybe you do and chose not to animate this.) If there's a water shortage you could also collect that used water and filter it before pumping it up for re-use. How do you safely move the trolley ffrom one column to the next? Given some clever animatronics and the budget of NASA you could design a system that hops from column to column all by itself.

See if there are any newer drivers for your graphics card. If that makes no difference, a visit to AM:Reports is in everyone's interest.

Check the filter buttons in the lower left hand corner of your A:M window. You can select what kind of channels get affected by keyframe operations (translate/scale/rotate/properties) as well as bone/tree/model/etc.

Fair enough - I was thinking more in terms of the fireworks/flag material John posted there other day. But for what you have in mind, go ahead!

I would only consider using the dope sheet approach for crowd scenes, where the audience isn't following any one particular character, and where accuracy and expression aren't all that important. For the central characters, however, I would much rather spend the time hand-tweaking the lipsynch in order to get it right. When your main character is speaking, your audience will be watching the mouth (well, it will be if I'm the audience!), so it's important for the mouth to look like it's really speaking what the audience hears.

Just be sure you're happy with the small print. I wrote up (and then scrubbed) a long missive about the small print the other day when JohnB enthused over YouTube. Their terms and conditions give them considerable leeway with your material for as long as you have your stuff posted on their site. Admittedly this is only as far as promoting YouTube, but I do wonder what would become of your material if YouTube collapsed before you could pull your material. Company receivers are notorious for keeping hold of anything the company has in its possesion. It's just me being paranoid, but I wouldn't put anything on YouTube unless I mean it to be public domain.

Check the the 5PP and surrounding patches all have their normals pointing in the same direction. This doesn't always fix thngs, but it sometimes helps. I've had that. It might just be coincidence, but I reckon I get better success at getting the 5PP button to light up if I hide as many of the surrounding CPs as I can beforehand.

Yes, but this dialogue - the words and the delivery - is very much tell-it-like-it-is, in-your-face in its nature, not some humming and hahing by some demure little mouse of a character. Maybe I think that way because I recognise the sound clip (Steve Martin in Trains Planes & Automobiles(?)) and feel the visuals need SM's delivery - which I think this anim mostly has.

The impression I get is that he's actually trying to avoid eye contact, which obviously doesn't suit the delivery of the dialogue. A more straight-ahead, open eyed stare would come across better. I get the impression the feet are inflating/deflating too, which is quite distracting. Otherwise, bravo! There are some nice gestures there. I disagree with Nancy about the twinning - I would say there's enough difference between the arm movements in both timing and reach to say they're not twinned. Te gesture looks quite natural to me.

I see in the first and last images the time cursor is set to 00:01:00, which is one second into an animation. Is this supposed to be an animation or a still image? If it's supposed to be a still image, in the render options panel that pops up when you do a render to file, set the frame range to start at 00:01:00 and end at 00:01:00. My guess is that it's set to start and end at 00:00:00 (the default values). Oh yes, there's another error: Katy really won't appreciate being reminded she's 35. Trust me.

Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines.

You still have that five-spline CP near the armpit. However, it's obviously not affecting the toon render, so I would leave it be. He does look good as a toon - I like the hair especially.

As Robcat said, good start. My first attempts at modelling a human were utter rubbish. I see that he's not symmetrical. Nothing wrong with that per se, but it means that the shoulders will flex slightly differently when you come to animate him. Who knows, maybe that's the way to quirky, unique characterisation! You have several examples of splines simply coming to a dead-end (the CPs with three and five splines leading to them). You might find these give rise to visible creases (pinch-points if you like) when it comes to rendering. I suggest you read up on "five point patches" - use them for those topologically awkward areas such as where arms meet torsos. The very grid-like layout of the lower torso splines could be a problem if you plan to animate them, depending on what you're planning on having him do. For example, if he was more of a fat slob character, it would be better to have the splines flow around the body curves. For your surfer dude, that's probably not important. You could probably cut down on the number of splines in the lower part of his torso too. If you need to link up a detailed area of the body with a less detailed area, read up on "hooks". That said, there's no definite "right way" to model a body - a lot of it comes down to personal taste and what your character is being designed to do. Or, to put it another way, don't rush to "fix" this guy - play with what you have and learn from it. Good splinesmanship takes some learning, but don't let that put you off!

That's a lot better, and the extra second helps - the previous edit's 'story' had a beginning, a middle, but no end. I look forward to it - the flying umbrella is a nice touch. BTW Why does she carry two umbrellas? EDIT: After the camera has moved around to show the fight, one of the cubicle walls moves in and out of the shot. Sometimes when I watch this movie that wall is really distracting. If it annoys you too, perhaps you could disable that wall as the camera moves into position. EDIT 2: I see why it only annoys me sometimes... I've been playing the movie back full screen (it scales up beautifully) but sometimes for smoother playback with QuickTime on my iBook I select 'Full Screen' then 'Double Size', which shows the movie as double size with a black border filling to the edge of the screen, and that cubicle wall makes it look like the right hand border is wobbling about.

There are two ways to accomplish this: 1. Show the Timeline (View menu). Select your action. Observe the long red bar in the timeline alongside the action. The bar is as long as the action. Click and drag that bar to the right until it starts where you want it to. 2. If you don't have it set, select to show the Advanced Properties triangle (Tools->Options menu). Select your action. Notice the small triangle on the action. Click the triangle - it will rotate to point downwards, and the action will expand to show its parameters. Tweak these until you are happy. It's been a while since I last played with action transitions so, as I'm not at my A:M computer at the moment, I'll not risk telling you lies for your second question...

Stuart, that icon is from the IPB Community Pack, one of the pre-fab icon sets accessible by clicking on "Avatar Options" on your Profile page. Ah, it never occurred to me that it was one of the stock icons. Either way, it's spooky seeing what I've always recognised as "Emilio's face" with someone else's "voice"!

As a quick aside... Can I suggest you change your avatar? Yours looks remarkably like Emilio Le Roux's.

Unless I'me very much mistaken, AO is a V13 feature.

In the choreography part of the project workspace, right-click on your camera and select "New->Post Effect..."

I don't have a solution for this, but here's a work-around in case no one else supplies one either: put a bone in place of the light in the model, and constrain a separate light to it in the choreography.

That's a nice alien design - believable yet nicely distant from the biped/quadruped format familiar on earth. I'm not sure a real Martian would need such sturdy or so many legs, given that Mars's surface gravity is only two fifths of Earth's, but let's not dwell on that - if we kept to real reality then the WotW story falls flat on it's face.

Hell, that fire's nice!

Yes. I couldn't put my finger on why I decided a cut wouldn't work, but I think that's it. But... She missed!It occurred to me this was the case, but not until I had posted, turned my computer off, and gone to bed. .... if I allow Monk any extra time to wind up, then Ebon practically has to move in slow motion to compensate. Hmm... If I have him duck lower....I quite understand. I think one of the problems is that we're scrutinising this almost frame-by-frame rather than watching it as a movie, which is why I kept mentioning soundtracks - once the whole is together, these little nit-picky points won't stand out. Before you dive into trying to fix this, I suggest you take a break from it and do something else - the next sequence perhaps. I find it easier to see what needs fixing after a break.

This is really nice. In particular I think the movement in the first half, before the camera swings around, looks very realistic. I like the movement of the cape too - all that work on rigging it has paid off. I also think you have a nice visual mix of anime characters and full 3D sets. At first I was going to criticise the rapid movement of the camera, but now I've watched it several times I think a cut wouldn't work as well - especially when you have a good soundtrack to accompany it. Two things that don't work so well for me... 1. When Ebon strikes the guy's head there doesn't seem to be much weight behind it. Again, good sound effects might help convey the action better without recourse to tweaking the animation. 2. The guy seems to be able to take Ebon's blow, recoil, and get his chop in far too quickly. The camera angle and the anime style don't show the full force of this chopping action. Maybe this sticks out to my eye because that's where the movie suddenly ends. Even so, I think you have some nice timing here, with a good balance of action and pausing. I've only once tried choreographing two characters together and I found it very difficult to make it look as if they were on the same planet let alone interacting - so I'm particularly impressed.

Amazon UK isn't currently stocking it, it seems. Their "new & used" link takes you through to copies available from other companies that operate through Amazon UK. If you read the small print on those items you'll see that they're described as brand new products, not used. And yes, those UK prices are a tad excessive, given the current USD/UKP exchange rate.