Stuart Rogers

Clutching at straws here... Do you have an Nvidea graphics card? Your symptoms look similar to those described in this thread.

Group-select the CPs you want moving to x=0. Set the pivot point for the group to have x=0. Set the x-scale of the group to be 0 (it'll reset to 100%, don't worry about that).

Fair enough. The case I had in mind was a recent project of mine which had the camera very much acting as a point-of-view (as if the viewer was in the scene rather than seeing things from the most convenient angles). Once the initial action happened, I wanted the camera to move in a little closer, as the follow-on action wasn't taking up as much screen space as initial action. I didn't want to cut because it would spoil the POV approach. So, I zoomed in a little. The transition from utterly static to zooming in was quite noticeable, however gradual I made it - the transition brought the viewer's attention to the camera move rather than the action it was closing in on. By replacing the static view with a very, very slow movement allowed the zoom-in to occur without bringing attention to it. Y2CMV ("Your Two Cents Might Vary")

Gotta disagree with that ... Avoid camera movement unless it's motivated. Interesting points of view here. I find that keeping the camera static only works when the action remains perfectly framed throughout a shot. Should the action require movement, I find that the transition from static to moving extremely distracting. So, *my* rule of thumb is that if there's to be *any* camera movement within a shot, never let it start from or come to a complete stop. Keep it moving, but ever so slightly.

I do it all the time - I only go to graph mode when I want to tweak the motion curves. I did have a problem with pasting keyframes, which I reported and was fixed in a fairly recent version of 12.0 (12.0t?). I suggest if ArgleBargle sees this problem again, he should try the current version (12.0t?), and if it then persists, he should report it.

You can also add keys to the object's 'active' property. Key it to active=OFF on the first frame, and to active=ON at the frame you want it to appear (if suddenly appearing is what you're after).

Have you been tweaking that hair? It looks shaggier, a little less groomed, and certainly a lot better! (But I think you should add more to the crotch area - give the impression he has something significant to hide!) Also, can I suggest you add some scuff marks to the hoofs? At the moment they look too clean-cut. A demon of this maturity would have gained some serious footwear scuffs! (I hope this doesn't sound too picky - you've done a fine job on this guy!)

Yes, but you're already a black belt in this kind of stuff!

That's odd. Have you *ever* been able to do this operation on this version of A:M? If not, check you have your graphics card drivers up to date - some similar problems over the years have been driver problems rather than A:M problems.

Looking good! I mistook the glowing iris at first - I took him not to have a glowing iris looking forward, but a dark iris looking hard right (spooky evil glance - I feel like I'm on the menu!) with an over-bright highlight. I'm not sure about that ridge running around his neck - it looks to me like he's actually wearing his chest. But as we've already established, I'm good at mis-reading images!

That's true. Marcel Bricman outlined a number of methods of faking it - see his web page and scan down the page to the "second method". It uses multipass while changing the "prism's" refractive index and colour within the same frame. The method works for animation - I've tried it. The settings he provides leaves the dispersed colours looking a bit muddy for my taste, but the principle is there. Don't expect the results to look like Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album art - that'll need different techniques.

I understand what he means... Take the situation in which you have two splines, the endpoints of which are at the same CP. (For example, take a spline and extrude it into a grid - the corner CPs will be an example of the situation). Now draw another spline and attach one end to the corner CP. The spline will attach itself to, and merge with, one of the splines making up the corner - but can you tell in advance which spline it will attach to?

Going back to the Dancing Girl wireframe for a moment... I see you've used hooks to reduce the complexity of the hand splines down to the complexity of the arm splines. Nothing wrong with that, but... I would take the splines a little further up the arm to another (extra?) spline ring. Why? Because you might get wrist patches popping in and out as you flex the hand back and forth. By placing the hooks one spline further away from the wrists will minimise that. (I came across this phenomenon and the solution while animating my talking mattress.)

Flashing mussels, eh? Mollusc porn is innocent enough, but where's it going to end?! For lighning effects, try building your lightning models as splines (no patches) and set the model to "render as lines" (or some such - I'm away from A:M at the moment) with some kinkiness setting. Set an ambient colour to 100% and turn on glow. In the chor, set your lighting bolt to only be active during the actual strike (with dome on/off flashing). You'll probably want to over expose those frames during post processing for a better effect.

I get this sometimes for the default manipulators, except that selecting the move, scale or rotate buttons always shows the proper manipulators without problems. This kind of thing can often be fixed by updating your graphics card drivers. That's OK - when it comes to bug hunting, the more information the better! BTW Are you using the version that came on the CD? If so, I suggest downloading and installing the current version. That might not fix your current problems, but it'll definitely prevent you coming across some others!

Generally there's nothing wrong with intersecting patches - I use them a lot for mechanical objects. They do raise some minor issues, for example... Unless you have modified your patches with displacement maps, the intersection line will be very sharp. Depending upon your requirements, this could be good or bad. Taking yout tail fin as an example - does the real Harrier have a sharp intersection, or is there a raised 'seam' from the weld where the intersecting parts meet? If you decide you do want the fine detail of a seam, you could either (a) create a separate seam patch, which intersects both tail fin and body, or ( add a seam as a displacement map on either the tail fin or body. Creating and lining up the latter might prove tricky. Your graphics card driver *might*, under certain circumstances, render one patch entirely over the other. This has happened to me in the past (in a chor - Shaggy was holding a cup, but the cup appeared to be in front of the fingers that were holding it). I should point out that this is a GFX card problem (which you may not get) and has no bearing on the final render.

I think I can out-nerd you here... It's years since I last played chess and I can't recall the correct shorthand, but this sequence is possible... White: King's pawn one step forward Black: King's pawn one step forward White: King's bishop's pawn one step forward Black: King's bishop's pawn two steps forward White: King's bishop's pawn one step forward Black: King's knight two steps to, erm, where it's shown White: Queen to where it's shown ...it's suicidal for the queen, but it is a legal sequence. Oh yes - before I get side-tracked - I do like the painterly look to the scene!

I suspect that your teeny, minuscule bounding box is an empty group, which can occur if you delete all the CPs in the group - i.e. the group doesn't disappear just because its last remaining member has been deleted. If you copy and paste a CP that is a member of another group, that group will be duplicated (just the group, not any CPs you haven't selected!). If the CP is a member of several groups, it's very easy to generate a large number of groups. The copies are numbered, as you know, and this can become very confusing if your group-naming convention (well, once you start naming your groups!) already uses numbers, which is why I shy away from doing this except in very specific circumstances. As an aside, just in case you hadn't realised... if you select an existing group in the PWS and hit Delete, the grouping disappears but the CPs remain; if you select an existing group in the PWS, then move the bounding box in the modelling window and then hit Delete, the CPs will disappear. It's the difference between destroying your groceries list and destroying your groceries. It's worth experimenting with this (on a test model, not your WIP!!!) as it can speed up the modelling process. (Don't do this experiment on your groceries, else you'll have nothing for dinner tonight.) The 37 extra groups appearing after restarting A:M seems a bit odd to me. If you can reproduce it, I suggest you take notes and wibble along to AM:Reports.

Throwing ideas into the ring... How about having the robot taking a quickly glance over his shoulder (ok, what shoulder?) to make sure no one's looking. It'll engage the audience, because everyone's been tempted at some point to partake of childish pleasures without wanting to be seen doing so. String it out a bit... First time around as you've shown. Second time around he gets a bit more confident and starts playing around - a little spin, balancing half way along, the plank teetering about the horizontal. N'th time around <Insert other gags here as you think of them>. Last time around he he gets his comeuppance with your punchline - the plank not moving resulting in a pratfall. Can you animate those eyebrows?

There are two solutions: add more CPs to define the curve, or play with the gamma and magnitude settings of the existing CPs (particularly the end ones). OK, so there's a third option... Create your half circle, lathe it to make a sphere, and then start disconnecting (but not deleting!) CPs in the section of the sphere you don't want.

Everything except the last shot, which used a Jeff Lee skylight rig.I notice there's some illumination flickering in the last shot. Was that a problem, or something you left in because you had better things to do than re-render? It's a good fun piece. I also thought your State of the Union anim was very funny.

Stuart: Then do you delete the six 'Balance' bones? Or ignore them?I set the pose sliders to zero and ignore them - mostly because I was afraid that if I started pulling bits out, I'd screw it up entirely. These days I'm working on my own rig (initially based on the Hash rig) which has no hint of a balance mechanism.

"Your mileage might vary". I prefer to not use bells-and-whistles like auto-balance - you might, you might not. I just thought it might be worth mentioning.

Although I don't think it pertains to your problem, I suggest setting 'Balance' and 'Balance Rigid' to zero. As their names suggest, these try to keep your character upright as you pull him about. When I was starting out in A:M I found they confused me, making it hard to learn how to operate a rig. YMMV.

Yes, you can rename them as you like. No, you'll have to render them separately and glue them together yourself. It's possible to do that in A:M, but for simple cut-and-paste jobs like this I find it quicker to use something like QuickTime Pro.