Bruce Del Porte

Are you using TSM2 2.0.7?

I think you need a little more light. Nice model, maybe bigger hands so they will be easier to see when he is fighting. Good job!

The operating system on your new Mac may be too new for AM05.

By "no glare", do you mean no specularity? You have the specularity of the key light turned off in the project you posted. Also if you make the key light width smaller you get more specularity. Play with the specularity size and intensity of your materials to get the effect you want.

I think for the most part the shapes are pretty good. There is maybe a little more movement than if you looked at your own lips but that is OK, this is a cartoon. The shape I would tweak that hasn't been mentioned would be the opening "W", I think too much teeth is showing. We obsess on mouth shapes because they take so much time but eyes and hands are much more expressive and sell the animation to a much greater extent. Even the Pixar guys keep it pretty simple. One trick is to sync to what seems dead on and then just before render slide the audio two or three frames to the right. The result will appear much more in sync. Nice job

A beautiful start, I love the backgrounds and overall look. . The animation as-is certainly doesn’t distract from the story telling. If you want to tweak the animation, maybe have some head bobbing counter to the wings flapping (wing down, head back – wings up head forward) would loosen his upper body a bit. Also, maybe he can glide as he is looking back and fourth so the eye is drawn to the head movement Nice job, I look forward to more.

There are a huge number of free models on the CD, on the extras DVD that came with the CD and of course on the Hash ftp site. More than enough to get you started.

Keying one active and another instance inactive works just fine. If you add a active/inactive key by mistake you have to delete it in the PWS. Otherwise place the second instance in the same location and with the same pose at the frame you want to switch (while they are both on they should look like they occupy the same space), and start from there. Be mindful that if you are in mid action, you may have to adjust your curve angles coming off the first key to make the action look smooth.

If the two models are equivalent, it looks more like a video card (probably driver) problem. Does it look this way from all views, I think the hair will return to place with a refresh. I would try the final version of 11.1 and make sure your video card drivers are up to date before I messed with the model.

Everything in a material that has a property can be animated in a pose, action, or chor. A quick video tut on animating a material property. Tutorial (5Mb)

Yes, having the disk in the drive when you boot is the copy protect scheme, you can take it out once AM is booted. It is a data DVD, put it into your DVD drive and explore the drive like any other. If you don't have a DVD drive it will not work. Can you post an example of your rendering problem, it may be your video card, you may just have to hit spacebar it refresh. Check to make sure you have the latest video card drivers.

They won't take your blood anymore?

They seem to be sampled at different rates, at some point one of them went through a render with some bad settings. Joescreen is sampled at 22,050 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, 00:00:06:29 Joe1 is sampled at 44,100 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, 00:00:07:25 I would resync to your original source file if you have it.

Check out the "Cosmic Bowling (Dynamics)" tutorial toward the end of "The Art of Animation Master" book.

You seem set then, I think there is a later version of 8.5 you can download.

We are at V13 moving to V14. The file format has changed to accommodate data needed for new features. There really isn't a converter cheaper than the $99 for an upgrade. The older models will of course work in the new version. Overall the new version works better and is more stable, I would rethink the upgrading decision.

It does look like a hair dynamics issue. Opening the dynamics flag in the PWS, are there keys?

If the emitter is a separate model, you can turn "Active" off until you need it to start emitting. Once it is on, you will need it on for only a couple of frames for a muzzle flash and then turn it active off again.

What's left? 2. I'm not quite following what you think you want to do. You can define "Diffuse/Transparency/Specular" within a material attribute giving you, for instance, a transparent hole instead of a bump. 5. You’ll probably want to become familiar with the rotate and scale modes and use of bias handles. 6. Merlin does nothing and is useless, ignore him, he isn’t worth waking up 8. That video was done using an older version and that interface was dropped, you can not activate it. 10 Two planes do not define a volume where the software fills in the transition, you would have to connect the control points between two cross sections and define the surfaces between them. Splining is a little different but you will see their power once you use them for a while.

You can of course make each layer a group and assign a color to it, a decal may be messy in this case. A two minute video tutorial (5M)

If you are doing the scene as a composite. Combine all of the footprints into one image and then just have a moving mask reveal the prints on the appropriate frames.

Go to the folder they are in, highlight the list (click-shiftclick), and drag and drop the list into the PWS.

1. drop each of the thirty tga's into the images folder so you have 30 separate images 2. open up a chor and turn off the ground 3. drop each of the tgas on to the camera as rotoscopes (the last rotoscope will be on top of the composite). Render

What exactly are you stuck on.

If it is called a RIM, yes it is a light. When it is highlighted you can change or look at its properties in the properties window. The default lighting setup is the basic movie three-point lighting. 1. The Key light is your main illumination 2. Fill light adds fill to the shadowy areas 3. The rim is usually placed behind to highlight the edges All three can be moved and animated. If you look in the choreography PWS list, all three are listed and when selected the properties show in the properties window.