Bruce Del Porte

Under Heads & Faces called Phoneme examples http://www.garycmartin.com/phoneme_examples.html

You need to set up the Preston Blair Phonemes as poses and name the pose sliders precisely like the exercises. There is a good Preston Blair Phoneme tutorial on the ARM and the naming convention is described in the technical manual.

Try here http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=24339

Welcome Donny, AM is a great hobby. If the bug bites and sticks, you are in for many hours of creative enjoyment. Your system is probably on the low-end performance wise. It will certainly be ok as you start the first exercises but if you decide to go further, you are going to want a much higher performance machine. The productivity difference is huge. You are probably six months to a year from having to make that decision. Good luck!

There is a free model called Starsphere on one of the free model sites, it may even be on the extras disk. It does a pretty good job as a star background. edit: found it here http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10528

Hey Zach, Not too early to think about your next triumph. http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/presenters/caf/index.html "Soap Opera" could take these guys!

Good start. I would recommend working through the exercises in "The Art of Animation Master". They methodically walk you up the steepest part of the learning curve, touching on most of the critical functions and skills. There is help available for these exercises in the New Users Forum. This is a one minute video tutorial on how to set you video compression. Good Luck! Setting Compression

That is correct. The CD is the copy/piracy protection. Once AM has booted, you can remove the CD.

I tried a scope using a decal. Here I shot the scene with a focal length of 200, panning between targets and then decalled the clip it to a "scope lens" panning on the same keys and rendered it at a focal length of 70. Decal Lens In addition to reflections, you may want some specularity as well.

These lenses follow (more or less) the laws of physics, meaning the magnification depends on the curvature of the two surfaces. You can't really PIP with two different cameras at the same time. Unless virtual lens are important for some reason, I would almost shoot it as two different versions of the scene and decal the magnified part into the sight. The direct answer is; no there really isn't a magnification or "sniper" setting.

Basically you have to have two curved transparent surfaces with an index of refraction over one to get a lens. Here is a one minute video tutorial for a simple double convex lens. I included the project too. Video tutorial to make a lens project file

You can, do a full edit of the first posting of the thread.

Very cool! Almost from the realm of dust mites.

What were your presets? Turn on the advanced option, reset them to what you want and they will stay until you change them again. I see some jpeg compression artifacting and maybe some noise from a resolution change. Can you post the original TGA as a file?

What type of file are you rendering to and what compression are you using? Maybe if you could post a photo. Pixelation can be caused by too much compression. What does a final rendered TGA look like?

Color can be changed on any single patch or on any group of patches. Here is a one minute 101 video tutorial on how. Transparency is changed the same way just below "diffuse color" under "surface" in the "property" window. Simple Color Change Tut (3Mb)

Do you have the CD in the drive when you try to boot up?

Hey Frank, If you are in the modeling window, what do you have selected? I'm not sure how to get the yellowman icon to grey. If you are in a chor or action, be sure the model is selected and then hit the yellowman icon.

Looks really cool! Great job. It sounds like you are having a Dilbert moment. Microsoft .wmv or a Flash .swf file might be the way to go, .avi would be my last choice. Sorenson 3 will play on machines that have even older versions of QT installed. There isn't really a perfect way to deliver video. Those that see it will love it. Bravo!

I love the robots, if they are seperate guys, I agree they need a color difference. Nice work

Hey Gerry nice job. Maybe make the bounce impacts a little more crisp but I think it looks terrific. A couple suggestions: Video Critique

If you are looking for effective cartoon effects, the tuts above are a pretty good start. If you are looking for a "photo-real" movie special effect (like a tidal wave crashing over New York or a parting waterfall like in The Incredibles), movie companies have large staffs of effects artists working on a shot like that for months. There isn't really a drop in "water effect".

Here is a one minute tutorial on where to look for and change the AM compression codec. one minute tut At the resolution you use above, you may be able to get away with a data rate of 50 kbits/sec

Let’s not despair here, the drama police might issue a citation. I think you need to change your compression codec. This is a one minute video tutorial on how. Setting your video codec in AM (3.5M) edit: at 320x240 you can cut the data rate down to 50kbit/sec

I'm late to the show here but I think this piece is outstanding movie making. Bravo Stephen, Bravo! I hope Lasseter calls to offer you the office between Doctor and Bird. As to the food fight above, when your production budget becomes a million dollars a minute, you can assign someone to do eye dart R&D. I loved it, thanks for sharing. Bruce