luckbat

Those feathers look beautiful, but I'd highly recommend creating a second version that replaces the orange hair-feathers with a decal, and using the hair-feather model only for closeups. (Alternatively, you could create a pose that toggles the orange hair and reveals the orange decal underneath.) Otherwise, your render times will be severely impacted by something that's barely discernable most of the time.

Well, I don't like posting to this thread without any new footage to showcase, but since you asked, here's the low-down: On Valentine's day, I got kicked out of my apartment. It wasn't totally unexpected--my 9-to-5 schedule had been cramping my musician roommates' lifestyles--but it still sucked. Fortunately, I was able to find a new apartment in time, and moved to a new place (with no roommates) on March 1st. Unfortunately, the move itself was incredibly costly, not only because my new rent is effectively double my old rent, but also because of the considerable expense to move my furniture. In all, I ended up shelling out about $5000. Not pleasant. To help offset the financial hit, I took on a couple of freelance UI-design jobs, despite already having a day job. All my deadlines somehow converged at once, and I wound up putting in 42 hours of freelance work in five days, while still working 9 to 5 at my real job. It's all a blur to me now. Don't get me wrong, there's no need to pull out the violins--my new apartment is quiet and comfy, and the freelance gigs are almost done--I'm simply describing what it takes to keep me away from this project for six straight weeks. It looks like I'm going to end up spending one more weekend wrapping up the bulk of the freelance work, but starting April 3, I'm putting my focus back where it belongs: animation. Any more freelance work comes my way, I'm turning it down. It's just not worth it.

You may have been rendering with different settings. Having multipass turned on, or radiosity, or reflections, or a number of other settings can slow a render substantially. If you're just doing test renders, try selecting the "Preview" render setting.

I think by "face," you mean "patch"?

I don't think the movement of the dust should follow the zombie's body. It should hover in midair.

Based on past experiences, the v.13 beta will be out sometime this spring, followed by an official release in the summer, with monthly updates continuing for almost a year after that. Owners of the Yeti CD will presumably be able to run all future upgrades of v13, even the ones released in 2007. Just so you know, the "final" edition of any given A:M version is simply whatever version is available when Hash decides to stop releasing upgrades for it. Since there will likely be at least one more update to v12.0, even A:M 2005 isn't "final" yet.

You may have "Animate Mode" turned off. It's the black 'A' button on your toolbar.

If our generation was able to handle the vehicular frogicide in "Frogger," I'm sure the current youngsters can handle this.

All those features are in the forthcoming A:M v13*, which is still in the alpha testing stage. Having said that, many of the forum users are playing with early builds of v13 and having a great time, especially with the new ambient occusion and pixel-level displacement. You can get the v13.0 Alpha 10 build here: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=20854 ..but I recommend sticking with v12t for any major projects. (* Cloth and Compositing are part of v12, actually--search the forums for "SimCloth" and "OpenEXR". And the Newton Physics are available for v12 as a free plugin. )

Just create one light the way you want it, and then drag a bajillion instances of it into the Chor. You can always override a light instance's individual settings if you need to, but otherwise you'll be able to update all bajillion of them every time you update the original light.

Understood, but I know you know how to substitute your own default choreography.

Ken, you may think this is juvenile, but it's snot.

Ryan, that's not helping.

Ken, the 80% default is an attempt to simulate, crudely, the "spill" from a given light source--since in the real world nothing casts a pure black shadow. If you have an object in the chor with a light shining on it using the default settings, you'll get an 80% black shadow, meaning that 20% of the light is passing right through the object. Whether the 80% setting should be the default is debatable, but it's definitely not a bug.

Have you tried using a negative bias on the toon lines? I saw Rodney use that trick to create a pseudo-poly-mesh texture one time. Edit: (The results looked like the bias=0.1 render above.)

That wasn't everything I wanted to know.

The only critique I can think of: that "Dark Lady" font doesn't seem to match the time period. Take a look at some of these ones: http://www.fontcraft.com/scriptorium/colonial/index.html http://www.fontcraft.com/scriptorium/western.html

Are you using raytraced shadows or z-buffered?

It's a known bug, but please submit a report anyway. This helps Hash prioritize. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=166182

Man! That leg hair looks downright photographic. Amazing. And his arms have that "new car" shininess!

Then why are you worried about spline continuity? Once you convert to polys, it ceases to exist.

Dead-end splines like that almost always cause undesirable creasing in a render, which is why A:M goes out of its way to avoid creating them.

You're doing it right; you just need to hit the Compensate Mode button before you apply the constraint. Here's a tutorial: http://www.s1.hashmirror.com/ftp/VM/ThomCo...constraint.html Oh, and you constrain the object to the hand, not vice versa.

From the looks of it, you've got a reasonable patch count, though you could probably go higher, especially if you want to reduce the size of those 5-pointers. The trick is in figuring out where you need the geometry and where you don't. At the moment, the placement of your splines seems somewhat arbitrary. You've got some bunched up around the chest and hips, despite not really needing any extra detail in there. Try to smooth out some of your spline paths by paying attention to "spine flow." For example, the ring around his belly is quite crooked, even though I imagine you probably want that area to be fairly rounded, not lumpy. In the long run, you'll probably want to train yourself to smooth your splines manually, but in the meantime, you may be interested in Steffen Gross' Smooth plugin.

It's really excellent, but during the last part, where the big guy shakes his prey, there's virtually no corresponding movement below the neck. (In fact, if you cover up his head with your hand while you're watching the movie, you can't tell that he's moving his head at all.) Such a violent shaking motion would surely involve the shoulders, don't you think?