KenH

Yes. One of those old double winged propellor planes. I also thought of the sign being pulled by the plane, but I think it would be abit tedious to animate it blowing in the wind. More so when the plane goes into freefall. I like the idea that the pilot could have been munching the pizzas. That would give rise to a problem in that we would have to show him checking every pizza box to see if one hasn't been eaten. Too time consuming. I also want to get the idea across that in todays society there is so much wasteful/pointless packaging. I mean a whole pizza box to hold a brochure!! BTW if you do make a model for the short, stick a pic of it in this thread. I'd like this to be a transparent documentation for others to learn from.

The main reason for using zbrush IMO is to generate bump/displacement/normal maps by painting directly onto your model. If you are worried about the model not animating well, just make the model in AM and import it to Zbrush and then get painting. But most of the time models made in zbrush will come through to AM perfectly workable with minimum tweaking. Just keep the poly count low and only use quads.

Hi Doug. I'll PM you soon. I've increased the size of the images above. Your ideas on the shark are good. I had originally thought of him rejecting him because he was too thin. But smell is a good one too. Same could go for the gull who keeps his distance. I want to keep the pizza box idea to have a third food disappointment at the end. However, I don't see why the ideas couldn't be combined: The plane is a Pizza promotional plane. The pilot beeps his horn. *Cut to pilot* He takes his hands off the wheel to cover his face from the smell. Plane turns over....dropping all of the boxes on the island. Pilot regains control and keeps on going never to return. Boxes fall as outlined above. The timing hasn't been worked out yet as I want to add/take away ideas still, so keep them coming! With your idea now, there is another model to build....the pilot. If you want to start on something, you could model him: Typical tallyho pilot with large moustache and goggles. He only needs an upper body too.

What's the significance of that "handcuff" icon?

This is a story I have been thinking about for a few days now. I've noticed that some people would be interested in participating in a short team effort. Well, that's the reason I'm posting this at such an early stage in the development....if you like the story and want to make a well animated(hopefully) short, drop me an email. Either way, I'll be making this short and posting updates here whenever I have them. Another reason is to get an unbiased view of the story. If anyone can think of ways to improve the story, put down your ideas in this thread. I'm willing to entertain anything. Without further ado here's what I have so far. I've even got storyboards for the first 3 shots (Number 2 has a problem I'm waiting for a reply on):

Anything made within Zbrush is made with quads. That image looks like the mesh has been optimised(reduced) and so tri-polys were created. You can see they are all in red. Either that or it was made in another app and imported in.

They're all quads and you can set it at different sub-division levels.

Just thought I'd share a rough model I got in from zbrush with displacements on it. This is all I got done before I was forced to stop due to some problems I was having. Hopefully they will be resolved soon though. The displacements didn't actually come out too bad. There's another level of detail that's missing, but it's still ok. I was going to woo a few zbrush forums with a cool Animation Master animation. Fingers crossed..... zed.mov

Cool. The legs look real claw-like. I wonder if there's something wrong with the motion blur in the beginning. Not enough maybe?

Nice. He does creap me out abit though....too realistic. I don't know if they did it in Bugs Life, but eyebrows add so much expression for little cost. So that might be the one to go for. Also, his head looks a bit small especially if it's for kids which from the dialogue it sounds like it is. I think the main thing creaping me is the movement of the feelers as he talks.

You'll need to sus out fan bones and smartskins. Do a search on the forum here and you'll get loads of info.

Here's two more: Options Settings: The options in the tools menu in the titlebar are saved in AM rather than each individual project. By that I mean if you change the render settings there, they will be the same in the next project you open. In the next project, if you change them again, they will take on those settings when you go back to the original project. Spherical Mapping: I always wondered how to put a spherical map onto a sphere. AM uses a very different technique to other programs....decals. This allows you to project an image onto an object. Very powerful. Yet that was all I could do on a sphere. Only recently I found a way to do it: Drag your image onto the model and create a decal. Don't apply it yet. Go into the decal folder and change its application method to "Spherical" in its properties. Now right click on the decal and select "Position". Apply the decal. It will now be spherically wrapped round the sphere.

Real good! Beats me how you did it. Sprites of some sort I guess.

I'm humming and hawing over which system to use to animate my characters face. It's the first "serious" character I've ever done and your system sounds like an elegant one. Do you find with those 3 sliders, you can get all the basic shapes of a mouth?

A great start and I adore the water. What material is it? It all sounds very hush hush! Maybe a big job coming up? Get AM more firmly on the map kinda thing? PS Sacman: You can attach an image in the reply area. Just scroll down abit and browse for your pic.

I've only just looked in on this thread! Great work going on. Characters are great and the background is also cool. That last fish might look more "fishy" if one of those bumps was a dorsel fin. But what do I know. Keep it up.

It's just a small thing but will look big when blown up....between the petals of the 2 flowers, there is a yellow shadow. I don't know what that is. And I hope your daughter isn't too young to be afraid of giant walking/house building/incredible hulk looking worms that live in apples She may never eat an apple again!

One thing I've always wondered.... Why are KeeCats eyes at the back of his head in the modelling window? But in an action they come to the front.

Damn! That model looks like it wasn't made in AM! That's the miracle of displacement maps! It's really progressing great!

Oh ok...I thought it was shipped as standard. It must preserve what's in your plugin folder already. Put this into your HXT folder in the root folder of AM... OBJ.hxt

The object exporter is already in AM under Plugins>export>

Looks cool! Love the smoke

Just to say there's great progress on this plugin. Nice work! It's a pity I haven't had time to play lately....hopefully soon!

Aww Dagnabit....I saved the cage as an obj and exported the displacement map. Then in AM, I changed the map to displacement and this is the result. I swear I didn't model a dogs dinner! Any ideas where I'm going wrong?

Damn. He's so good, he's even doing impressions! Nice..