NancyGormezano

Just found this in my stash - probably got it at a community college class (DeAnza College, Cupertino, CA) on animation (class taken around 1991 - Now those were the days, and of course, I still was probably the oldest person in the class): O'Donnells' Laws of Cartoon Motion I. Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of it's situation. (Think Daffy Duck walking off a cliff, suspended in mid-air until he chances to look down - only at this point does 32 ft per sec squared take over) II. Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter intervenes. (Toon characters are so absolute in momentum that only a telephone pole or outsized boulder retards their forward motion, absolutely.) III. Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to it's perimeter. IV. The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken. V. All principles of gravity are negated by fear. (Eg, Spooky noise will induce motion upward - usually to a treetop, -or - The feet of a character who is running need never touch the ground, especially in flight) VI. As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once. (Eg, character's head may be glimpsed emerging from cloud of altercation due to tooth & claw fight, at several places simultaneously) VII. Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot. VIII. Any violent rearrangement of Feline Matter is impermanent. IX. For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance. X. Everything falls faster than an anvil. (Hope you enjoyed - and since time has passed and new laws of the Toonerverse have been discovered - be free to add your own)

One other trick I use - may not be appropriate for you - but since I use an emitter most of the time - I usually shade my emitter from dark to light so that I don't have to use shadows & yet I can get variations of intensity along the length of the hair - sample emitter attached: (purple background is just so you can see shape - and I use a tga file so that I can have a proper alpha). (ooops - just noticed that hair color of puppy is very close to the decal color - Sorry to post this info - if it's not relevant or you already know this)

I was using an image emitter so it may be different for you, but I found that the ambience setting & ambience color for my model (or groups with hair) in combination with the brightness property for the emitter would produce that washed out flat & gouache look - Since I don't really understand how they interact but... For an experiment try ambiance color set to black (or intensity to 0), and brightness of the emitter to 100% - The hair color then (in the modeling window) should probably look the closest to what you are using for your decal driving the color - work from there with different combos... I usually always do fakey stuff, so I usually want my fakey hue, saturation, intensity for the hair... shadows will also make it look darker (if you haven't found that out by now)

That's excellent - looks realllllyyyy real..

I also wanted to mention I thought the mood, lighting, setting was quite nice as well - with a hint of mountains? in the distance - (tho perhaps tree is a little too centered). As a variation, it would be interesting to see a print-type rendering, reminiscent of an Ansel Adams type winter day in Yosemite, done in B&W of course. I assume when you allow the hairy-leaves to sprout - you'll consider changing the season? to repeat, very beautiful. (And I'll be a hot bidder for the secret decoder ring for the Hash Fellows group when the next one shows up on ebay)

Oh yeah - and beautiful tree by the way. I sure hope there isn't a lot of good discussion going on in secret among you elite people that the rest of us plebians are missing out on ? Don't leave us flopping in the wind please.

I think the proper term is femellows.

Fantastic - wonderfully appealing guy - perfect animation - Bravo!

You can very definitely use decals to control the color of hair (as well as length): 1) apply decal 2) under images section for the decal, where type is defaulted to color, change the type to Other 3) then under properties driven, rt click - select add property 4) choose diffuse color hair on the patches where the decal has been applied will take on the color of the decal Search for my fwuffy in wip - thats how I did it - and I also used decals for length of hair, along with an image for the hair emitter - which gets colored by the decal as well http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...indpost&p=77638 How to use hair in the documentation online also discusses this

Perhaps inside of mouth should suggest "growth rings", and teeth might have touches of fuzzy green moss (from not brushing properly? - ewwww yucky)

Absolutely a Terrific tree Model ! Wonderful character - like the idea of texturing - but feel like the texture needs more depth to suggest something more "barky" - maybe add a bump map for deeper darker, more defined creases in the texture..

thanks for the comments y'all - Robcat: Yes the yarn is an image map - I'll give some thought about "unsquaring" the ends. I was thinking originally of going for the look of cut yarn - as if to suggest someone had actually "sewn/knit him up"... might try using two image maps for emitters so that the strands don't look so regular Johnl: Yes I'm starting to animate him - using dynamics so that the hair moves, as well as giving the red tie dynamic constraints as well - might have some tests to show manana - so far render times have been reasonable (20-30 secs/frame at 640x480) ... Still having problems with grooming - very tricky, scary, tedious - the old adage of 80% of the work takes place in 20% of the time is turning out to be very true of course...it's that remaining tweaky stuff that drives me crazy -

Needs mucho work - but I like the way it's progressing. Been playing around with creating a model with hair, and trying to get something that might have reasonable rendering times for animation - - so I've been keeping the density low (lower than I'd really like) - And hoo-Boy have I been struggling with the grooming (yikes what a spaghetti nest of string!), resorted to fakey lighting, shadows, 1 pass, etc... BUT this image at 640 x480 rendered in 37 secs! I could live with that...(I'm really really impatient) Will be working on cleaning up the face (too confusing - image wise) - fixing the bald spots... comments welcome

Well Beam me up Shaggy Boy !! I always think there's a use for the stuff you do (well... almost always). So just what are you doing there? I like the effect.

I love the drip - beautiful reflections, colors, nice composition, interesting to look at - one thing that bothers me is that the end of the brush with the paint on it (where there is no paint) needs to have a more "bristley" look to be more consistent with the rest of the brush - also there's something funny about how perfect the concentric circles in the paint are - would prefer to see it slightly less regular, maybe slightly off center ?- nice work

Thanks so much John for investigating, at least I know it's not just me - I also came to the conclusion of doing the same workaround for controlling length of hair in a non-linear fashion

Hi John - I downloaded your project & cornc.mov - and was playing around with it - I found I was not able to set the frame number for the cornc.mov movie (or even a simple tga sequence) so that I could choose the length of the hair in a fashion other than straight thru from beginning to end. In other words, I found that I could animate a regular "color" decal (using either a movie, or tga sequence) and could select the frame # in any order I wanted. eg frame no# 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 3, 2, 1 of the movie etc and it would play fine. However when i tried to animate the sequence and use it as a property controlling the length of the hair that the animation (eg cornc.mov) would only play from start to end - could never get it to go in reverse or out of sequence - it would just stay on the last frame - Have you had any luck with doing this for hair?

That's fantastic John! - I love it - I've always wanted to do some "growth" type thingies - thanks for all your ideas (again & again - you provide inspiration)

Excellent transition, works really well - also love the colored lights - How are you doing that

that is one super gorgeous caterpillar - and wonderful motion - love the coloring, and modeling - very appealing

good, fun stuff - excellent mood - draws me in and makes me want to know more about what happens next...

Hi - (Disclaimer: I always prefer stylized, expressionistic or impressionistic images so take the following as a subjective opinion on the backdrop) I actually prefer the oddness of the first backdrop to the second, as it seems more interesting. By oddness I mean the unexpected color - it casts a different mood & suggests a different time of day, (but with perhaps a bit of unwanted pollution in the air?). The blue gradient backdrop suggests a happy, noon time, but is almost a cliche. Perhaps a tad bit more purple? turquoise jewel? in the blue to keep it happy, rather than the greenish cast as in the first eg. like I said - just a personal biased opinion - and only you know the mood you want to create - Nancy

another...

no not me, the only reason I dedicated my animation (Bop the Bozo) to him was that he was coincidently thinking about buying AM and being super active in the forum when I was working on it ... thought he might need some coaxing...however I do live near the wonderkid Zach! - I feel so so old ...

Curlie- q's (huh?) - too tired tonite to figure out different shape trees, and render in chor problem - but wanted to play with leaf images