NancyGormezano

I am not a clothy expert - but I think the way to make the hair stay attached at head is to exclude the topmost cp (or spline ring) from your cloth group? (see page 8 of Holmes tutorial pdf on Cloth). And I believe the cloth group must all be assigned to the same bone? I like this approach for getting the collision detection - sounds promising! Yeah they are a mystery, probably worked with older versions of A:M?. Length seems to work if the shag material is dragged to a group (with patches), and the length had been changed from default in the original material. Then it seems you can change the length in the instance. Don't quote me as to it working 100%. I wouldn't have thought of trying it either until Matt suggested muhair would work (but doesn't for me in 16b). I still like new hair better, but this makes some new-to-me possibilities for old shaghair. You had me curious, so I dug the project up. And holy guacamoley! Yes a decal does drive the length property for the barbarians loincloth - and apparently one can use a decal to drive other properties as well, similar to new hair. I changed it to drive diffuse color. Surprisingly, the leopard doesn't use shag hair for fur, just a decal.

Hmmm...not with the OLD shag hair as far as I know. With the "NEWer" hair..yes, of course. IMO, real hair (not shag) is more easily managed, groomed, colored, shaped, etc. Way more possibilities. But it's interesting to see what the old Shag hair can do. Here's quick test of OLD shag material on 4 different splines, twisted around each other, boned, Matcapped, & bones are dynamic constrainted. I don't know why the ends of the shag hair are blown out (spec was OFF). I left the density, thickness low, to shorten render times. I'm guessing the twitchy stuff in there is probably because I used only 4 cps/spline? vgashagbraidbone2h264loop.mov

Muhair? perhaps you meant matcap? I could not find how to do muhair with shag - but MATCAP works fah-boooo-lus with this old shag hair. As for collision: could have the shaghair spline attached to bones, that had a dynamic constraint that has collision detection turned on.

I went ahead and tried the dynamic constraint route for myself to see the resultant curves. The simulation produces more variation than a hand done one. I found I had to fiddle with the constraint settings to get something that looks fluid (made stiffness = 10%, drag = 20%, use gravity = OFF). Here's resultant baked curves of bone1, 2, 3, with a movie of the motion and the baked project. It is also harder to tweak/modify the resultant curves from a simulation. But it is possible. tailtestsNULLbakedembed.prj taildynamiclow2twiceh264loop.mov

nice!

Well done! Lots of good insight in there (eg, all curves are the same at beginning, use of the rotate manipulator, copy/paste of multiple bones/keyframes at once, lag, overlap, translating curves in curve editor). Might be interesting at some point to contrast the resultant motion with a dynamic constraint, and playing with the settings.

I believe there is a problem with rendering to avi's in A:M in recent versions (just tried in ver17a 32 PC, and 16b-32) and using ANY compression codec. Set the format to uncompressed if you want an avi, and compress it using something else. And yes it's better to render to a sequence of stills instead, in most cases, unless you are just testing. Use jpgs, pngs, tgas (the best). I use QT pro (ver 7 something). fast, easy. But not sure it's still available?

I am curious: Was the motion of both your feet/legs in your reference video perfectly symmetric, as it shows in your animation? I can't imagine me being so perfectly symmetric when jumping.

Wow! That's a great thread. Explains SSS like nowhere else, & probably should be included in some documentation, if that effort is still alive, and if still true for recent versions. I don't remember ever seeing it. Even with that info, still seems like SSS requires much experimentation, tweaking based on model geometry, chor lighting, and model's size.

Beautiful! Happy New year to you too!

In my experience, trying to view any LARGE video on A:M films has been a herky-jerky-quirky experience probably due to lack of bandwidth. However you can post to Youtube, and supposedly have the link to it on A:M films. I've done it. But not without alot of hassle trying to get it to link ( 1 year ago). It required divine intervention from the divine Jason. For now, seems wise, easiest to post it to youtube and post a link to it here? No? Eventually can get A:MFilms to link to youtube (or one year later, it may be easier now, and not require Jasonintervention).

Enjoy! Merry Xmas! & ...er...step away from the chrome book. (Amazes me how you get better & better looking every year)

Fierce looking sun! I thought for sure you did it in AE. Do tell of your method of wizardry, please. Very impressive

I am going to guess that your walk cycle action has Stride length = ON. I have had better luck, more control with turning stride length OFF and setting the number of repeats (and cycle length, and chor range, etc) to whatever I want, especially when using paths.

Wonderful! Merry Xmas to you!

Not the same as cpu usage? No comprendo. What else would it be? But anyway I tried 2 instances of AM 17 rendering simultaneously: 1 instance took 6:36, other took 6:41. Not much difference from only 1 instance. And yes both cores were grinding away at 100%, and my hard drive was spinning a storm. First time I've tried that. I would be a little hesitant to do that for any long renders (might burn up the universe). But was interesting to try. I guess that equates to doing 2 frames in approx 6:38 mins average, and around 3:19/frame (if I did any parallel rendering). When I only do 1 frame, my cpu usage usually shows around 50%. Not sure, because I did't monitor it, but that's what I'm use to seeing. I have a feeling that the swapping (with whatever) is what's grinding it up to 100% solid when doing 2 frames in parallel.

Thanks for the input Gerald. Pathetically, my luddite gene is coming into full bloom. Every day, I can hear the faint cries of the dodos & dinosaurs begging me to join them. I'm still (after 3? 4? more? years) afraid to upgrade to win7 64...Yes. Fear & profound laziness about having to reinstall everything, finding out what else doesn't work anymore. I know I will have trouble getting my "antiques roadshow candidate" wacom tablet (15 years old?) to work. It works beautifully now. I was hesitant to try 17c. I thought I had read that people were having troubles with it making their computers act weird? (mtpeak? Robcat?) - perhaps I am mistaken? My graphics card: GeForce 8600 GTS/PCI/SSE2. My drivers, old and antiquated, I'm sure. Could be the problem. I suspect, but don't know, that going to 17c will help, I suspect it won't. A real concern for me is that FakeAOCpu won't work. It works beautifully in 16b/32 for me, but it doesn't in 17a/32 (crashes). I've come to love fakeAO. I do hear that by some fluke, that FakeAOCpu doesn't crash in 17/64 (for some others). I wish Jenpy, if he is going to abandon it, would just give Steffen the source code so he could recompile it. When I finally get some courage, and the urge to torture myself, I will upgrade OS. Hopefully before I am forced to go to Win8. Gawd. That sounds even scary-awfuller. I have a 3.2Ghz Core2Duo. I tried rendering with 17a twice, however, both times only one instance of it was rendering. First time I had it rendering with my browser, Photoshop, & A:M16b also, all open, and the render time for 17a was 6:36. So then I tried it with nothing else open, and rendertime was 6:34. Are you saying I should try with 2 instances open, and both rendering? All times I have ever tried this benchmark test, I have only had 1 instance open and rendering. I have never noticed wildly different times, from one render to another, using same version, on any of the versions (13, 14, 15, 16, 17 etc).

Comparison of ver 16b/32 to 17a/32. WinXPpro sp3. Surprised to see 16b is faster.

Here's a playlist of talks on "story telling". I haven't watched them all, but I have no doubt that there are some tidbits (for me, and probably others) to be found at: http://www.ted.com/playlists/62/how_to_tell_a_story.html

Great personality!

I like your candy bar, and the white background with reflective surface is very striking. And yes that reflection is weird. Not knowing who you are marketing to? - A chef? for an ingredient for cooking? or...for eating while cooking? Then maybe elements that suggest milk, coffee beans, raspberries, oranges, hazelnuts, almonds etc or other food stuffs might be appropriate. But if you are marketing towards adults & in particular women who REALLY like chocolate (or to significant others who give chocolate as gifts): I would experiment with adding elements that do not interfere or compete with the taste experience of the chocolate, but go for heightening all the senses as well as taste. Adding story as Rodney suggests. I would experiment with warming up the image, and I would experiment with different backgrounds and adding other elements to suggest story eg: How does it look on reflective black? a warm brown? Piano music? On a silver or gold platter? Perhaps adding other suggestions of music, plays (eg violins, pianos, playbill), red roses, soft fire lighting, or floating candles in water, lace. Or if marketing towards kids, or even ramping up nostalgia for the inner-kid in adults, then I would experiment with going for an ooey-gooey melt all over adults with chocolate covered faces, hands, clothes, sharing with friends in memorable situations (baseball games, at the beach) or wrestling, competing with friends for the last bite, etc

Fun, fun selections!

I'm curious of course. Not sure when I would get to it, but I am always interested in something that makes anything easier & more controllable. That's the type of stuff that makes it more likely for anyone to give it a go at some point. Seeds get planted...and eventually sprout. It's a slow process for me to jump into new mediums, I sorta inch closer and closer until ... boom...my laziness inertia reaches escape velocity.

Happy Birthday & wishing you a many more !

Very nice! Well done. And I was pleased and surprised to see that "schmutz" is a real word still in use today, not just something my gramma used to say....