John Bigboote

HEY! I noticed that... I did a 'spotlight' effect recently and was pleased to see the render moving swiftly! NICE!

As far as your SimCloth Q: Do your SimCloth simulation, and once happy with it you can export it as an 'action'- and that action can be reused in different choreographys.

SOUNDS like you might be importing Quicktime, which A:M can choke on depending on the version of QT and the compression schemes you may or may not have installed on your system. The WORKAROUND... convert your QT to a targa sequence (.tga files) or one of the other image types that V15 accepts like .png or .jpeg... A:M can be used to do the conversion. RTclik on the movie in the image folder and choose 'export'...

While dinner was cooking? Next year...EVERYBODY over to the Gram house for Turkey Day!!! Should we all take our shoes off at the door?

You would have to buy QTpro for $30 to convert files... could'nt you use A:M to convert it and spend the money on beer?

Wow, Bruce... that was a LOT of work to end-up getting lost in the mail. That's too bad, man... glad to finally see it. Good stuff!

Martin has a little thing going on you can participate in... other than that, anyone have any ideas? The 'Pass' project was cool because Will gave very little instruction other than 'Ball enters screen-left and exits screen right'... you could use your own characters or pull one off the Hash CD. It was very loosey-goosey-anything-goesey. We need another idea like that, but maybe evolved to the 'next step'.

THANX! I'm glad you dig it! I'm big fan of your Soulcage too! I am due to update my avatar. A lot of people don't know it actually has some Flash rollovers in it...one links to my website, the other gives a Quicktime of that character in more detail...

The entire audio mix and voices feels very professional, well done!

Yup...good times! It deserves a viewing from time to time.

Yup...it's startin to look like one of them 'thousand dollar taxi's'...kind of a 'Big Daddy Roth' version of one.

You may not need 16 passes... you could possibly get away with as low as 4...

WOW...that looks GREAT! LOOK at the refraction in each droplet! I'm happy to have helped. Keep us abreast of your experiments!

Yup---that's strange, alrighty! What V of A:M are you in? My first instinct is that you are using multipass set to 1 pass, for speed...and that if you increase the passes the outline will become softer...

Very enlightening, Rob. That illustrates the benefit of Multi-Pass rendering... Maybe Martin can sell Pixar some code...

It wasn't really THAT hard... as I said above... I used the .ai wizard or font wiz to generate the 3D text, and then deleted the face, so it was open and could collect the falling liquid. I also set it's transparency to 100% in the properties. I made another model that was an emitter and applied the liquid material to that. ( the emitter is a simple 4-sided patch, but it needs to be placed in a lathed tube that collects the liquid and lets it escape in a stream, like water from a faucet.) Then the hard part... experimenting. I animated the emitter/tube passing over the text and did a low-res render...examined the results and made appropriate changes and re-rendered(Changing the animation, the emitter size, the material/liquid properties etc)...probably over and over about 10-20 times until I got one I liked, and rendered at a better resolution finally.

That's cool! Thru having my stuff up at Youtube I got an email from an animation fan, and when I checked out his website it turns out he is a backup/lead singer for Carlos Santana! I tried getting permission the proper way (asking for it) for a song called 'Rude Mood' by the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. His webpeople were excited about it and said they would present the idea to Jimmie Lee Vaughan, Stevie's brother and estate-keeper. I never heard back. Good for you! Take the ball and run with it!

I always thought the way to go about this would be to use multiple cameras in the choreography and use the 'ON-OFF' property for each to turn each camera ON and OFF as needed... I'm going to test it... EDIT: Nope, that idea did not work the way I thought it would.

Maybe you need to 'peak' all the CP's. (Select all, and 'P' on the keyboard.)

Yes, that's an interesting point. The Tireman can only say two words... "Belle Tire!" It's funny how everyone is both annoyed and amused by the simplicity. KIDS run around saying 'Belle Tire!" These same kids eventually turn 16 and get a drivers license and ultimately get flat tires... where do they go? They have been programmed to go to Belle Tire. Advertising 101. It's so fundamental, I'm happy to be a part of it. When I was an apprentice cel-animator in the late 1980's one of the animators worked on the BT account... Tireman was 2D cel-animated in those days... well-because the budget was low and TireMan is a cantankerous object to draw and redraw, this guy purposely did a 'HACK' job on the animation... which then aired and was seen over-n-over-n-over- and people wanted to KILL the guy that did it, and his career 'took a knock' because he was known as they guy who--- I am determined to not go down that road. By putting a little pride into Tireman I have re-ignited the agency's appreciation for animation and much more work and higher budgets have evolved.

WOW--- those last two posts from our newer members say a LOT! In 2 months 'TheSpleen' has created many characters and 2 shorts! AMSpector is using TAOAM and the Technical Reference and is pleased with the power and performance. BOTH members have been quite active here on the forum... I think THESE are users that fit Martin's description, above. GOOD WORK GUYS!!!

There is the .ai wizard... (In model window RT-clik, choose wizards/ai) Remember, A:M can only use .ai's from illustrator 8 or earlier. The wizard is primarily made for extruding .ai's into a model, but you can de-activate all that. G'luck!

google for BVH actions of the free variety... freebvh.com.... mrbones.com What kind of females are you needing? (WHY do I feel like a pimp asking that?) Cartoon/Realistic/Stylized .... Young Girl/Teenaged/Adult Woman..... dressed conservatively/dressed stylishly/dressed sexily/undressed

There was this idea I came-up with a month or few ago... involved (as you mentioned) an .ai shape but left open on the front side so it could hold the liquid, turned invisible...etc... AM_Fluidsmall.mov

Yeah, top notch! I like at the end where the Bunny looks at the list, then at the kid...CUTE!