John Bigboote

Activate the alpha buffer in the advanced render settings and render a .tga sequence.

'The Mummy' was done by Hollywood's Industrial Light and Magic...perhaps thousands of animators and effect-artists and technical directors with a high budget. You are setting the bar pretty high for just yourself and a $50 animation application. Many newbies ideas are lofty and un-attainable because of over-ambition. Keep things simple. That said...you might be able to Google to find some papers on ILM's approach to this difficult visual, apply them to A:M's toolset via experimentation... and prove me to be an old 'crumudgeon'! Good luck.

I would make a walk-cycle action, then in choreography set the choreography action to 'add' instead of the default 'replace' then animate the waving action there, and you will be able to see how the 2 actions interact. Copy and paste the keyframes from the 'normal' arm and hand positions at the end of the wave and the walk cycle should remain uninhindered. THEN- you could save THAT performance as an action, bring it back in the chor and continue to add to it. Build it up.

I agree... it's a good way to start but it will only get you along 'so' far...

This is a forum for 'The Wizard Oz' (TWO) modeling, you should post your Q where more folks will see it... Are you modeling from scratch or converting from polygons? There is no 'auto-smooth' like you might see in Maya... and I believe drag-n-drop is the only way to mount decals- other than patch images (drag n drop image onto group in the PWS and said image will be applied to each and every patch.) A:M is a very 'hands-ON' program...very WYSIWYG if you will.

GOOD! I remembered where I had used the curtain like that...it was in my 'bikini strummer' HA:MR sample I had made...though for some reason no-one ever noticed the curtain...

You can control the amount of emitted particles via keyframes, and walk that amount down to zero...if'n that's what you mean.

I took a different approach to this task once... I modeled the curtain... a repetitive 'S' form...like a curtain... then I applied bones vertically, one for each 'pleat' in the curtain. I then animated them opening and closing in an action and applied dynamic constraints to give them life. A cheat.

So, you hand-animated the liquid? Good-golly! Git-R-done, ay? Great stuff...hey, where is the 'recyclable' logo?

I've had Darktree's for several versions now and think they are great but have a question: Are DarkTrees now included in V15? If so, where can they be found? (Or do we still need to seek them out on the internet and download them?)

Are you multi-tasking and once in a while checking out your render only to notice the next frame produced is glitched? This happens to me a lot and I find that once you hit render either leave A:M up in front OR collapse A:M and don't check back until you know it's finished...

OHNO! You split-up the Beatles!!! SOUNDS feasible... why not just provide a basic model (Thom?) with all the appropriate numbers of CP's and just let the end-user move them about to make the character of their dreams....

Also, if you used an 'action' to animate in... you can stretch it out or enter in your own 'ease' settings... SO---there's many ways to skin that cat!

IF you were showing us a front view of the croc (above) and IF you have applied some bump or displacement to your alligators skin THEN a:m is doing a very good job of showing you the glow bouncing off the texture of the skin... IF NOT, then I dunnoh.

What do you suppose is generating the 'cracks'...splines, decals...?

Yup--- that's a good rule of thumb for A:M... TGA's... even better than jpeg's, and as an image sequence better than .movs. USE them every chance you can.

GREAT PACKAGING!

I hate to be a 'me to'er...but, me to. When the 'CP listed twice' or the "033" thing comes up I'll usually immediately save and reopen the project. Not a big deal, save often I guess. The thing that's been KILLING me is every once in a while I will be doing something REAL simple, like changing the color on a group (On a real detailed model, TONS of groups, TONS of decals and TONS of 5 sided patches) and BANGO! all-a-sudden I notice all my 5 point patches are not showing. Close project...NO save...reopen, still bad! I'll then weigh the odds between fixing them or reverting back to the latest version of my model, and usually end up fixing all the bad 5 pointers (select the 5 points, hit the button...maybe 40 or 50 times) and then I realize, all my decals that overlapped a 5 pointer need to be repositioned and re-applied.

Are you using V15? There might be something about the gif's color depth or something that A:M does not like...can you convert the 4 images from the gif into a jpeg or tga seq? (Photoshop or Imageready?)

I think Ken is recommending that you approach your animation in an action or a choreography...that 'pre-canned' actions will look as such. I happen to take the same approach you are for all of my characters I will make a LEFT HAND FIST and RIGHT HAND FIST pose...then in animation, since hands are usually not needed to always be articulating, I will simply walk the value for both up and down so that the hands are always slightly evolving from the flat modeled pose to about a 25% fist and back and this keeps them from looking 'dead'...

Maybe rendering the sprites separately and then adding them back in in 'post'...

Look to see if the sprite has an ambience setting...it's probably at 100% where you want it at 10 to zero %... methinx

Your accent or age is coming thru BIGTIME in your typing... can you elaborate a little more on what it is that you are looking for? We are by no means snobs on this forum... but a little punctuation goes a long way.

Welcome Artposer! Delve on in and hit us with your Q's if you get stuck. I would watch all the tutorials that Hash has to offer thru the homepage firstly.

That's freeky. Put some 'Grateful Dead' music behind it...you have a hit! Good work!