John Bigboote

How did kids EVER build snowmen without a kit? COOL stuff!

Oh? Are you dropping a hint? How cool would THAT be...are we all going to need to paint a room in our house black? If so, I already have one.

Yeah---your gonna need to 'fess-up' on how you got that line quality and glow....me-likey!!! Did you set the ambiance for the flame/img-seq to a high value?

I'm afraid... I don't get it. Is the ape being rendered via Flash? How can Flash be used as a renderer? If so, I'll stand in line, impressed! But still confused.

If you 'hover' over the buttons they explain themselves...it's the 11th button from the ledt typicly...a little green plus-sign...keyboard shortcut shift-Q. Then you can either click in the screen, or what I have grown accustomed to do is right-clik and drag a preview box, smaller=quicker...

This keeps coming up. There is a drop-dead easy solution, but on the surface it appears difficult, so nobody ever wants to try it. When a bone rotates on it's 'roll handle' axis, or ANY rotation in 3D animation for that matter- there are different ways of approaching the math of the spin. By default, a bone is set to be rotated by 'QUATERNIAN' mathematics... it 'sounds' like a deep term, but the root is 'QUARTER'... and a quarter of a spin is 90degrees...right? this works great for most simple bone rotations, but for something that goes 'round-n-round...like a FAN BLADE or a WHEEL... you need to approach the 'math' of the spin a little differently. SIMPLE: Adjust the roll-handle of the bone a little bit...just enough so that AM knows you are referring to that aspect of it. NOW, go to your PROPERTIES window and right-click on the ROTATE header and you will see some menus pop up...there should be one that says. "CHANGE DRIVER TO" and you simply change over from 'quaternion' mathematics to 'EULER' mathematics. Was that hard? No. Now, you will be able to spin that bone OVER-N-OVER-N-OVERAGAIN until the cows come home and the program knows what you are askin for... REPETITION. All these solutions with poses and actions and what-nots are very clever, but I guarantee if you look closely at your spin you will see a 'hitch' eventually, and oh, want to do an ease-in or out... good luck. SWITCH TO EULER. There's more about this in the manual.

We've been asking for a 'Kingdom of Riches' button, or slider... Nice test, John!

Gatherin dust, INDEED! That's the BEST sample I've seen yet!

What-the-heck-is-a 'hybrid cat lady'??? I think there might have been one of those down the street from me...when she moved out the humane society was there with nets for a week- then they had to raize the house.

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.