John Bigboote

Progressing well! That is some Hollywood calibre stuff! Are you going to animate him?

Gerald Fitzpatrick? Patrick Fitzgerald? That reminds me of an Irish joke... WHY are there only 239 beans in 239 Bean Irish Stew? Cause if there was 1 more...it would be 'too farty' ...

Another thing to try: Set the gravity in your choreography to zero.

GREAT IDEA! Or you could go the OTHER way...and make the car into a 'Big Daddy Roth' muscle style car... KINDA like I did in this sample on A:MFilms.... (watch for the Ford Mustang...it was a normal model that I 'souped up' using the distortion mode feature, which was new at that time...) OOOOPS: Here's that link: http://www.hash.com/amfilms/search/entry.php?entry=947

There's a lot of personal opinion and experimentation to be applied here. For most things video you can get away with 4,5 or 9 passes. Doing print? Go big! I found recently on my 'Cloth Art Van Furniture'( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNtW9yMyTvY ) TV commercial that with the Depth of Field option if you did not use multipass it would work OK but will not effect (blur) the alpha channel. With multipass ON around 4 passes, the focus effect would have 4 distinct offsets...the higher I went the better the 'out of focus' looked, and I used 16 passes. Conversely, sometimes when you want to do a 'quick test' you will opt for multipass with 1 or 2 passes only...and find it renders much faster than with multipass OFF... MULTIPASS is a great new feature, and along with the new 'composite EXR'(among others) feature makes Hash's renderer a very competetive and robust engine.

Wow! Small world! My brother lives in Clarkston (Andersonville Rd. Big Lake Rd.) and I am just south in White Lake. YES---our economy is in the crapper BIGTIME! People are leaving Michigan in Droves. Our newspapers are thick with home foreclosures... There never really WAS an animation industry in Michigan unless you go way back to Jam Handy or the Fleisher Brothers... lucky thing for me... when the economy tanks...businesses ADVERTISE more...I'm busy as HELL!!! UNfortunately, it looks like our bad economy is spreading to other states...I hope I'm wrong. If anyone out there is looking for a really nice home for 'dimes on the dollar'...Michigan has a plethora to choose from top to bottom.

$40 . As an experienced car modeller I know that it is a lot of work doing convincing vehicles. A tutorial would be even more ambitious. I don't think you should feel you need to do it for free. Knowledge is power. Power is money.

Arkaos- Pontiac? I was born in Pontiac and still don't live too far away from there! Are you still a Michi-Ganderer? You could join D.A:M.N. (Detroit Area Animation:Masters Network)

HA! You obviously don't know me too well, Will! My company grabs any profits, dangles an incentive 'carrot' in front of me if I hit my numbers...and then come bonus time fudges the numbers! Needless to say...I am considering freelancing and going it on my own...

UPDATE! I just put the Finished spot on youtube for your perusals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNtW9yMyTvY This is a 'superless' version...meaning in the edit they covered this animation with text, logos, prices and disclaimers. Yuch. This spot went out last week...I did it 'on the side' while I was doing other animation during the day...'get it while you can' mentology. I was not entirely happy with the way it hurriedly went out and aired, so I revisited it this week and added/changed some stuff, for my demo reel. I employed Hash's 'Depth of Field' feature on this final render, and liked the fact that since I had my camera 'aimed at' a null the DOF focus was locked at that range as well, so I only needed to adjust my forward and aft focus ranges. To get the DOF feature to work, you need to use multipass...the more passes the better. THIS was a 16 pass render, rendered at 1080X729 resolution (larger than D1) because I was doing a 'fisheye' effect in After Effects and needed the Xtra real estate. At about 1 minute per pass, and 16 minutes per frame, and 2 instances of A:M rendering on my PC- it took 3 days to render the :30 spot. I only rendered 15 seconds of animation and doubled that in After Effects but still... I need a render farm! In After Effects I added the 'wind-blow by' effect...which is actually a turbulence sequence generated by A:M for some water tutorial I did a while ago. I just fuzzed it out and made it fly by the scene with lowered transparency. I also added the sky in AE, which was a stock-footage movie that I altered bigtime to look right. You can barely see it, but I also used a displacement effect in AE so that the sky is displaced (offset) by the veil's alpha channel. As I mentioned above, I used the 'optics compensation' filter to imitate a little 'barrel-roll' at the beginning of the spot, and you can actually see this effect in the '1' at the beginning of the spot...it has a slight curve to it, whereas it was a straight line coming out of A:M. I also used a 'shine' filter from trapcode.com to add the 'god-rays' light effect. V14.0 cloth feature is a real winner! Matt Campbell aka John BigBoote NEW ANIMATION: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNtW9yMyTvY ORIGINAL TEST: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTE4nCHGwNo...ted&search=

Entity- Nice work! I'm pickin' up what you are putting down, man! I had breezed thru that other thread where they discovered how to place a button on cloth, a quick read of yours and now I understand the technique fully! THIS is smart thinking. If you raise the mass of your cloth OR increase the gravity force of the choreography you will get less jumping around... GOOD BRAINSTORMING! Myself...I have been 'toying' with the idea of using thin cloth strips as HAIR for a while now, might have to give it a whirl...

I got it to work too, John. THANXZY!!! I used a G5 Mac instead of my PC... fought me every step of the way. Hats off to the Mac users...you have more patience than I.

HA! Cool characters! Do both fellows hair employ collision detection at the same time? I've tried this before with 2 characters in the same scene both with CDhair and it drives the hair 'wonkers'... Yes...you CAN say 'ass' on this forum. Just NOT when referring to me...

Yes, follow Will's advice (always a good idea) as I think I misinformed you... another way would be to copy paste the positions for each camera and set the keyframes to 'hold'... that way your 1 main camera would jump from position to position...with no constraints involved.

I believe the method for this would be to turn the camera's ON and OFF at the desired time...the on/off can be set in each camry's properties box. You DO know about the 4 and 6 (side views) and 2-8 (front, rear) and 5-0 (top, bottom) view keys...right?

Impeccable! Are those displacements I see on the dash? Do you own a 41 Plymouth in the real world?

To get back to your initial plea... I believe that feature (attach) is currently been disabled...maybe Hash does not know it is unavailable and we need to submit an error report. I've tried everything, cannot attach, then I read the OTHER thread concerning cloth that is current right now and those Hashers also discuss this very thing with the same opinion...it's broken! Until it's fixed, you cannot drag your blanket around...Linus.

Me likey! The splinage looks quite efficient! You've become quite a modeller, Mr. Caushca. Please don't 'backburner' it...

HI RODGER! Always LOVE to see what you are working on! These look really good! I'm with Eric, I'd like to see the '41 Plymouth. How are things in Windsor? We gotta meet some day...you could be member #4 of D.A:M.N. (Detroit Animation:Masters Network) Your friend across the (getting shallower every day) Detroit River, Matt Campbell (PS---Did you see Martin's backyard railroad setup?)

Cool! I'll 'second' Mike's request about the falloff. If you haven't used that feature yet it is VERY cool! You'll notice in your floor group property box when you turned ON reflections that several OTHER options appeared below it, and the final on being falloff. A good way to set this is to drag a preview render box around a part of your floor, and then increase the number in this box until you have a nice falloff in the reflection...(Falloff meaning...the reflection goes away the further away it is...) I'm not too sure what the other two...reflection blend and reflection filter do. Anyone else want to offer an esplantion? Cool!

I d'loaded the LATEST RELEASE of V14.1 onto an unused Mac and started playing with cloth to see what the 'to do' is... Either this release is missing the thing I was looking for OR they changed how you attach and constrain cloth to objects... I modelled a simple mesh grid...100X100 CPs...and then lathed a 'handle' and placed it near the corner of the grid, with the idea being that once placed in the chor and simmed the mesh would fall but hang from the handle... I made 2 new materials...Simcloth and a SimCloth deflector, placed cloth on the grid's group and the deflector on the handle's group...also dropped the deflector onto the default 'ground' model so the cloth would detect the ground plane. Now, in previous versions of Hash's SimCloth- I would select the 'cloth's group in the model and open the little triangle-box in the bottom (of it's property window) labeled 'plugin properties' and then the triangle that would open the 'SimCloth' box. Here, I was able to turn on the option called 'attached' and then select a group for it to be attached TO... In this version of A:M (V14.0) I CAN turn ON the 'attached' option...but I 'CANNOT' indicate which group I want to be attached TO...begging the question... IS THERE A NEW WAY TO DO THIS? or IS THIS A BROKEN FEATURE? Until I get to the bottom of those 2 questions you and I, AwfulBridgeDude...are scratchin'...

I'm quite sure you are missing a step. I'm in the middle of a heavy render and can't open another A:M right now... I'll do as soon as can--- I don't think this link (above...http://www.lowrestv.com/arm/search3.asp?bo...ateAdded%20desc ) will be of any help...one was 2004, the other 1998...both are written about OLDER version of cloth...not the new 'SimCloth' feature...

Who says V15 will have liquid effects??? Or is that just 'ruthless speculation'?

It may also help to lower the gravity of your tree's choreography. Default is (Y) -100%...try -25% to get the leaves to move slower.

Wow...Rusty, you have OUTDONE yourself! Cowboys and Indians??? Get down to your local community college and start teaching! THOSE kind of analogies are PRICELESS! I love it! I suppose this picture could be painted with 'cops' and 'robbers'... Mschoenhals--- for most 'professional' results rotoscopes are usually left as guides in A:M and then composited in another app like AfterEffects or Premiere...Vegas... IF you want to use A:M as the compositor you will obviously have to find a compressor that renders right...so experiment. Try 'No compression'...what are you using to convert your video compression?