John Bigboote

That is a powerful feature...does'nt the new 'composite' feature sort of do this using .exr buffers? This is how Division X (a company I work with) is able to get their photorealism... http://www.gracewild.com/divisionx/index.html

I 'LOVE' obscene limericks! I've been known to write several meeself... THE BASICS TO SPINNING A WHEEL: Make a wheel, a lathe operation works well for this. Go into bones mode, make a bone that will be the axis point for the wheel with the roll handle acting as the spinning mechanism. Now, make an action or bring this wheel into the chor. Enter skeletal mode (f8) and click on the roll handle. In it's properties windows you will see the rotate property. Right click on rotate and select 'change rotation to euler'...you can now advance to the end of your chor and rotate the roll handle as many times as you wish to see it spin. THE BASICS TO RIGGING A 4 wheel VEHICLE: Do the same wheel creation as above but copy and paste and offset to make 4 wheels as in a car. Make a bone for each front tire as above and only one bone for the two rear wheels. This will allow the front wheels 'steering' capabilities. Bring the model in to the chor and animate the one wheel to turn as shown above. Once wheel 1 is animated satisfactorly, right-click on the rear axle bone and select 'new constraint'. Select 'Roll like' as the constraint type and select the bone that you animated as the target. Now, do the same for the opposite front axle bone but set the constraints 'scale' percentage to -100%. All four wheels should now spin the same. THE BASICS TO GETTING KICKED OFF THIS FORUM: Threaten to kill someone. Best!

Might want to try the old save-and-reopen trick...

Beautiferous! I think the floor is the weak point. And that logo is overexposed. Shadows could be darker...Nice work!

otherworldly! In a 'good' kind of way....

There's more to it. I use A:M primarily as a 'footage generator' and then use After Effects to composite and edit. Sometimes I work with an editor who would use an Avid or DS... My TV production toolkit includes: Animation:Master, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere, Flash, Sony Sound Forge, Sony Vegas, Sony Acid...

Here's a small selection of TV spots I have made using A:M. I'd like to see other folk's as well...if possible. http://youtube.com/watch?v=tNtW9yMyTvY http://youtube.com/watch?v=GQ59K_vGRVU http://youtube.com/watch?v=PUOJ5ZRr4HM http://youtube.com/watch?v=pP4xpeqaifI That last one...'First Motor Club' is one I did freelance this summer. I had posted on the 'Jobs' forum to see if anyone had a lion model I could buy...someone told me of the 'cougar' on the Xtras DVD and suggested I modify it...so that's what that is! Also of note in that one...the 'weeds' at the start are animated using the wonderful 'dynamic constraint'. The entire job is sort of 'toon' rendered to match the art director's design.

Hi---YES! A:M is a very adept program for making TV commercials...coupled with a handful of other apps. (You will find you might need an editing program, a compositing program, and an image manipulation program...Some people contend that A:M can do all of this.) You are asking some pretty general questions. Studio's do not 'air' commercials...they make them, usually in conjunction with an 'agency'-who writes, produces, directs, and sells the commercial...and their client- who the commercial is for, and who foots the bill and reaps the reward. The agency will also buy the 'media'...which is airtime on cable or broadcast television. Individuals can approach their local cable stations and buy a package of airtime quite easily. Simply call your local cable or satellite service provider and inquire. I would recommend taking some advertising classes at your local community college, or approaching your local cable station for training. You seem to 'want to know'...and that is an important first step, so PERSUE THE KNOWLEDGE!

Stian- Thanks for sharing those...congrats on winning...awesome models, render and subject matter! The ONLY critique I can see...and my eye went right to it...and it's nothing you did...is the perspective on the background building has some un-natural convergences. It would be great if you could elaborate a little further on the render techniques you employed. Great work!

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?