John Bigboote

Great test, Rodney! I would definitely combine any effect you do with a particle/sprite effect with collision-detection to get some interaction with the water and the character. If you are sold on the green-screen method, you could use multiple layers of green... the 1st at 15% opacity, then maybe 45%... and the final 100%- so you will get more of a gradual emergence.

I got my feet wet in the '3D Printing' arena this week... turned out kinda cool! I uploaded a hash model of my Tireman character to sculpteo.com(via OBJ exporter with a .mat file for colors...) and interacted with their online 'repair-bot'... which sent me back to A:M to make revisions maybe 8-10 times as I learned what I could and could not get away with... and mostly what geometry was deemed 'too thin' for the scale I had chose... which was 3.8" tall. This print cost $80...I am pretty happy with what I see. My method was to pose the character using his TSM rig in a chor and save it out from there as a .mdl... which I opened and deleted all the bones and decals from... the 'Tireman' on his hat was a decal so I modeled it and replaced it with real 3D geometry. I was under the assumption that to make a 3D print I would need to make my model 100% waterproof- meaning 1 continuos mesh, but I was wrong. Sculpteo's 'repair' bot- which takes about 5-10 minutes to work- seems all the interjoing geometry into 1 fuseable mesh. I DID model the base and included it's depth in the model, because I did not know if the model would be too top-heavy to stand on it's own. Sculpteo took about 1 week, the box came HEAVILY packaged for damage vis USPost. I might adjust some colors and make some more for 'thank-you's' for my clients. I'll post a wireframe of the model later. I recommend Sculpteo dot com!

i am lazy

I am coming to this party late... did you ever get your episode #1 up on Youtube?

Yeah! I like it! I was going to say it is missing the social media links- but I found them easily enough. Great work, Gerald! Where did all that great imagery come from???

That's pretty cool, Robcat... another for the ICBD Series? Why isn't sphereize included in Animation:Master anymore?

A former manager of mine once noted that whenever he cut a client a deal in the hope of future work, it never resulted in future work. It seems a lot of big VFX companies have gone broke on that plan. My former company(that I worked for)- Grace & Wild Studios- one of the largest post-production facilities in the midwest- went out of business in 2011 by doing exactly thus. It never-never-ever-ever paid off!

Fucher got it... another program. Shame on me. Thought they may be useful to the 'sphere-collectors'.

Here are 2 files along the 'spherical' topic that you may want to grab for your library. One is a non-lathed 'hexahedronical' sphere, the other is a sphere made-up of individual cubes- great for motion-graphics usage. Any guesses how I made them? Sphere_hexahedronical.mdl sphere of cubes.mdl

I can never go to this thing, so I always appreciate seeing pictures of the tom-foolery- Thanks Jason.

"Half up-front and the other two-thirds on delivery!" -gets a laff every time...

Looking good... here's more reference from talented CG artist Carlos Ortega's Facebook page, with a nice pose for Rodney: https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t31.0-8/10498670_710595029012110_6628952404570965155_o.png and from Mathieu Reynes: https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/t1.0-9/10530911_10204532182166981_7753830864903307074_n.jpg

That's one for the festival circuits! Great work! A:M shines as the main vehicle for this bizarre tale...right?

If you do use my hair, I'd like to see how it goes. You may want to take the geometry where the hair will emit from and copy/paste it and use the splitpatch utility to double/quadruple it's density... which helps collision-detection to work, if that makes sense.

SELL, SELL, SELL! That is the salesman's motto... which is not too different from the old animators motto... 'CEL, CEL, CEL!' Get pix of the Cosplay chix... they go to all that trouble... right?

AWESOME! This is gonna be GREAT!

Hey Looks good Zaryin! Here is that image link: http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/07/BATGIRLMODEL2-720x10181.jpg Looks like she has flowing red hair... you should grab my hair material from the 'Hair Salon' forum and let it flow!

" It may be possible to parse and load the A:M files from within Unity. I will have to see if I exposed enough functionality in HAMR to get to the patch or poly models and get them into Unity and create a Unity poly mesh model." Hi Ken! It will be interesting to learn what you find on this! Glad you are well... sounds like a great gig there in Texas! How do I work the quote function in this new forum?

You may want to look into using Adobe After Effects CS6 or CC for this task...

I've never had good luck with lights in a model,,, same results. You may want to add the lights in an action and then drop the action on the model in the chor. Have you tried rendering with and without multipass/

The one that 'got away'. No more contests for me.

Did not know... got any links for some of that Blender stuff? Is it a 'download the utility-player' kind of thing or does it flat-out work in a browser?

Sent it in a month ago... and forgot about the whole dealio. Wasn't that great. Maybe I'll show it here since it does not matter.

I've been following this thread, just wanted to chime in some useless input. The pre-cursor to HA:MR was a utility called 'Arctic Pigs'(by a user/programmer Nils...something)... the goal of HA:MR was sort of to be to take-up where AP left-off and build upon the technology. In my opinion,HA:MR never got close to the AP level... One thing I really-really liked about AP (other that the facts that it worked and was easy) was that you could specify any object in your scene to be a 'button' that would trigger an action- for instance for a Hash/AP contest I had a 3D cartoony car on a turntable and if you clicked on the hood, an action was triggered to open the hood, same for the doors. Very cool! I forget what it was that doomed the AP tech... I think it was the new SDK for V13 or something. If anyone wants to 'dust-off' some old cool program and update/modernize with todays tools... I would look at Arctic Pigs before HA:MR...

Strange- I see it in my sent folder to support@hash.com June 5- I remember I thought that was the deadline- guess it does not pay to be early... that's just the way it goes sometimes.