John Bigboote

Anyone have any insight on this aspect of Unity?

I'm digging the 360-scenario you have them in!

It needs work in the 'scaling' department... somehow the Empire State building is not the tallest, and the Chrysler building is WAY too short. Rendertimes for the above movie(post #1) were 7 seconds per frame... the 1280 X 720 5 multi-pass with trees, shadows and reflections are taking an average of 7 minutes per frame... not too bad.

Wow- you were even a great modeler way back then. This 'Employee of the Month' is a great concept... someone should make a movie based on the premice! Reminds me of the bumper-sticker (for some reason) "In the town I came from, we didn't HAVE a town drunk, so everybody had to take turns..."

This being a patriotic holiday here in the US... HAPPY 4th of July to my fellow Americans. (The Statue of Liberty model seen here was a 3DS model I found on a free model site and I used the AM Importer to convert it to a hash model, worked well... needs the base. These images used my 'Fisheye Lens' model and a Photoshop filter.)

That was the 1st thing I considered and tested, I mean- it would be great to simply make a 64bit grayscale patch image with varying levels of gray boxes to make buildings of various heights... no? Well, I could not get favorable results... and render time goes up with displacements as well as other issues... like how close can you put the camera to a displaced surface (not very) without problems. I found a Darktree material called 'Division' that I tweeked to get the 2ndary level of suburban chaos below the copy/paste boxes- not perfect by any means but a good cheat. It employs a bump for fake depth and renders quickly. Here is one single patch with and without Division:

Progress: I added clouds at the last minute before render last night... also, you can now see the particle trees that dot the landscape. This is with 5 passes multipass, I'll let it go over the weekend and we'll see it animate on Tuesday!

Sure is a lot of detail, accurate and beautiful. I don't know what kind of story you are working on, but I envision one where there is a heavy narrative, and as the story is being told the camera slowly pans the rooms, showing all of this imagery- making it the 'star'.

Oh... THAT flickering-bickus dickus! Yeah- this is a quarter-res 1 pass render... possibly tomorrow I will have a full res to share, it's rendering right now at 1280 X 720 with 5 passes @ 7-8 min per frame. I really-really-really need a rendering solution... long renders are KILLING me. I will look into using DOF eventually... also might be neat to use some FakeAO on this scene.

Thanks everyone...! Nancy, temporal scintantilization-bickus-dickus? Lost me on that one... it is a proxy flight plan... Shawn and Co. will do with the camera whatever as they wush.... where's my dictionary...? Did I bevel? Heck no.

Frame 1 done... so I junked it up with text. No duplicator wizard used, just good old copy and paste and heavy usage of action objects. There is a skydome with a gradient material (white to blue) and there is a Darksim material called 'Division' on the ground to add more boxxy subdivided urban junglry. I am thinking about adding clouds...

This 'Manhattan Project' I am doing for Shawn Rogers (NewGuy) is coming along really nice... I decided that to do a proper NYC you need to also model what lies across the rivers... which is Staten Island, Brooklyn, Jersey, the Bronx and the Atlantic Ocean... among others. (Bridges, Statue of Liberty, ships...) The project is for the Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls... and next I will be modeling their stadium... so the zoom can continue right into midfield! Texturing is minimal... all is heavily stylized... just needed to capture the 'feel' of the city. I will render a high res over the holiday weekend with particle trees, reflections and shadows at 720P... DIG! (Thanks to Shawn for the patience, the permission to share with the forum, and the gig!) NYC1.mov

Dang- MISSED it! Wull, have a happy 'day after' birthday- thanks for all you do!

Yeah, great testimonial! Come back often!

For those newly looking in... Symbiont=Darktree.

Here's-to future tinkering!

I had something like that once on the bottom of my boat... it hasn't happened again tho since I took it out of the water...

Booleans are great. Make sure: -Your normals are pointing right ways (out for the positive shape, in for the negative cutter.) -Your 'cutting' geometry is closed. -Your camera never passes thru the boolean. The MAIN downside, in my book- is that you have to do a render to see their effect. So your model will look kinda weird until you render. HERE is an old animation from my archives, booleans in motion: AMbooleans.mov

Have you had a look at the DarkTree materials?

That method should work- and I would think it should be the preferred method no matter which rig you start with. The 'bake' should make a keyframe for each CP on every frame with distinct XYZ placement values, I wonder if you missed a step or what... did you employ the 'Gormezano Method' which is to save and close A:M before you do the 2nd part, or even after is all said and done and you have the weird results... save as... close A:M... reopen all to see if your fate has changed...

Hope you are out having a Lager! I owe you one. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

That makes sense, zero... as in 'skip zero frames'.

It doesn't ? I thought there was a 'Reduce Channels' option box that popped up and if you set it to '1' (default) it would make a key on every frame--- or do I have this wrong?

OR--- use your alternate program, that you are familiar with... to make the splines in vector form. For instance, use Photoshop or Illustrator to make the perfect geometric shapes with the vector tools, then export them as an AI file and use the AI Wizard in A:M to import them, then extrude away to your hearts content!

The list under his movie says he used A:M V16...