John Bigboote

and then... a tip-of-the-hat to Martin!

STEP 3: the STAND Using my rough building sketch as a guide, The simple 'Hut' is an homage to all those ice-cream joints we have all seen and frequented. Once again, Simbiont textures will add a nice Stucco texture. The 'Fin' on the top was an added detail, and rotated once I added a sign so the text would read better. Simple black shapes (cubes) added inside the building give the illusion of equipment and hide the back wall- Text was quickly added using the Font Wizard, and the font 'Honest John' which I believe was made to look like the old Howard Johnson's logo text had a nice 'food-stand' look... classic!

STEP 2: the ICE-CREAM First, I did a Google image search on 'ice cream cone' and came-up with a lot of reference.... what flavor? I hadn't even considered. Vanilla would be easiest, I suppose... but I was hungry for something more. I played with many Simbiont AM textures and finally found one that looked ice-cream-ish... and it was the tx-Bio Alien Skin texture. I played with colors and settings and got a nice 'submerged chocalate chip' or maybe they are pistacchios... I don't know- looked good and was quick-n-easy. For extra detail, I added a plastic/paper transparent holder, and along with an upside-down small cone added at the very bottom the cone's problems were mostly hidden. Some drips were added as well. Also- I added some extra 'chips' to the ice-cream surface that served to break-up the smooth outline nicely.

My next move would be to see if it is a V19 problem, open up 18 and try it there...

But I still had a ways to go. I realized I was making my cone like the Youtube video I had watched... https://youtu.be/_f7-Eq4H0D8 at 1:30 in the video I noticed the round shaped waffle goes into a cone where it molds it's shape... I had to do that, so I: 1- made my grid into a round shape and tilted it 45 degrees. 2- cropped the top off so I would get an even top. 3- used Distortion Mode to meld and form my waffle to a primitive reference cone shape (red) 4-Final result... I now added the color and a celturb material to give a little variance and texture. Looks nice, but there are still 'problem areas' that would need to be dealt with. Mainly, the top was jagged and rough- an easy fix once I put my ice-cream in, will cover it up nicely. But, at the cone's bottom- the grid is over-converging and comes to a non-uniform crumbly tip. The solution? Stay tuned.

STEP 1: The CONE I began by attacking the cone of the ice-cream cone... still not knowing if I was working on an idea I would scrap- or ever finish. I figured this was a good starting point, something I literally love to sink my teeth into... and I told myself it would be an easy start. Right? Wrong. I initially lathed a cone and then started playing with materials to get that 'waffle grid' look I was after. Materials let me down in the mapping (spherical, cubic...?) and in the bump/displacement (I wanted to be able to 'feel' these ridges...) I scrapped the lathed cone idea and watched a Youtube video on how ice-cream cones are made for inspiration. I could'nt believe I was 'stuck' at such an early point in the process... so I went 'old-school'. I used geometry (CP's and splines) to make my waffle pattern. I modeled 1 grid-unit and then copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste... and via the magic of exponentialism I was quickly there.

It was just a crude doodle made while on the phone... but I liked the way it seemed to catch the spirit of summer. It had the whimsy and composition of an advertisement you might see on a marquis while deciding if you should get a slushy or a cone. I liked the way the 'shack' sat at the bottom of the frame, and I immediately redrew it with more angled perspective and added detail. With the right colors and textures- this could make a nice image! I read recently that in the name of not being 'overly-ambitious', when you start a project with a design like this you should reduce some of the elements, so ultimately I would 'nix' the ice-cream scooper, the car, people and picnic table and just concentrate on the building and cone.

I'll be posting some images, files and explanations about my 2017 SUMMER Image Contest entry here. I am sorta working backwards, seeing that my entry is already submitted. I worked on it for about 8 hours, 4 on 1 day and another 4 the next. It all began with a simple sketch that I was able to get excited about:

That is odd... guess you will need to re-apply that one?

Ha! I like the way the pink dots took reminded you of a little story for us, Simon. Maybe time to paint your house pink! I feel your pain on this--- wish I could be more help. My approach to UV'ing has always been to simply apply a decal... maybe take a screen capture of the particular view I am looking at... take it into Photoshop and paint to that angle. I was very excited to start learning C4D with it's 'Bodypaint' feature for UVing... but found it quite convoluted and many other users feel the same way and recommend expensive 3rd party UV-ers... Lately, back in A:M, my approach is to use less imagery and more materials- tho that would'nt help you here- sometimes you need paint and imagery. I appreciate this thread and will follow-up on the knowledge here when I can. Let's go for a pint at the Shadingfield Fox!

Thank-You... I tend to avoid the search bar in the forum... I just wanted to check the rules one more time before i SUBMIT MY WINNER!

I really like that noise material set to displacement! Hey Rob--- I went looking for the post for the 'Summer' image contest, it was not where I imagined it to be- which was in the 'Current Contests' forum...

How fun, and easy topic everyone can relate to. I will shoot to get at least 1 entry, I hope many others do too. The prizes are great- and EVERY ENTRANT is a WINNER??? That's new! Imagine your excitement as Rob scratches-off your $1 ticket from the Texas lottery... everything in Texas is BIGGER!

Finally got a moment to appreciate the high degree of detail and attention Rob has put into my award. The videos were informative and entertaining... he even dons a suit for his on-camera appearance! Every detail has been considered, and the pewter coin... is heavy and perfectly made! A true memento! Here is my award front and center with some other knic-knacks picked up thru the years... THANK YOU ROBCAT!

Great study, Rob. When used in NetRender with multiple renderers, the time-savings really adds UP! I have been putting V19 NetRender thru it's paces with some test projects- working well! NOTE: I made a test project with 2 instances of SSS, and it did'nt crash upon render... so nevermind on that. I have so many belles and whistles turned-on in my renders- playing detective is no fun.

LOVE IT!

Thanks Rodney- that helped! Here is another for testing... may be a bug...When you have 2 objects with SSS in the same scene the render crashes...

Hey- sorry to change topic back over to V19... I have installed it and am toying with a old project- is anyone else having trouble selecting keyframes in the timeline? It is not always predictable but about 50% of the time, I drag a rectangle around a group of keyframes (see image- arrow at bottom) and the keys will 'maybe' become selected. I can workaround by selecting a different bone in the PWS then reselecting the bone I want and trying again which resets my odds at 50%... is there a new feature or setting I don't know about? Seems like a bug.

Truly looking forward to it. You go above and beyond for this forum, BIGTIME!

Nice LOOP!

The Haven wedding story got my stomach in knots!

Impressive list, great work Steffen! Lots to read here! Happy to see my request: - 6772: Feature Request: Weight Menu Undo the weight dialog has now a "Cancel" button , which reverts the changes done in the dialog to the state before the dialog was started. Weighting has now also a general Undo/Redo , if the dialog is exited with the "Done" button. among the additions. Got a chance to update today.

appears to WORK! Trial is limited to 500 frames- doesn't seem to be a time limit. There is a little bit to learn about it... and you need to install ffmpeg which AfterCodecs is built upon... but, I just successfully encoded a Pro-Res on my PC! Happy Day!!

http://aescripts.com/aftercodecs/ I figure these guys are going to make a million dollars, then lose it all to an Apple lawsuit. For the last 5+ years, Apple's Pro-Res Quicktime compression has been the standard in video playback and delivery in the pro world. And Apple being Apple- they made it so that Windows users could read, but not write Pro-Res files. Which has been a royal pain to Windows users (most just keep an old Apple around for conversions)... 3rd party solutions have come and gone, most simply don't work, or were too complicated command line stuff. An article I read explained that Apple had tied part of the conversion to something inherant in Apple hardware that is not found in PC's... whatever, it has been quite a roadblock... until now. I am going to test the free version and will report my findings. AE Scripts is usually a pretty reliable source for erthwhile plug-ins. $55 not too bad- they could charge $300 and sell a ton of them. They also claim a Mac version is coming soon... which begged the question, WHY? from a mac user. Here is 3 good reasons- they claim: -faster ecoding(for Pro-Res and H264) in the AE Render Queue than After Effects can do. -smaller file sizes than AE writes. -better image quality/less artifacts than AE produces. We'll see!

Resurrecting this old thread to show some E3D stuff. This was a nifty little combo between A:M and E3D (Element 3D, a GPU renderer) Client is International, they make semi-trucks. Their logo has a very particular hi-light to the letters that are cutout of the metal... 1st thought was to simply use a boolean to cut out (reverse) the letters in C4D, but then, that would ignore the particular hi-light- I know how these corporate clients are sticklers for the details of their logo (it is very important.) So I knew I had to MODEL this particular little offset highlight(it is the white edge around the text)... C4D's modeller is easy for simple stuff but I don't know it well enough to get intricate like this. But I know A:M's, and it was pretty straightforward. I also used Photoshop to prepare the images to be used as the 'metal' from the logo itself and applied them as decals in A:M. Once I had the bar with the text modelled- I used the mesh-mode deformer to put the 'bend' into the bar, and exported the model as an .obj WITHOUT using the 'generate model maps' function (when I used it... it had seems around each patch image... no good.) But, when I opened the OBJ in C4D- there were the images (now considered UV's) I was then able to send the file out to the other animators working on the job who were scratching their heads as to how I did it (ancient Chinese secret...!) Whatever new changes are coming in V19... EASY REQUEST... don't change anything with the obj exporter! It rocks! Once I confirmed everything was looking good in C4D I saved it as a C4D file (yes, I used C4D as a very expensive file-converter...) and imported the .c4d file into Element 3D- which resides as a filter inside of After Effects. Element has some nifty render features... on this, I employed DOF, AO, shadows,glow, and set some E3D physical materials onto what were once my A:M groups. As a quick test, I used E3D's replicator to duplicate the model 8X and gave it a spin... an AE camera and 2 AE lights(AE is SO clunky in 3D!)... the lens-flare was another AE layer with Video CoPilots lens-flare applied. RENDER at 1920 X1080 took 2 seconds per frame- 10 minutes to make a :10 loop. I am using E3D more and more in these corporate jobs and A:M is a perfect model generator and animation program for it. (as far as animation goes, the graph editor in A:M just plain ROCKS! I struggle with C4D and After Effects graph editors and come to realize... they just don't GET IT.) 3Dlogo spin test.mp4