dhartman

Do you mean beveling on edges? Here's my 2 cents on beveling everything. 1. When the camera is too far away, fine "edge" bevels don't show up anyway. (Or very little.) 2. There are plenty of things to make a scene look real, beveling is just one of them. You seem to have hit on some of the others, such as texturing. You might apply bevels to objects that would benefit from it, i.e. close to the camera or large bevels that will actually show up appreciably. Great work, keep it up!

That was me. I am happy to find someone using that chain rig that I set up a while ago! Cool stuff. I never dreamed it would be used for robot treads. BTW I think that's a 19 tooth gear, the bigger one. It uses a path. In fact, you could make the slack part of the chain squirm and flop around just like slack chains do in real life when they're going around the sprockets like mad, or if the tank (or robot) is going over bumps. Here's a link to the original post. Wireframes and project file is also located there. The chain is heavy duty #40 roller chain, but its certainly compatible with tank treads!

VERY nice work. But I have 2 items of constructive criticism. 1. Bring the rear tire down to the pavement. 2. Add a kickstand for heaven's sake, the thing's going to fall over! As I said, nice job, and keep up the good work!

I especially like your choice of fonts. I do website design some too, and there's something to be said about them simple fonts like courier. Great job.

Rough positioning done with the spin button in the ease property. This has a resolution of 1, and from there it had to be wrangled with the number pad and lots of 2-place decimals. In hindsight, in the 50% and 100% values could have easily been figured out mathematically by adding 25 and 50 to the 0% values. I have some ideas about how to eliminate all that in future bike chains, though, and use only whole numbers. Hint: a "tail" on the end of the path spline, that by pulling out longer or shorter, would space the links correctly. Hope you all follow, I know it sounds weird. Then, in theory, the chain would be limited to 49 links, using whole numbers for ease percents.

I wrote: Actually, the last link (Bone31) eases from 48.3% to 98.35%. Bone32 does not have any cp's, it is just an invisible bone that serves as an "aim at" constraint target for Bone31. I couldn't use Bone1 to serve as the target because of being a circular constraint.

Thank you all for the input! It was a lot of fun to do, and although I spent a good bit of time working on it, it could be done again (or in more detail) in much less time, as I learned a great deal in the process. I'll try to do a little dialog here to answer the questions: I used A:M extensively in illustrating an technical book that I wrote, and that's where some of the practice came from. For the background, if you are referring to the graph paper, it's simply a pattern that I made in PaintShop Pro, and applied to the curved "ground" mesh. If you are asking about my educational / experience background, I do computer technical support / programming and website design for a living, and in a previous life, operated printing press (lotsa bicycle chains on them). I think Yves gets the credit here. The shafts are simply stretched cylinders straight from the primitives library that comes with the A:M disk. You're right, Yves, there is. In the action, I tried to correct this by looping the pose from 0% to 99%, rather than 0% to 100%. This made it worse. I think the ultimate problem is that the 100% pose isn't exactly identical to 0%. And I must go into some detail about how the path is set up. The path actually makes two complete turns. This is because the first link has to ease along the path from 0% to 50% on the path (don't confuse the ease percentage with pose percentage), while the last link eases from 50% to 100%. All the other links are somewhere in between. A little work on these ease percentages should clear up the hesitation, if I'm understanding the problem correctly. Good observation. Interesting you mention it, I did actually try putting a decal of a photograph on a plane behind the camera, but for some reason it would not reflect in the chrome. I think it had something to do with the lighting, like there was not light coming from the photo. Maybe adding the 100% ambiance to a photo decaled mesh would put a nice realistic reflection on the chrome? Thanks again to all of you for your observations and praises. More posts to come...

Hi all! I was inspired by a recent post by David Dustin of Dustin Productions to attempt modeling and animating a bicycle chain moving around sprockets. So here it is!! I've attached screen shots which you can click to view larger images. Thanks David for the inspiration, and you're welcome to use my project if you have any use whatsoever! BTW, I'm a little nervous, this is my first post to the Showcase, so here goes...but don't be afraid to criticize. (I hope my links show up correctly!) My technique was to create a pose in which each chain link was constrained to path, with a different ease with keyframes at 0%, 50% and 100%. Then the sprockets were syncronized with the chain in an action. Finally, paint and chrome was applied (my favorite color by the way) and put in a choreography with a nice backdrop of graph paper. The sprockets are in a 16:7 ratio. There's even a master link you can follow just so you know I didn't cheat--the entire chain is fully animated all the way around the path. Here's the animation: 10-second clip of this rig in action. (5.2 mb) And here's the project file. Enjoy!

Deform the model. You want to keep that crystal clear water look to the stream, and I don't think this could be accomplished with particles or sprites. I'd use some poses applied randomly over time to simulate the randomly shifting pattern of water flowing. Fade in at the beginning and out at the end with post effects so as not to disrupt the "perpetual" flow of water with the "finite" time restraints of a short movie. Also, better lighting on the faucet, along with some nice chrome and porcelain would really add to the effect as well. BTW, great job on the waterglass, don't ya just love that index of refraction feature?