[My first spline Head - WIP]

Hey guys, please hop in here with a little "hand-holding, step-by-step" help if you'd be so kind. This should be easy, and I've searched and read the manual but it's still escaping me.

 

I've made some bump maps (ie for the forehead wrinkles) and want to add relationships to the poses that regulate the percentage of bump relief. Easy enough, right? I know how to add the relationship to a pose, but actually getting the bump percentage of my decal to change as the pose slider changes is not working. I'm doing something wrong, and several hours of experimenting haven't improved my understanding.

 

Any rescuers available to make the light bulb go on over my head?

 

Thanks

[My first spline Head - WIP]

Thanks a lot for all of your comments and help. I hope to have time to try out the suggestions this weekend.

[My first spline Head - WIP]

Thanks for the comments. This is my third head, first one with splines. I've never gotten to the actual lipsync or animation part, so this should be fun! I like the tools A:M has for animation.

 

There are three bones so far: neck, head and lower jaw. The CP's of the mouth area are weighted. I'll be adding rigging for the eyes and probably tongue. Other than that, all movements are poses.

 

I tried the porcelain material and get a few black areas, even though all normals point in the same direction. It's probably the result of 5-point patches from what I've been able to gather from other posts. Once it's got bump maps and texture the small ridges shouldn't be visible anymore.

 

I have a few questions:

 

1. There's light shine-through into the mouth/head. Am I missing a setting that prevents this, or do I need to add a "negative" light inside the head?

 

2. When rendering, if I right-click and do a selective area render it works fine. If I hit the "render to file" and try to save a targa file it renders a totally black frame. This must be simple, but I'm stumped.

 

3. There are eye decals for the irises that seem to come and go at will. I end up having to redirect A:M to the file again. The decal image is in a different directory from the prj and mdl files. Would it help to keep them all in the same directory?

 

4. I remember reading a post about aligning all the cp's in a spline to exactly the x=0 value, and now can't find it again. Does anyone happen to have that post bookmarked?

 

Thanks a lot for the help,

 

Mark Strohbehn

[My first spline Head - WIP]

Thanks for the encouraging words.

 

My previous 3D experience consists of a couple of years with Blender. It's been a real challenge relearning everything in A:M language, but my progress has accelerated lately and now it's really enjoyable. The PWS concept was hard to wrap my brain around and there are still a lot of things I don't get, but these boards have been a huge help.

 

It's funny, I originally became interested in 3D when I saw Victor Navone's "Alien Song", but had no idea he used A:M for that until I started looking at alternatives to Blender. The quality of the other A:M Films were enough to entice me to make the move.

 

Next on the "to do" list is teeth, tongue, and texturing. I really only intended to do this head to learn spline modeling and lip sync skills, so photorealism is not what I'm after (yet). Many challenges ahead....

 

 

Mark Strohbehn

[My first spline Head - WIP]

Hello folks,

 

I'm a new A:M user, just getting used to how A:M works so there is MUCH I don't have a handle on yet, but I thought I'd unveil my first WIP.

 

About half the facial poses are finished. Texturing will come later.

 

So far I'm very impressed with A:M, and am looking forward to joining you all here.

 

Best regards,

 

 

Mark Strohbehn

 

 

 

9/30/04 10 second Lipsync test on page 3