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strohbehn

*A:M User*
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Everything posted by strohbehn

  1. Yves, this is an absolutely beautifully crafted model. The lighting is amazing as well. Threads like this are pure gold. Thanks for offering your hard work for examination and instruction!
  2. Wow! Your lipsync is amazing on this. Really nice job. Great character. Thanks, too, for all your posts on the facial rigging setup. It's powerful stuff that I'm trying to get a grip on. Mark
  3. FYI... there is an awsome perl script by Aminator (Jack Morrison) called "splitp.p" that will take a pose and split it into individual Left and Right side poses (and still maintain the bilateral version). I've been experimenting with this for the past few days and it works beautifully! It's a Huge time saver! Contact him to see if he'll post it with the instructions if you're interested. It would make a good tutorial on the Tutorial Resources site. Ken... I actually ended up adding those two rings you mentioned after trying a few poses because I wasn't able to get the fullness below the eye and above the corners of the mouth without them during certain movements. Thanks Mark
  4. Got a chance to try most of your helpful hints, and you were all correct in your answers. I tried the porcelain material again and did indeed have some normals flipped the wrong way, which was causing the problems (thought I'd gotten them all, but hadn't). Smoothing will help. While looking into nerrazzi'a suggestion about mesh layout on the neck I discovered that that was an old version of the model. Weeks ago I cleaned up the mesh around the ears and neck area on one side, then intended to delete half and copy/flip/paste. Somewhere in the multiple saved versions I grabbed an older version of the mesh and did the poses on that one. Grrrr... now considering redoing the head with rigging just for fun. Pengy asked for a full front view, but I think this one shows everything more clearly. The arrows show changes from the previous mesh. Mark
  5. Bravo people. The light is now ON! Your answers made it clear. For future newbies reading this thread, follow the previous three posts and you'll be fine. It appears A:M wasn't initially refreshing the new bump % values, so even though I may have stumbled on the right solution once or twice I didn't know I had it right. Pressing the spacebar did the trick to refresh the values once I had followed the right steps. I actually like the way things are organized in the PWS, but it's confusing at first to know where to look for what values need changing. My light shine-through problem was due to my not setting "cast shadows" on my lights. The first raytraced result was really odd, but I can read up on that now. Thanks... There's soooo much more to learn. Thanks for helping me along. Mark
  6. 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
  7. Thanks a lot for all of your comments and help. I hope to have time to try out the suggestions this weekend.
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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
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