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Godfrey

*A:M User*
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Everything posted by Godfrey

  1. Sure you can; I've seen faces made before A:M supported 5-pointers. It's just very difficult to do it smoothly without them.
  2. Yes. Although I used Photoshop at work, my preference at home has always been The GIMP. There are a few differences in the way each program does things, they have different filter sets (though there is a great deal of overlap), and The GIMP doesn't handle CMYK images as well as Photoshop does; but if you're not doing actual press work (and therefore need the CMYK support), there's very little that Photoshop can do that The GIMP can't.
  3. Great stuff, Zach and pia12254. Dang it, now there's something else I want to buy... FilmGIMP is now called CinePaint. It's based on The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), a freeware image editor; CinePaint works on sequential images (such as film or video frames).
  4. Nice greebles outboard the engine and in the cockpit!
  5. Great job! How about some wireframes?
  6. That is really nice, Zack. Well done! You ask for C&C; the only thing that jumps out at me is that the frets look a little aliased. I don't know if it'll help or not, but have you tried Greg Rostami's zero blur trick?
  7. That is truly nifty-looking! The only thing I notice is that the electric arcs seem to be producing shadows (i.e. there's a shadow of the arcs, not that they act as a light source which throws shadows). Still, that's really cool.
  8. Sure thing. Here's the exploded view: And this is how it all fits together: Yeah. My wife refused to be in the computer room when I was painting the eye decal. She'll be thrilled when I tell her I have to do another one (don't want to end up with two identical eyes, like Gollum in LoTR)...
  9. I tried making the retina part of the eyeball itself, within the main model. That worked fine as long as shadows were off; but when they were turned on, the retina remained black (not enough light getting through the pupil, and I suspect the IOR of the cornea may have been mucking things up as well).
  10. I was browsing through some photos the other day, when I realized I was missing something from my attempts to make realistic eyes in A:M -- the annoying red pupil effect you get when the light source is lined up almost directly with the camera lens. A lot of effort goes into reducing red-eye in the real world (from Sharpie markers to strobing flashes to software), but just like lens flares, it's an artifact that doesn't occur in CG unless you deliberately make it happen. So here's a little test animation of what I came up with: EyeballTest.mpg (208 KB). The basic technique's pretty easy; just a partial sphere inside the eyeball with a black surface and a large orange-red specular highlight. However, to get it to look right, I had to make the "retina" a separate model, set to not receive shadows, and constrained to the eyeball bone within the choreography.
  11. The first thing I'd suggest you try is to go into your options and switch rendering methods (i.e. if you're using Direct3D, switch it to OpenGL, and vice-versa).
  12. It's only a problem inasmuch as the HTML code being used to display the video assumes that the viewer is using Internet Explorer. Just add a regular HTML link for those browsers that don't automatically include WMV files into the Web page, and everything should be golden.
  13. That's what I get with Opera 7.54, too. A quick perusal of the source code lets me find the actual URL of the video, but it's a pretty narrow pipe; I'm getting less than 7KB/sec transfer, on a 9MB file. I'm looking forward to seeing it; BF1942's one of the few games I bothered to reinstall after my hard drive died on me.
  14. Last time I counted, it was 57,638 patches. But it'll go down some when I take out the glyphs and turn them into decals.
  15. Thanks for the compliments, all. Well, this is what one of the decals looks like (scaled down; the original is 2790x700 pixels, and a Targa). I'm currently re-doing the slots-and-zig-zags decal which goes all the way around inward of the glyph ring. Basically, the whole thing has a ninefold radial symmetry, so each decal covers about 40 degrees of arc (and I just replicate all the parts as action objects). I'm going to try. It'll be an interesting challenge, that's for sure. :-) Sure, have two: full frontal nudity and more demure.
  16. The engraved lines on the front/back faces are bump/diffuse maps, and the "knobbly" texture around the outer circumference is displacement/bump/diffuse, but all the other features (including the "chain link" type things on the inside of the ring) are modeled. The glyphs are modeled, but after seeing the show I think they'd do better as decals. Gonna have to think a bit to figure out the most efficient way of doing them. Probably an image-sequence cookie-cutter decal would be best. (Tsk, they couldn't have done a physical turning ring. No, that would be too easy...) It was definitely dark on TV, but some of the promo pics suggested that it was lighter. But it could also be the lighting. The SG-1 Stargate looks pretty light in some shots, but it's really dark in some versions of the opening credits. I guess without making a trip to Vancouver to see it for myself, I'll never really know.
  17. Here are some renders of my attempt to model the eponymous prop from the new Stargate series. I started it based on some promo pics that came out before the series, so a couple of features need to be "reinterpreted" now that I've actually seen the show; but even so, I don't think it looks too bad. Click the thumbnails for full-sized pics. I've also got some "white renders" of the entire model, front and back.
  18. He kind of reminds me of Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants. Not that that's a bad thing.
  19. A classic Bugs Bunny cartoon; "Ali Baba Bunny," if I remember the title correctly. Hassan, a big dimwitted thug, says it when he prepares to cleave Bugs Bunny and/or Daffy Duck in twain. "Uh, open.... dahhhh... septuagenarian?"
  20. Very nice! I love that he comes off the ground when the axe strikes, but it's almost too fast to perceive.
  21. Unless the other filmmakers put their works up on the Web, there isn't a place to do so. And just in case there's a misconception, we were (to my knowledge) the only animated film entered in the Washington DC segment of the project. All the rest were live-action.
  22. So have I, actually. Sometime in December, IIRC.
  23. What?! James Earl Jones is dead? When did this happen? Interesting walk cycle, though for some reason it looks to me like he's crawling on his knees.
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