fae_alba

Dude that's harsh!

Not to mention going to a community college first then on to a four year will save you more money than you can imagine. Having put two kids and two adults through school, one a private 4 year fine arts degree, and my youngest through school now, tuition is going to kill ya. A good AA or BA will take a kid further than anything else right now, since it is the most versatile. A fine arts degree says "I can draw/paint/sculpt", a game design degree says "I can design a game", a general AA/BA/AS/BS says "I had the discipline and knowledge to learn the basics, now I'm ready to learn your business" Employers will look at that, coupled with real world experience over anything else. And every HS kid (yours included, cause mine did) will say "bunk!" to that. My oldest spent four years "learning how to paint", cost me over $80,000 in tuition (which I am still paying), and the day she graduated told me "I got nothing out of the last four years". She is now a teacher in a pre-school. Worked with a bloke who went to Syracuse University for graphics design. Very talented. He told me he could have learned the same thing drawing in his mother's basement for the same four years. Sad to say, but a specialized education, in many cases cost far more than its worth, and provides the student little to no return on the investment.

just pumped an old Humphrey the Bear animation through it. It works well in showing some extremes that normally aren't so apparent when watching the video. Bookmarked that baby!

Instead of "Ghosts in the Machine" there are bugs.... oooooo next image contest...winners to be announced on October 31st!

holy moly, these are fan-buggin-tastic entries!

right now I only have 11 neurons. That's enough to do the lower body and one arm, or both hands. I'll need to invest in at least 6 more to do the whole body minus hands, or find some way of layering bvh data for the lower body in one pass and the upper body in another. According to their website, new orders won't ship until somewhen in October, so I've got a bit of time to experiment and make sure everything works ok.

Over a year and a half ago I sponsored on Kickstarter the Perception Neuron motion capture campaign. Didn't really expect they would meet their goal since they were looking for over $300k and were only $75k at the time. Much to my surprise (and my wallet) they did meet the goal and I had "bought" a $175 motion capture suit. It took them much longer than they expected to get the development done, but finally, last week, I got mine in the mail. It's a neat rig to be sure. I finally got it set up, though there are a few glitches that I suspect are more on my part, but I did capture a simple get up and walk sequence and now need to see how it will translate in A:M. The suit supports bvh file formats so hopefully there won't be too many issues. I attached a few snapshots to give you a slight idea of what this thing is. One is of the actual sensors (neurons) used to capture the motion data. Others are of the rig setup and a screen grab of the software. Neurons Rig setup Communications Hub Screen grab of the Axis software

man. some heavy hitters in so far, this oughta be good! Edit: I'm NOT including myself in the "Heavy Hitters" club!

done and done. Looking forward to the submissions!

I just ponied up for the Animation Scene Approach tuts. We'll see if my trend of learning new tricks continues!

Aaaand one more tweek to the scene.

Good catch! Added a lid for good measure as well.

Now see, this is what happens when I post before coffee! I was looking at the wrong image. using the right version does the trick. Thanks for the tip on clearing the image cache; I knew that was there somewhere, just not where. One thing I'm digging about this contest, I've actually learned and put into practice more working on this scene in the past two weeks than the past several years. Maybe my knowledge of A:M is finally reaching critical mass and I'm finally comprehending what I've been hearing here on the forum, who knows. What is for sure is that what started out as a "what the heck, I'll put something in" into, being really stoked (again) about using A:M.

of course the minute I post the last pic, I noticed that the change I made to the image to remove the "space invaders" pattern in the brick didn't take affect. This is actually a material, with an image applied. I corrected the image, but A:M didn't reload the image to see the change. Short of deleting the image from the workspace and reloading, how do you get A:M to always grab the image from disk?

Rodney pointed out the same thing earlier, and I figured the same, just hadn't gotten around to it, since I had been neglecting the character in favor of the scene. Well, I'm sorta happy with the results all the way around so far, though I'm sure I will continue to mess with this all the way to the bitter end (aka deadline August 9). I traded the brick darksim material for a decal of dirty bricks (Google is great btw). I had to do some work on it since it introduced a repeating pattern that looked suspiciously like space invaders. Below is the result.

I remember that one too. I remember standing in the middle of the theater and spinning around trying to catch it all in. The hand rails were there so that numbskulls like me didn't fall lat on their arse during the movie! There was one part of that movie I seem to remember of a battle between Highland Clans. It felt like I was in the middle of the action. So, wouldn't it be interesting to set a chor up to shoot in 360 degrees. Then all you would need to do is build your own theater to show it.

This reminded of the "Soarin" attraction at Epcot (and at DisneyLand). There the movie is projected onto what looks like a hemisphere. The seats are on lifts that for the most part move you into the edges of the screen, so you are "inside" the movie. Added to that the motion of the movie is mimicked by the movement of your seat, and the experience is quite memorable.

Here it is with volumetrics on the klieg light in the fixture. Might just roll with it for now. I've still got to texture my bad guy insect (you can see the beginnings of him in the wanted poster). I'll see how the scene feels once I've got him added to it.

Here's a quick update to the scene....still no fog.

You can have one kleig pointing down at the ground and another pointing up just to illuminate the light shade. That way you can adjust each one's brightness separately for desired effect. Sorry, Paul! I meant to reply to your post but edited it instead... If you can remember what you wrote and want to repost it that would be great. you want me to remember something?!? Oh that's a hoot an a half! I was lamenting my lack of fog and the fact that the klieg light wasn't illuminating the inside of the lamp shade.

You can have one kleig pointing down at the ground and another pointing up just to illuminate the light shade. That way you can adjust each one's brightness separately for desired effect.

Thought I'd share. Here's the scene I'm working on for the insect contest. i have my insect character very nearly done, but wanted to get the staging scene done first. I still need to get some sort of fogging added since I'm going for a film noir feel. I've surprised myself with the lighting, guess you really can teach an old dog new tricks. Any suggestions, let me have em!

proof the pluto fly by is a hoax! Staged by an A:Mer....who is it. Fess Up.

Guess I no longer have the excuse of not enough time!

Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate! I had envisioned an online app, geared mostly to A:M users, for A:M users, free of charge, where asset and project management was the main focus. Each user could set up their own "studio" where they managed projects and collaborators working on them. A global pool of interested people maintained at the site level. It's not that hard to do, and you can get the dev tools from Microsoft free, if you know where to look. Where I stopped was online annotation of storyboards. Getting input from other folks is critical in designing these things, because invariably, I would find myself in a vacuum missing key pieces that others would find as show stoppers if they weren't there.