fae_alba

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.

I'd actually started on much the same thing for my own self. I was writing in in .net, and had hoped to tie it into my website. Had about 15-20% written before work kicked me hard and had to stop in order to get one or two hours of sleep.

That is exactly what I was thinking. If you have a close up shot of say a character opening a fridge, and the only thing on camera is a hand reaching in from off frame and grabbing the handle, why have a choreography of a complete city block? I'd set up a chor for just that scene, with nothing more than what is needed for the shot. Asset management (all of those props/actors/chors/ etc.) becomes a bigger issue, but easily accomplished with a little planning. Edit: just watched your tutorial "Tutotial; Composing Models from other models". I can see the power of what you've set up and that seems to answer the whole, only have in a chor what you need.

Ok then, I've decided to heed popular opinion and keep the Pappa Bear Studio domain. It fr some oddball reason wasn't s straight forward to get GoDaddy to renew the hosting, but after much trial and tribulations, the site is back up and running. I do need to revamp it though, but that will hav to wait until after vacation.

fae alba is Scots Gaelic for "For Scotland". I adopted that when I was publishing my magazine "Scottish Tales"

A little history first: My oldest daughter loved Disney's Jungle Book, and always associated her old man with Baloo, and started calling me 'Papa Bear' which was the nickname of Baloo. I on the other hand always took a cotton to Disney's Humphrey the Bear, which is the basis for my Papa Bear character. My quandary is this, I created a blog site with the url of pappabearstudio.com. That domain is expiring, but I'm questioning if whether I want to maintain that domain or "re brand" my studio efforts into something a little more generic. I'm thinking of something along the lines of "Kitchen Table Studios" but that one has a fb page already. I'm looking for some feedback from you folks to see if your creative juices might come up with something catchy, slick, etc.

I wasn't hinting that you start hosting wordpress, merely that I had some decisions to make, and your adding the subdomains makes that decision process that much easier. Adding a blog feature to forum members could potentially help drive traffic into the Hash site though. But that is purely a call for you to make, with no pressure from little ol' me!

I'm trying to decide if I could use this or not. I have a wordpress domain that I have been using sparsely, but the registration is about to expire. I'm trying to decide if I should renew that and keep going there, or perhaps at the very least migrate the video content and such to here and scrap the blog aspect totally. Since Papa Bear has a section on the forums it makes sense to keep it "all in the family".

Dude, relax. I've been told there is such a thing as "life/work balance" or some such. Though I haven't achieved the nirvana of that particular concept, I do believe it is kind of, sort of, important. So take a step back,relax, and don't sweat it.... too much.

So my first thought was..cool get Pixar quality renderings. But then don't we already? So my next thought is what does renderman get A:M users other than bragging rights to say something like "rendered to Pixar quality" or some such, which you of course can't really say without Pixar taking issue with it. Add to that if you have any desire to say create a short and monetize it in some way (we all do, admit it!), then you can't use renderman. So what does it buy us, other than an intellectual exercise of playing with Pixar tool sets? I had looked at it, but without some understanding of its benefits I shied away from the learning curve.

Will, I plan on fixing the smartskin tonight. I did a quick spot check of a leg twist and it didn't seem to mess up the mesh. I haven't added any new bones to the Saucy rig, since I'm not certain how it will react when I go thru the install process. So far I've gotten all of the cp's assigned and am working on weighting etc before finalizing the installed rig. I'm trying to keep the rig simple, but at the same time as worry free as possible for animating so I'm not going on frame by frame in a chor to adjust cp's. I'm a big fan of KISS!

Thanks for all the input. Before I got the chance to look at everyone else's I started work on redoing the smartskin on the upper leg bone. Below is what I've accomplished so far. I can see myself that there still is work to do on the back of the leg when it is raised. leg_test.avi

I got the "jumpies" on one or two cp's on the belly. I'll revisit smart skins, remove all of the weighting along those points and the smart skin over.

I've re-rigged Papa Bear (again) with the Saucy Rig. So far I'm loving the ease of the rig. But I've run into the same challenge that I have before, with the big guys big belly. When I rotate the leg up, I want it to obviously not penetrate the stomach. I've messed with CP weights, with smartskin, and a combination of both, but it never really is as smooth as I want it to be. Below are some screen grabs of the upper leg forward and backward rotation and where the challenge is. Any suggestions?

I challenge anyone to take a look at any "best of A:M's list", like the one on Fuchar's signature, and not believe that A:M is perfectly capably of producing detailed artwork, animatable or no.

that was it. Add this to the "Lessons Learned" category. Pay Attention to the fricking video! Thanks!

That poor fan looks like it has seen better days!

Us versus Them, Apple versus Microsoft, A:M versus ....well the "M" word! When will the world be at peace and we all play together? To respond would most certainly either start a software war or bring the trolls out in force. Better to simply produce quality work, let everybody ooo and ahh over it, then say "by the way, it was done in A:M".

Mirror plug in settings

Is your pelvis at "0" on the "X" axis (both ends)? Well it wasn't. After some coaxing I got the pelvis at 0 and re-ran the mirror bone. Now the pelvis does not duplicate, but I get a second set of left leg bones over the right leg bones.

Join the club with rigging! I've learned a lot just by doing, re-doing, and many many "lessons learned"!

I've been working on installing the rig on Papa Bear for a while now, and have gotten to the point of running the mirror plug in. I've got an issue that I wonder if anyone else has run into: Run I run mirror bones for the legs, by selecting the pelvis etc. it not only mirrors the leg bones as it should, but it also makes a copy of the pelvis bone and a second set of right leg bones.

Disney's ability to cross-pollinate between their movies and the parks is simply amazing. Just from the little bit of Tomorrow Land shown on the trailer I caught all kinds of references to that section of the Magic Kingdom. No doubt the merchandising machine has already kicked into high gear in Orlando.