fae_alba

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.

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.