frosteternal

Does anyone even drink Kool-Aid anymore? I don't recal even seeing it advertised any longer... Oh yeah...the rivers of soon-to-be-blood...VERY nice and icky. Love it!

Yay! Blood-stains!! Looking much, much more creepy. Nice work and best of luck with this project!

An easy way to "rough-up" the scene is using some volumetric lighting (makes it look dusty) and maybe stains etc, also shallow depth-of-field really adds to the claustophobic "feel" of a dungeon. I threw this together last year as a web-site background to promote one of my books, it's not perfect, but might give you some ideas as far as texture/lighting/etc. [attachmentid=14980] Nice work thus far, I particularly like the ghostly-lit head with the eyes. =) Gorgeously creepy.

Yes. Open the working choreography. Expand the character shortcut in question. You will see a "Choreography Action" under the "Actions" Folder. Right-click it, and you will see "Export as Action". Do this. Save the .ACT file. Now you can scrap the Chor action from the broken project file, and dump in the exported action. (On the right character, that is.) This is far easier than the alternative of sacking the whole mess. Let me know if I can make a bit more sense in any way, just woke myself up with a horrible nightmare and I might not have been terribly clear in that explanation, but my facts are all in order.

1. Anime and almost-real characters: Start simple, maybe even with a real head (like someone you know.) My first decent human head was my mom. When I say decent I mean it looked mostly-not-like-lumpen-horror. I'm not sure if she ever modeled for me again, come to think of. =) Oh and study other people's face meshes..you will find striking similarities between the good ones; like how the slipes are laid out, etc. (Dushan, my co-creator for the Mountain film we are working on never did any human modeling and was able to get a workable face for the woman character in about 3 or 4 intensive tries by studying meshes and having me critique his work. Of course, I still had to rebuild parts of it, but he's a newbie.) 2. Cloth. I can't speak for v13 yet, I cannot change versions in the middle of a major project; that would be suicide, I fear. But the SimCloth plugin is the same in both versions, and although squirrelly, it is capable of very effective cloth. BE PREPARED TO TWEAK THE HELL OUT OF ANY I MEAN ANY PHYSICALLY SIMULATED ANIMATION! Technology has not progressed to the point where it doesn't take days of settings, weeks of experiments, and many tears to get physical simulations to look right. But it's worth it, now, my Old Man's coat will be almost automatic. I'll post a tutorial on how it was done once the project is all finished. The summary, since this has become PostZilla, is that it will take a while, and tons of practice before you are "proficient"...and even then, continue working at it. Oh, and when all else fails, start with a walking easter egg. That was my first A:M character. (He looks like an M&M now, looking back) Best of luck!

Yep, I gotta guess. Do you have a pose in the user properties, perchance, that is set to "ON" or some %tage by default, when it should be "not-set"? This happened to one of my Old Man set-ups and it was making me nuts.

On your next try, snap a screen-shot of what it looks like BEFORE, and one AFTER (after the model reloads with incorrect decalling) so it is more clear what exactly doesn't look right the 2nd time. I gota say, this seems to be a bit of a stumper, but before and after shots may give us some clue. Frustrating!

Alpha channels on decals will allow your decal to have transparency. Like if you wanted an irregular shaped decal, or to have a hole where a material shows thru. Oh, and I opened your model file; I assume you are referring to problems like places where the stripe decals don't line up, like on the wings? Oh and why are all of your control points peaked? Just curious.

Hmm..high spline? Not terribly, unless you are comparing with ..say...me. ('m obessed with low-res geometry because I have an obsessively slow&behind-the-times computer.) Seems fairly economical, really. I could eliminate maybe 10 or so splines but that's it.

Extrude he bottoms of the feet, then "peak" the edges, selecting the vertical splines that create the bottoms of the feet. Easiest way is to select the bottom-of-the-foot geometry, then press "p" on your keyboard. This will peak the whole bottom of the foot, including the edges. click on one of the horizontal edges, press ",". this will select the lathed spline. un-peak this spline; it's the tool button that looks like a parabola (i don't recall the shortcut key for smoothing splines at this hour of the morning) Good work thus far!

Very nice; the eyelids in particular are beautifully modelled! Can't wait to see the finished product.

Ha ha his balance is INCREDIBLE. Yeah I know I know, at 3 am it looked fine for my purposes. His final walk will not be cycled either; he needs to struggle and lurch up the mountain, with pauses and to catch his breath. My next posts will be likely much more production, much less test bits... Thanks for the "heads up" NOTE: All posts from now on will be under the topic "The Mountain", as they will no longer be just the Old Man... click here to go there

No, all hand-modelled geometry, and my own process. =P perhaps I WILL check out this displacement thingy...I AM lazy after all. (although I know better than to change versions mid-production, that is asking for trouble, 12q is nice and stable for me.) Cheers & Happy Chinese New Years

Here's a little more. I agonized over footprints, and dust, from walking. Yeah, it's rough, and he is un-cloaked, but the main test here was the environment reacting to him walking...*whew* Comp_1.mov

Yes, the angles will probably continue since the whole short takes place climbing up a mountain. (See image below.) If the ground looks level at any point it will be because the camera is tilted. And it is going to be a very different sort of short.

Just a bit more; a test render of a shot w/ some lighting and texturing trying to get the best "look" for the scene...

Thanks a bunch! Spent the last week working on the animatic for the film with my friend, who designed a wonderful woman/angel for the "death" sequence...more to come. We're both very excited about where this is going...hopefully the first of many wonderful collaborations between us...the old man is done...now we have been building sets and the final design for the evil bunnies. (They ended up half bunny, half demon, thanks to observing real bunny photos and sending them thru the twisted filter that is my weird mind...) Now I'm off to begin final animation work for the film. Wish us luck!!!

Yep, the walk was just that : a quick test. the main thing was getting his cloth to work. His feet do kinda look like they are doing some demented "mashed-potato" dance step. I knew I could count on you to notice it. And yeah my edit post was being squirrelly so I just gave up and did a 2nd. My internet connection is very unreliable.

Sorry file didn't attach. [read: i didn't attach it] oops. oldmancloth.mov

Just a quick test of cloth+walk. Not perfect, but pretty cool, thus far.

It's not bad. The distortion can be fixed by not closing your lathe object until you have lathed it already. I always leave a tiny little hole on the tips of lathed objects so as not to have "4-pointed-3-point-like patches" (my term, ya like? haha.) When all the vertices intersect in the same spot, they make crease-ridden 3-pointers. Good deal, looks bvery chess-piece-y. =P

Thanks, the coat was hellish interesting to model. I found that it flowed more naturally if constructed as just nice evenly sized patches rather than built like a real cloak would be; in sections. I had guessed that putting it together tailor-style would be better, but oddly, it didn't work out like that. If you play with cloth, be prepared to tweak, tweak, TWEAK those lovely cloth-sim settings. I am still playing with them. Also, I had to create a denser-leg model exclusively for the cloth-sim. (The original model kept "catching" the coat in the middle of his leg. Yuck.) Additionally, for some reason my latest attempts keep crashign the program to the desktop, so I am once again tweaking those settings. Yay! Oh, and your condolences are appreciated; thanks. It has been hard, although, slowly, gradually, life is becoming more bearable. (Quitting smoking and joining a health club are odd side-effects of this grief process thus far.)

Took your advice from the first diagram, thanks! (Well, I changed it slightly, but the 5-pointers did the trick.) That's what happens when one re-uses model parts that one built from before there even were 5-point patches supported in the software. (Yep, waaayyyy back.) Happy New Year Everyone!

Checked into that, it was a bone-assignment error I made whilst rigging. Now he bends properly. Good catch! For the curious, I've included a shaded-wire shot anyhow. Yes, I know his arms look like glued-on noodles. For the most part, they just function as collision objects for his cloak's cloth sim. Most of them are hidden before the final render. (Why bother rendering what you can't see?)

Been working on him on and off lately; work gets in the way. =) His name is now officially "Duddles". Of course, this is fairly irrelevant to the film, but it helps to give him a name, history, etc. for animation/personality. I did a bit more texturing, and fixed his floating condition. Poor Duddles, he was so very floaty! The new green pills his doc prescribed helped immensely with his anti-gravity-itis. I have also been rigging up his face so he can *emote*. Since he has no speaking role his expressions must be so very expressive. I also fixed up his cloak. Now it doesn't do funny-shoulder-business. Much more controllable, now that I added non-rendering "thread"-splines to rein-in the cloth simulation... Whee. I am such a control-freak. That's probably why I love 3-D; my god-complex is rearing its silly head again...