frosteternal

It is an action, just set to repeat. I think the whole blade rotates once in 4 frames, I don't quite recall but I might have set up sub-frames as well. I also put the axis slightly off center to give it a rougher spin, make it look more jagged. Thanks, I have been really, REALLY focusing on pose timing in my work as of late. Thank you everyone, the feedback is stunningly encouraging!

Nancy, Luuk, Martin - Thank you all for the positive response, it is good to know that the giddy tingly "wow I think this is good" feeling isn't just all in my head. (I believe the final voting will be done on the Heinz website in late august, after their judges narrow it down to 15 entries.) I'll keep everyone updated.

After several weeks of work, I (with some helpful input from Dushan, my roomie) have finally completed and entered my commercial entry for the Heinz "Top This" challenge. It is done, and I am very satisfied. The music/sound-effects are a combo of stuff supplied by Heinz for the contest, as well as public domain bits, and my own home-grown effects. *whew* You all can view the entry on youtube at... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pj2OMLr0xQ It took remarkably less time than I had intended, as I had blocked out ~2 months for pre-production etc. Wish me luck! I have seen the other entries and I think this really has a shot at the grand prize. (Hopefully you all will vote for me when it inevitably reaches the finals.) (Now we can get back to the Mountain project. Although, a break was welcome and refreshing!)

You need to set a keyframe at the point right before the turn begins. Keyframes are as follows: 1) starting direction, 2) ending direction, 3) turning direction, 4) ending direction #2 My guess is your character is beginning to turn throughout the animation, you just need an extra keyframe to define where one facing direction is to end.

Ethan - The new one looks more youthful and bright-eyed. You consequently have made him enormously more appealing - a very important thing for a kids film. I like the more realistic decaling, too...The only thing you might consider changing is taking his colours "up" a bit; make him stand out from the backgrounds. I have seen the original film and it was good, but I recall thinking "oh how muted the colours are" which is nice, but might not grab a kid-of-today's attention as effectively. New character shape though - MUCH IMPROVED. Great job!

Use a material effector with the "ripple" material in the Hash plugins material type. Anything the effector touches will have ripples on its surface.

Exquisite. I LOVE these controls - so intuitive! Martin is right - this would be perfect for animation students...although advanced enough for other work too. Great work!

This is the correct solution - since an automated lip-syncing tool produces varyingly acceptable results, it is common to tweak the channels' tweening curves. Adjust the timeline curvatures for tweens that need to hold (like "hmmmm") or other such oddities. Probably no need to even set all curves to zero-slope, in most situations that is over-kill.

Two things : One, is your red grop below your black group in the project workspace? The lower group should over-ride the group above it. Two, it would be best to remove the black patches from the red group. The best way to do this folows : Click on the black group's icon. Press the "hide" button. Now only the black patches should be visible. Now, click on the red group icon. .Since the black group is part of the red one, the patches should highlight. Hold down the "ALT" key, and drag a selection boxed around the patches. They should de-select. Now they are a member of the black group, but not the red group. It sounds complex, but this is the best way, in the long run.

Yeah subd's are totally different - best to not even think that way. I haven't found any other modelling paradigms that really are at all similar to hash patches. This is a good thing! As far as adjacent 5-pointers...it does depend greatly on the geometry. 5-pointers are best used in areas where the surrounding geometry provides plenty of curve detail. 5-pointers extrapolate their shape based on surrounding shapes, so while in one case two of them adjacent might not cause trouble, another case it might. I usually try to separate them by one quad (standard) patch, but have successfully joined two at a common edge. Just do plenty of test renders, certain shading options (like porcelain, which averages normals) are trickier to use with 5-pointers. Just remember, if it looks right (and animates properly), it IS, in most cases, right. Oh, and to answer one of your earlier questions about intersecting splines...you should not have 3 or more splines ending at any given point, it will crease. Caveat : this may be desirable sometimes. Not usually.

5 point patches are not a "bad habit" but can be a very handy tool to use, when needed. If the foot WAS modeled from Hash patches as pictured (which it is not, those look like subd surfaces) it would crease on the toenails, and also the ridge where the foot connects to the toes. The splines would be "dead-ending" on each of those little arches (which might be okay for a foot, but most likely not). 5 pointers come in handy most often, in my experience, in hands (connecting fingers) toes (connecting toes) and the cheeks of a face. Look around the forum and study the spline layout of some other models, or check out the ones on the cd. Spline layout is an art, and can't effectively be studied by looking at other modeling methods for examples.

If the image with the lime green background is a JPG file, the background is probably not all one shade of green, due to compression artifacts. You need to bring the magic wand tool tolerance up past 0%...maybe 1 or 2% maybe even 5%. If that doesnt work post a screenshot.

Not a fix, but definitely a better workflow. (Rendering to MOV/AVI is really just for quick previews, in my opinion) As far as what happened with your a/v synch...is your source uncompressed? A:M only handles uncompressed WAV files. It could also be your quicktime output settings. I have noticed that some quicktime a/v codecs lose synchronization on slower computers, or sometimes even from converting between codecs or just for no reason at all. I always use sorenson3 with uncompressed audio for quicktime output when previewing, no probs. The real answer - it could be any one of a myriad of possible reasons; and w/o sitting down in front of your computer these are all blind guesses. Since nobody else has claimed to have encountered this yet, there's a very good chance it is not a problem within A:M. Glad you found a way around it!

Installed, yes. Running simultaneously, no. If you want to do that contact Hash and buy a 2nd license.

You can also make objects ignore fog. This is in the properties for objects in the Chor. This would add depth cues to objects that need it, but not things like stars planets, etc. And fog is very fast.. not a post-process, and I've never seen any rendering time hit at all. (I think it is encapsulated in the a-buffer rendering process, but it doesn't really matter.)

Wow...very nice model! Complex in its simplicity... For rigging, might I recommend liberal use of CP weighting - the "Balance Connected" tool will work wonders and keep the various stones as solid objects so they don't flex in an un-stone-like way. I can't wait to see this one moving....I can see it in my mind already.

Fog is simply applied based on distance from the camera. To do clumps of dust, I've had great success with sprite-type particle emitters, containing bitmaps of dusty clouds. These can be effectively animated over time in transparency/size to get a nice dust-cloud effect. You could also use Layers to position dust clouds, but I would suggest rendering the dust effects separately and compositing on top of the rest of the shot to keep unsightly object intersections from giving away the 2-D-ness of Layers. Just a few ideas.

Try using uncompressed video files. The look better, and you don't have to worry about conflicts from the codec...

Excellent work! Reminds me of an air-brushed piece. It's very difficult sometimes to keep the spontaneity of hand-rendered art. Gorgeous!

I like the living ball idea. That ball has the most personality I think I've ever seen a bouncing ball exude. Now I can honestly say that I know people more boring than a rubber ball. Nice work! The squash & stretch, as Robcat pointed out, is not perfect in its volume-maintenance, but I think it doesn't hurt the piece at all in this case.

Ha ha. While this does free up my time, I need to spend that time looking for a new job. I AM doing some work on the film, lighting some of the finalized shots. I have a few other interviews lined up, but they are dreadful retail/service jobs - nothing even remotely related to computers/graphics. Fortunately I go back to school soon, so once I finish my degree (finally) I may actually have a decent chance at something I can enjoy/be challenged by. Once I resume earning money, be it whatever job I can eke out a living from, I will be going back to "The Mountain" film production in earnest. Grim times.

I did not get the job, after all. Which makes me wonder - who did? I can't even begin to imagine their reasons; everything seemed to be going so well.

For future reference, and a more general solution, if you ever want to just increase cps/patches somewhere on a model, I cannot recommend highly enough the "SplitPatch" plug-in by the inimitable Steffan Gross. (sgross.com) This is an easy way to double the patches in a particular area, for added detail, then just hook/5-point the results to the rest of the (lower-resolution) surface. This is, not surprisingly, extremely handy. Just my extra tip.

Lathe it. No reason not to. Easy as pie. Here's how: Set lathe to 16. The easy way to do this is hold down SHIFT and click the Lathe tool, this will pop up your modelling options. Draw 1 two point spline on either side of the y-axis. Lathe it. Delete one ring of points, now you have a 16 point spline perfect circle. Rotate it 90 degrees around the x-axis. delete one half. select and break ("k" on the keyboard) the remaining "left-over" edge. Nudge the 2 top points just over the y-axis. All points should be on one side of the y-axis. Lathe this. Done. I timed myself, took 23 seconds. I make all my circles, spheres, what-have-you this way; I am a bit wary of the primitive wizard as it has produced "funny" geometry in the past (doesn't all highlight when you choose "group connected", etc.)

I think it went very well - it is a job assisting people with public-access computers. I aced their proficiency tests (not hard). I'll find out whether or not I'm hired in the next few days. Thanks for asking!