John Keates

Amaazing stuff there! The texture maps on his face work really well. One thing that I noticed was that the eyes stand out a little. Are they reflecting? If not then that could help. The nudity kind of suits that landscape somehow but I am sure that he is keen to get some clothes on.

He he.. I love this animation. This is just the kind of stuff that we need more of! Can't wait to see more.

Looks like this thing is gathering steam. I am looking forward to it. OH, Gaz... I got my t-shirt the other day. Lovely it is... fits snugly. Makes me feel right important.

It is possible to do a sheer by holding down 1,2 or 3 whilst rotating. The cps are prevented from moving in a cirdle and can only move in the direction that you allow.

That is an interesting character you have there! One crit would be that certain parts (legs and stomach) are quite diminutive whilst others (boobs and arms) are a little chunky. I like it though, nice to see some imaginative work.

Sounds good to me! I am pretty free at the mo. A little freelance work here and there but I am sure that I could squeeze a meet-up into my schedule. It would be good just to get the ball rolling for now - just as long as I don't have to pay an arm and a leg.

" The head has a kind of "Chucky meets the Terminator" look to it. I can see it now: "Chucky: 2030" " He he he... Vern, you are one of the few people an any forum that can make me laugh out loud. I will never look at my creation in the same way again. In fact I find it hard to look at it at all now that it has become ten times more scary.

Oooops!.... Looks like bits of my version were a little off.... sorry.

Thanks for all the compliments fellas Ross, "you control all the tentacle movements with basically one null, right?" Right, apart from the head which has a separate null. If you play the movie through slowly then you will see the "cascading" movement allong the tenticals. First from top to bottom and then from bottom to top. Oh, one thing that I forgot to mention is that, for the rubber pipes at each side of the body at the bottom, I used the nifty dynamic constraint feature where you can IK the end of a chain to a null. This would be great for many applications such as chains, ropes, saliva etc. It realy was a gift as I had previously set up my own rig which didn't work so well as there wasn't so much detail in the movement.

EDIT: repeat post

Hi there Mr Navone, I can answere some of your questions as I had the plugin a while back and battered Yves with similar questions (sorry Yves for butting in here). The shading model is Oren-Neyar (usually used for rough surfaces - but I guess you know that). The "hue shift from saturation" thing effects the amount that the skin colour changes as you go towards the terminater (richer and redder). As far as I can see, it shifts the colour allong the spectrum. This is independent from the "blood" part of the equation. Yves would like to work on an ambience shader but as yet, the renderer doesn't allow for calculations beyond the terminator. I guess that it would have to be a seperate shader and that this is why there is an "ambiant shader" option waiting to be used. Hope that helps.

and here is a link for an animatoin of her looking scary!! (and yes, she scares the willies out of me to). Copy/paste it into a web browser. http://www.gackland.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/whipper snapper roar AVI cine 75 15.avi

Here is a wire for you. Note the whips - you can use a cross-section of 3cps for greater efficiency.

Hello Mr Bigboote, "Will the new Setup Machine have a rig for it?" I can't imagine that the Anzovins would go to the trouble Here is a description of the rig: **WARNING - RIG TALK AHEAD. Skip it if you don't like reading stuff that should have pictures** -------------------------------------------- The whips and the legs are seperate objects. They are put together in the choriography. I thought that it would be good to control their sizes, placements and direction in such a way that they can be controlled with a pose and actions so I made a bone for each whip (in the main body model) and changed the scale of the bones in a pose. I then used the old orient-like and translate-to constraints allong with a scale like to make the whips sit in place on the model. The bones that the whips are constrained to are children of bones that point inwards (actually, with the magic of offsets, this probably wasn't necessary) These "pointer" bones pointed inwards to a null in the centre of the body (there is a seperate system for the head whips). When the null moves, the whips rotate. I didn't want all the whips moving at the same time. I thought that it would be neat if the first whip to move was the one that was at the front of the movement. In other words, if you have a line of whips in a row going from left to right and the whips are facing up and start moving to the right - the whip on the right is the one that starts moving first. If they move left then the left whip moves first. I wanted this automated so I had to set up a system where the offsets for the aim at constraints varied depending on which direction the null moved. There is a percentage pose where the offsets of each bone are set so that, at one pose extent, one bone leads (has a smaller offset with this offset increasing as you go allong the line) and at the other extend, the bone at the other end leads. I used zero-slope on the channel to blend the enforcement from one extreem to the other (each bone gets two constraints which each are at 100% at iether the start or end of the pose and at 0% at the other). Then I made another null which follews the main controll null (that the bones aim at) with an offset. There is a bone anchored at the main null which aims at the second null. The bone has a smart-skin which controls the "offset" pose so that, when the controll null is moving up, the offset pose is effected so that there is less of an offset on the bottom pose. --------------------------------------------- The words are all swishing around in my head now so I will stop writing. I wonder if it made any sense at all. Hopefully it was of some use. John

Hi Yves. Thanks for the wirs. I will give them some study. Nice to see that your skin shader is being let out of its cage. I have just niticed a possible crit. It is possible that the meat of the thumb is a little to big. Iether that or the thumb needs to be bigger. Might be the angle though.

Hey Yves, that is a really beutifull modell! I always liked that one. I would love to see some wires if you could. A before and after would be intersting too. Are you thinking of working your magic shader programming skills in your spare time? (John crosses fingers).

Thanks for the comments guys. pabloschmid Hi there. Yes, I think I see what you did - played with the curve gadjet to make the image more punchy. Actually, I did some of that myself but, looking at the image here it looks like I posted the wrong one I agree that I need to work on the floor to make it look more natural. zandoriastudios " That is freaking me out!!" He he I will take that as a compliment. modernhorse I'm glad it is an improvement. I am rendering an animation at the mo (will take a while with those soft reflections etc). It shows him/her looking terrifying (hopefully). I plan to do more with this in terms of animation but I have to work out how the hell it walks about. KenH Well spotted about the floating rock, I put that one in there for you . Err.... I saw it but just didn't correct it. It can be pretty hard grounding those things when you have a disp map on the floor. I will get a wireframe together once my animation render is finished (probably tomorrow).

Thanks for the comments. The lines are painted decals. I was thinking of making them non-metallic but went with the "anodised" look in the end.

Hi there, It was suggested to me recently that I should do some more work to an image that I entered into a Hash comp. a while back so here it is: Here is the original: I hope that it is an improvement. Any crits are welcome. John

Nice piece! It has a really professional and lively feel to it.

Oh, I forgot... You could possibly loose some geometry on the ears allong the helix (just the one spline furthest from the head). It wouln't save much animation time but could serve as an exercise in splinemanship. I rekon that you could get a similar shape with fewer splines and a bit of bias tweeking.... maybe.

I would certainly keep the spline rings around the eyes and particularly the mouth (for such a realistic face). When rigging, you could try controlling each of the splines radiating from the mouth with a bone with the influence of each bone tailing off as you go away from the mouth (see V Navones wip thread for more on this). It is possible to split poses by copy/pasting cp info from one pose to another but a bit of time saving is always worth it. When mirror mode wasn't working in poses I used to make a pose for the right side of the mouth and then copy/paste-mirrored to another pose. Then I would make another pose that would controll each of the other poses. There are some advantages to doing it this way. 1. It is more efficient as most of the information is just contained in two poses, the pose driving the other poses doesn't take up much memory. 2. It is possible to have the "both together" pose control the right and left poses differently so maybe one side smiles more. You can even have it so that one side leads the motion a little before the other which then catches up (it is possible to set the relationship keys at any part of the pose slider). A-symmetry can add a lot to a characters face - particularly an old or wacky one. Another thing that you might want to consider is driving the poses with bone rotations (a simple smart-skin does it for me) You can have the bones around the face where they are easy to see. You can then have an on/off pose for turning the bone visibility off. Anyway, just some thoughts. It is allways worth putting some thought into rigging before you get going in my opinion (not that I am the greatest expert). Good luck

Wow! that is one of the best heads I have seen done in AM! Welcome aboard! Did you rig him or are those poses modeled by hand? One thing that I might suggest is the porcelain material (If you do a search then you should find all about it). Maybe you know about it already. It will basically just smooth out the mesh a little if you want that. Great going though -can't wait to see more.

Yeah, seems to have fallen through. I am up for it for next weekend now (I have moved allready). Maybe we need somebody to heaad this thing.

Cool, four of us (hopefully). Is there a postcode for the location that we can use to get a map from? What time are we starting? Does anyone have a computer to bring yet?