largento

Here's an update of how the Captain Krok model is coming. I had a time trying to figure out how to model the hair. I had a bunch of false starts before I finally got it to go the way I wanted. There's room for improvement, but it's coming out way better than I thought it would, so I'm not focusing on the negatives. :-) I just put in a temporary bump map for the ear lobe wrinkles. I think that'll work. Now onto the rest of him...

Well, you can right-click with the Mighty Mouse, but you can't left-click and right-click at the same time... a trick that A:M depends on a lot. I went out and bought a 3rd party mouse to use with A:M. It works just like it would on a PC and the scroll wheel even interfaces with the zoom tool. It's a decent mouse and it cost me less than $30, so it's hardly a big investment. I still go back to my Apple mouse for using other applications. The transition is a little jarring, but the 3rd party mouse is too "clunky" for things where I want to be precise (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.) I'd definitely say go out and get one, though. Makes things much easier in A:M.

Thanks for the tip. I found Nick Porcino's website and checked out the models. The bridge set is impressive in it's simplicity and his Enterprise model is fantastically cool. He does have a disclaimer against the models being used in anything of a commercial nature, though. I'll most likely never see a cent from this, but I'd like to keep the option open to sell DVDs or "photo"-comics of this at conventions someday. It's really cool that he's got them available. The Enterprise model is a wonder. The way the lights reflect on it and the level of detail. Definitely something I'm going to have to study. Here's the url for his download page, if anyone else is interested: http://meshula.net/daystrom/1701/1701_4.html

You, sir, are a gentleman! Thank you! These are great! Especially the details on the consoles. I think it will be really trippy to move around the bridge set when it's finished. That is a bummer about the sickbay, but it's not nearly as familiar to folks as the bridge set, so I think cheating will be okay there. These are definitely more polished than the ones I found online... Thanks again!

That would be awesome, Trafalz! The blueprints I found for the bridge seemed to have been done by a fan who built his own bridge set (for real) in the '70s. I'll try to post a link to one of the images tonight when I get home for comparison. (Don't have them at work with me.) Did the book have blueprints for the Sickbay set? All I've got are some tiny line drawings in an old paperback book... Thanks!

I hadn't thought about that, nyah. There was no audio with the comic, so they weren't nearly as annoying. :-) It would be funny if they kept getting accidentally wiped out during the fight. A bunch of the gags in this are a play on "dog" jokes. "Mr. Spott" is a Vul-canine and the Pon Farr is basically them going into heat. There's little things like the soup "Nurse Temple" brings to Spott is in a dog dish with his name on it and "Dr. McGruff" calls it "Pew-Ree'nuh Soup." The title of it is "Amutt Time," since Spott is a mixed breed. :-)

That's really awesome, dude! The fur on the ears looks especially cool!

Thanks! I think I may be wishing this had been live action before it's all through, goodguy! :-) There's a pretty big cast in this. Still, there's a simplicity to the designs in the old Star Trek that makes it seem attainable... with a lot of time and patience, of course. I'm taking the attitude that I'll just pick away at it each day. In May of '05, I knuckled down and lost 120 lbs. Took me almost a year and a half, but it was the same sort of thing. Every day a little bit. I've got the story pretty much narrowed to 4 sets: a hallway, sickbay, the bridge and the arena on the planet. (This is a parody of a specific episode, "Amok Time.") I've found some pretty good reference for most of it. I found a website with blueprints of the bridge (that's what I used to make the captain's chair) and a lot of the props (communicators, medical scanner, tricorder, etc.) It'll help to be able to keep everything to scale. And then there's the Enterprise (or "Secondprize" as it's called in this.) :-) I can't really think big picture on this, though. It's too daunting. Baby steps. :-)

I'll have to consider that. There's definitely an aspect of wanting to create a dimensionalized version of my original, so I don't really want to stray too far from the designs of the characters, but I'm not too married to them. I think that once the hair is on, it won't seem as dramatic. Here's the mesh:

My first time around with Animation: Master in 2004, I had wanted to do an animated version of a Star Trek parody I'd done as a comic. I only got as far as creating one model and it looked pretty terrible. :-) I eventually reached a point of frustration and abandoned it. This year, I decided to give A:M another go and this time, I've been making a real effort to learn it. So, I'm giving my Stalled Trek (now the name's even more appropriate!) another go. Here's the scary head I made of the captain back in 2004: It's even scarier than I remembered it being! :-) Here's where I'm at with the new version: It's like night and day! I'm not entirely satisfied with the ear. I'm figuring that one out still, but I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with the tools and the proceess. I've got a ton of work ahead of me, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how it turns out. On the side, I've started building set pieces. Here's the captain's chair from the bridge set: Only about a billion more things to do. :-)

Thanks, everyone. Once I figured out how to make the pose slider (I hadn't done that before), it was relatively easy. I set up the movement of the hands to go through 12 hours. I started with 12:00 and made each 2% increment 15 minutes. I reached 12:00 again at 88% and changed that to the max value on the slider. Now all I have to do is set the time on the slider in the first frame and the end time on the last frame. Very cool! Here's a short test clip. This is the speed it goes going from 12 to 12 in 30 seconds. clockclip.mov Again, my thanks!

Thanks, Jay! I'm still trying to figure this all out... having fun, though. :-)

Hello! Hoping someone can help point me in the right direction here... I'm making a simple wall clock and would like to animate it so that it does one of those "time passes quickly" gags. I've set it up with a bone for the minute hand and a bone for the hour hand. They are independent of each other and when you rotate them (from the front view), you can change the time on the clock, so it basically works, but I would like to make it more automatic. I need to constrain them, so that the hands only rotate around the center pin on one plane and I would like to make it so that moving the minute hand would work like a real clock: making it so that rotating the minute hand makes the hour hand rotate to a lesser degree. (i.e. so if the minute hand is on 12 and the hour hand is on three, rotating the minute hand all the way around to 12, would make the hour hand move to four.) Is there an easy way to do this?

WOW... WOW... That is incredible! Really spectacular work!

*whew!* :-) Now that you point it out, I can see a place where it looks like the spots jump. I didn't notice it until you pointed it out, though.

That was pretty cool! I liked the little step-back he took when the doors opened. :-) I'm still new to this, so I'm not seeing the difference you're talking about with the iMac render. What specifically doesn't work on the Mac render? (I'm on a Mac and won't have any other option but to use it to render.)

Hi, all! I'm a newbie on my 2nd time around. :-) I bought A:M for the Mac (v10, maybe?) a few years ago and really enjoyed it, but something else shiny came along and I was distracted away from it. Just recently my short attention span spun me back around and I decided to upgrade. Wow! I am really having fun with it. I'm sure having a faster computer is a part of the better experience, but it's clear the application has improved, too. The DVD of extras is FANTASTIC! I learned more about A:M in a few hours of digging through the tutorials than I learned in the months that I played with it a few years ago. It's a fantastic resource and big thanks for compiling it and to all the folks who contributed! I foresee huge chunks of my free time disappearing. :-) Largento

Yeah, I'm having a problem there. Looking back at the drawings I've done, I notice that I've "cheated" the arm length as was necessary. The way the character is set up, he's sort of normal size up top and then stubby at the bottom, so stubby arms don't quite look right. Yet, in this position, you are right that they look gorilla-like long. I'm going to see if positioning can make this work. If his arms stay bent at the elbow most of the time and you only see extensions when you can't see his lower half. Or maybe there's an inbetween solution that I'm not seeing yet. ... Dearmad, if you can remember that ST parody and know of a place I could see some of it, I'd like to. I don't want to make anything too similar to what's been done before, but I'm also curious to see how certain things have been approached in the past. I remember seeing "tests" for some animation years ago, but it was a guy in Australia (I think) who did all of his characters using "Simpsons" characterizations. ... Thanks for the compliment, Rodney! I hope so! I'm having more fun with this than anything I've done in years. (Probably since I first started using Photoshop.) It's like having a machine to make your own toys and then you get to play with them! I hope to fix the hands and get the rigging started tonight. I can't wait to move the guy around! Largento!

Making progress. Took the advice and went back and removed almost all of the 3-point patches. (I think there might be one or two in the hair, but I figured it was okay, since the hair won't move.) I also began building the body. I've got to do some work with the hands (probably rebuild them), but I was anxious to see how the whole thing would look. A:M is a fantastic program! Kudos to all involved with it! And the talent of the folks working with it is amazing! Very inspiratonal! Thanks again, Largento!

Thanks, guys! Your encouragement means a lot! Yes, I do plan to animate, but I want to model all the characters' heads first. (I figure once I've done that, I can make one body that I can reshape to accommodate the different characters.) I'm viewing it like learning to play music. I want to learn all the notes and stuff, before I start playing the instruments. Here's the 2D version of the character that I was trying to translate. That's why he's got the flattened jaw and the weird scott'sman hair. The hair was a breakthrough, since it was really the first time I was trying to find a way to create something I'd only seen in 2D. I'd drawn the sides before, but never the back. It was sort of like, "Oh, so that's what the back would look like.") Again, it's far from perfect, but it's at least down the right path...

Thanks, John! here's a couple of views with the mesh on... I must confess that most of the work here has been trial and error. Move this point, see what damage I caused! I also never could tell where I needed to add more splines or take them away. I ended up with huge amounts of them on the nose. Largento!

Hello, all! I just bought A:M about three weeks ago, after reading a press release that an OS X version had been released. I'm not a 3D artist, but I am a graphic designer and A:M seemed like an affordable way to experiment and play with 3D. Anyway, as I started playing, I decided I'd focus on trying to figure out how to model some of the comic characters I'd worked on in the past and decided I'd start with a parody of Star Trek I'd started as a web comic back in 1996 and then did as a PDF comic in 2000. The character designs I'd used were pretty simple and there was a focus on character to them, rather than striving for likenesses. (You never know what they'll decide to sue you for!) That said, I've finished my first model of the head of one of the characters, Captain Krok. Having never done anything like this before, I'm dazzled by it's dimensionality, but I can still see that there are some definitely rough areas that hours of fidgiting (sp?) with have failed to smooth out. Some of the model was done as an afterthought yesterday (like the neck), so I've yet to go back to it, but figured this would be a good stopping point and check and see if you knowledgeable folks could spot some obvious mistakes I'm making and can pass on some tips. Any comments/criticisms/slight-ego-crushing would be extemely welcome! I definitely feel like I've been bitten by the bug. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I've lost in these three weeks! Largento!