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Beautiful job!

This really looks great, Mark! Did you use Sweeper to place the lights and ornaments?

Thanks and Happy Holidays to you, Mark! Thanks, Gene! It's amazing what you can accomplish with a little bit of messing around... :-)

Great job, Chuck! Very entertaining!

Thanks, Paul! Santa is a redress of the Barney model. :-) You are totally right about the risks. Part of my decision was that I felt like I'd never really tried hard enough before. I sort of see all of this as being tested on how committed I really am to doing this. Thanks for the moral support!

All the suffering is so that I can make sure that doesn't happen, HomeSlice! A little bit of Christmas cheer... I'm working on a Christmas strip with Flemm sitting on Santa's knee. :-)

Great looking character, Gene! Your style is really starting to show!

Very nice, Mark!

Welcome aboard!

Thanks, Myron! It is a bummer, but things could always be worse...

Just an update... Things are pretty hectic right now. I've gotten some freelance work (thankfully), but not enough to change the fact that I'm going to need to move out of my apartment. So in between work, I'm now trying to pack up all of my stuff to prepare to put it in storage before the end of the month. The Wannabe Pirates is having to take a back burner for a little while, which is quickly bleeding away the surplus I'd built up. Oh well. :-) I'll just have to work twice as hard when all of this settles down to rebuild it. After this coming week, all of the strips that I've posted here will have appeared on the site. So starting a week from Monday, there'll be new strips to read on the site!

Rob, I'm not really sure what you're asking with the latter part, but rigging eyes is relatively easy. There are multiple ways of doing it, but a simple way is to position left eye and right eye bones starting from the center of the sphere and extending out through where the pupils are. Assign the CPs for each eye to the correct bone and then add a third bone in the center between the eyes. This will be your control bone. Create a new On/Off pose and edit the pose. You want to apply offset constraints to the two eye bones so that they will orient like the control bone. Once you've done this, you can hide the eye bones and making sure the new pose is turned on, you'll be able to control the eyes with one bone. Alternately, you can create a Null and use aim at constraints so that the eyes will always point at the null. Then wherever you move the Null, your eyes will follow. Look for some of the basic rigging tutorials to learn about the basic principles of rigging. There are some amazingly complex rigs out there, but basic rigging in A:M is really, really easy.

Great job, Ken! 'Spect there'll be some happy children this Christmas. :-)

That's extraordinary, Al!

That's a unique way to do it! There are a couple of other ways to do this: One is to have the different parts of a set be individual models that are then assembled in the Choreography. That way you can turn off their visibility or make them inactive when you need to. Another way is to hide them in the open model window. Open the model file and select the piece that you want to hide, use the "/" key to select all of it, then use the "." key to switch the selection to everything else and then use the "h" key to hide the piece. It's still there, of course, but it will be invisible in the chor. You can't save the model with that information, though. So you need to render at the same time (or repeat the process when it comes time to render.)

Wow, Gene! Lots of stuff this time! Looking great (especially the Sphinx!)

That was fantastic, Gerry! By far, your best yet!

Very cool, guys!

Have you written this commercial yet? If it's short I might be able to animate it for you. Some kind of head was definitely the original plan, but I was literally down to one hour to finish it. That's a generous offer, Robert! I haven't done anything yet for the commercial, but my thinking was always that it would just be short cuts of different characters and things from the story with a narration of some sort, but that's about as far as I've gotten with it. Most of the "cool" assets that I would need haven't even been started yet.

Well, I ended up having to rush this, but I think it came out okay. Thankfully, the reason I had to rush was that I picked up some freelance work, which I really needed. The majority of the work was home-based, but I started today doing three days of work back at my old work. I'd forgotten what it was like to do that. :-)

Very cool, Jake!

Very cool, Al! The detail (as always) is fantastic! You're going to have to do something with all of these models when you finish!

That really works well!

Haha! He's hilarious!

Thanks, Kat!