JohnArtbox

This is becoming pretty spectacular Eric....are you planning on giving Stian a run for his money?

Nice work Shane... you might want to use some other camera shots though, maybe a CU pan along the body for variety. Great start for a demo tape.

Wow! This is incredible. Could the engine be used as a hash to flash convertor or is it too difficult for a non technical person to implement? It seemed like the animated files(like the bug) load quickly and efficiently, do you use interpolated motion between keyframes or is every frame a keyframe? Frame rate on my centrinoM 1.8 was between 10 and 15 for the last gorilla file. I'm really interested to see where this goes.

Thanks Andy, enjoy the wallpaper. Spent a little time tonight planning out the changes I want to make... I'll probably move the camera to give more room on the left hand side as well.

The various panels can be reopened under the view menu eg view--> project workspace. You can't delete you project without getting a warning, and then if you have saved your project it will still be on the harddrive unless you save an empty project over it. Deep breaths and use incremental saves often.

You apply a decal in the model window and then use the choreography to animate the image sequence. from memory you have to open up your advanced properties, under tools >>options. I did an animation several years ago where I created cut-out characters using planes decalled with image sequences By animating the sequences I could change the mouth image, hands, eyes et al. Unfortunately I lost the animation in a hard drive crash Always meant to revisit the technique.

Homeslice/Mtpeak: thanks guys Eric: Better water will come, but not before the deadline ....and strangely enough, I screencaptured a lot of my worktime so that I could create a tutorial of the process...so in a couple of weeks you'll get to see it happen. David: You're right, it's the tyranny of time that meant I didn't get to build a custom map. The centre area is rock while the sides and top should be a brown soil. I'll update it when I have some more leisure time

I read an article on Gamasutra about the original designer Patapon Designer Interview It's a fantastic little world that looks like a lot of fun. Cool thread.

Thanks Nancy, I'm pretty happy with it. Sometime I'll have to add in the Platypus, make the house a little more lived in and add the dozen small touches that'll truly finish the image. But you know the story, images are never finished, it just becomes time to move on. Looking forward to seeing what you've done.

Great project largento. The characters look fantastic and the amount of work is truly impressive

Thanks David... Ok... I stole a couple more hours but now it's definitely as done as it's going to get.

Robcat: it's on the list to do....along with improving the grass. But I need a spare day and you can never find one of those when you need them. I have a feeling this is all I'll be able to manage. The headstones are boulders, they're there by mistake Yves: I've always thought that a beautiful piece of atmosphere. Hopefully by the time I get to the end I'll manage a fraction of that I think I'll have to revisit this in a week or so.

Another quick update. With deadlines approaching I've been cannibalising other projects, the cottage is a backdrop from my vastly overdue short film "Investigating Jack". How much else I get done depends on my somewhat frenetic work schedule but I feel like I'm getting there. Render time is sitting just under seven minutes at hd resolution which makes it pretty comfortable as a backdrop for animation

small update Freshest:you're welcome, nice still.. and nice website Hey Robert good to hear from you Phatso/Fuchur: Aw shucks Eric: No pressure Edit:Small changes not worth a new post so I just bumped the image

In a little house by the river lives Platypus....or he might if I get that far The idea's been in my idea's folder for some time, an Australian take on Wind in the Willows. initial sketch and the first start. The tree's from the Hash cd, but since it's one of mine I won't feel guilty. It's a stand-in until I build the cottage and some of the surrounding scene.

I'll try to be more explicit.... If you press alt 2 the timeline should appear along the bottom of your window. This shows the keys of your animation along a timeline for the items that are selected. Select your first character in the chor and then press the pin in the top left of the timeline to keep the keyframes visual. Now select the keyframes by dragging a rectangle around a group and drag them into the new position. if you select a group of keyframes on different frames you can drag the handles to scale the time factor but beware this leaving your keyframes on half frames and softening your animation. Alternatively go to the last keyframe on your animation select cut and the go to the frame you want it to be on and select paste. Then go to the second last keyframe and so on. The play controls on the bottom will make finding the keyframes easy.

You'll find more details in the zbrush threads, but basically you export an obj files from an AM file with UV's setup. Once you're in zbrush, you reload the texture and then flip it verticallly. Paint and enjoy.

I have used graphics tablets and tablet pcs Both work well with 3dPainter and AM, although for AM most of the time I find a mouse easier to use than a Wacom tablet. If however, you find yourself working on the run a lot, the tablet pc setup works pretty well for AM. You lose the keyboard shortcuts and you have to setup a few extra buttons, but it's a comfortable way to work on a bus, or in a cafe. If you use paint programs with a tablet of any kind you'll never want to draw it with a mouse ever again. It's a life changing experience, you get to apply all those years of learning to draw with a pen plus bonuses like pressure sensitivity. 3d painter is no exception, it's far and away better with a tablet.

superlative...as always

This is a more traditional approach to foliage. Straight Cookie cut maps on basic geometry with render time of less than a minute

You can also keyframe the image sequence using the timeline.

Quickly adjusted the Shadows, and I also introduced soft reflections at various levels in the latest version, but it seems to have affected the transparency of the model in places, especially under the wing of the aircraft where you can see trhough to the camera rotoscope. It also looks like the groundplane reflects under the right foot, even though the groundplane has 0 reflectivity Nino:AM14 Yves : the camera's a canon powershot. It does raw, but I only pulled it out of the box this morning so I'm still learning. The extra tonal range of the raw format sounds interesting, I'll try it and see. Using bracketting it's not a big issue to get three shots and produce an HDRI with a 4 f-stop range. I've got a shadow only light to shade the deck(front projection target), but it also darkens the models, which is not ideal. The problem I have is that if I don't flat shade the ground plane it doesn't match the BG plate, while if I do, I lose the AO "shadows". Ideally, I'd like a way to darken the groundplane with the AO and ground the models, but not affect the illumination. Any ideas? The Shadow only option on the ground plane would normally do this I think, but doesn't render the AO(I assume because AO is a trick, not real shadows). Does this mean you don't set different levels of reflectivity? Or that all objects in the scene should have reflectivity of 100% with the specularity diffusing the highlights? Ethan: The shadow comes from a kleig "shadow only" light so I changed the angle, shadow softness and darkness in this image. It's controllable, but has the downsides I mentioned above

Switched to a Canon stills camera took new hdr lighting and bg plates. The photos seem to contain more accurate exposure information and the hdr's generated appear to be higher in quality. I didn't adjust the shadow light angle, but the rest of the image appears more cohesive both before and after tone mapping. When I open the exr image as a composite the background plate disappears, even though the scene is set to not render alphas. Is this normal?

Thanks for the comments all. I shortened the length of the hair on the tree leaves by a third to match the grass and it seems to reduce the leaf jitter(which makes sense), anybody know why not all the leaves are affected? Matt: Read your comment about hair and collision detection in Mike's hair notes thread, I'd be curious to see the results. I tried basic collision detection (default settings) on the tree leaves, but I need to experiment a lot more before I get anything worthwhile. Mike: It's almost there, but like most things the final 10% is going to take a long time. Bighop: I used one force with turbulence and then animated the force as well. Jirard: I think the basic scene took about 30 minutes. Experimenting with dynamics has probably absorbed three hours of tv time (enter dynamics settings, shaded render, reread the manual, let it sink in while watching Burn Notice, change a setting, start again).

Nice idea and the animation is really beginning to come together.