TurboGorilla

Hi Tim, That's a great astronaut! I'd like to talk with you about modelling another one for me if you have the time. Please email me at sodonnell@turbogorilla-software.com Thanks!

Hi, Would anyone have a cape model they would like to share? Not looking for anything fancy, I just want to integrate it with another model. I'll either do a sim-cloth on it when I get it to a chor or else I'll just add a couple of bones for simple movement maybe instead. Thanks in advance!

Hi, This is a video I made for my church. It features my pastor, Brian, and his secretary and some standard models from the A:M CD. It was supposed to be shown during a service about overcoming fear. However, when we previewed it on the big screen in the church, there was a very little girl in the audience who ran out screaming when she saw the knight running...so it did not get shown that day. Hopefully it'll appear at another time. Not the greatest synching in the world, I know, animation wise, but I sort of like it... I also have it out on YouTube at: if you prefer to watch it there.ScaryDream.mov

Yep. Appears to be something flaky on my PC then. I can run this without those artifacts via QuickTime or Windows Media Player from the output from A:M, but if I bring it into Windows Movie Maker or into my Sony Vegas Movie Studio it adds those lines. However... if I close everything and reopen Vegas or Windows Movie Maker...and then import the A:M AVI file, I can run it without showing the extra lines. So I guess I have a corrupt something or other somewhere on my PC. Well, I'll either figure out what caused it or else I'll just live with it and open and close the editing software until I can get it to output without those artifacts. Thanks everyone for your responses!

Field Render is off by default. I never turn it on. In fact, here are my default settings: Quality: Final Multi-pass: Off (although I tried ON also) Motion Blur: Off Depth of Field: Off Shadows: On Reflections: ON Levels: 2 Soft: Off Draw Particles/Hair: ON Fog: OFF Toon Render: OFF Field Render: OFF Stereo Render: OFF Plugin Shaders: OFF Format: AVI Resolution: VGA Width: 640 Height: 480 Aspect: 1 Gamma: NONE BUFFERS: all OFF ------------------------- Other suggestions?

I don't know what codec I am using. How would I tell that? Far as I know, it's whatever came with Windows XP Pro and A:M V 11.0.

Hi, When I output an animation to either AVI or MOV format, and then bring it into a video editing program such as Sony's Vegas Movie Studio or Windows Movie maker, the video file (the animation I brought in) shows these really annoying lines. Take a look at the sample I've provided here. Why does it do this and how can I make A:M render a movie that does not show these lines? I've used both Multipass and no-multipass, tried VGA format, Super 35, and VistaVision. They all show the same problem. I am using A:M 2004 (V 11.0) if that makes a difference. Maybe the latest version of A:M would not do this? I don't mind purchasing it if it would fix the problem but am reluctant to do so if it's just going to be the same thing all over again. All suggestions are appreciated and welcome. AllChars1.mov

Ah Yeah! I knew someone would jog my memory! I completely forgot about the text wizard. That's what I'd seen mentioned before in the forums. Thank you very much!

Can anyone point me to a tutorial or other instruction on creating animated text in A:M? I know I've seen something about this in the forums before, but I cannot seem to locate it now. Thank you!

Wow! Very nice! I liked how it felt so smooth and alive. My only suggestion would be to either: a) Move the camera up slightly higher so you can see the tops of the bottom row of teeth so that you realize that these are actually teeth when you view them or Shape the teeth objects so they look more like real teeth. What I mean is, you may have made 100% anatomically correct and scaled teeth, not being a dentist and not spending a lot of time looking into mouths, I couldn't say. However, these teeth look a lot like real teeth but there's something about them that looks odd. Not bad, just odd. But I know that when I draw something, a lot of times I cannot simply draw a completely accurate representation of the subject because when you do, it does not translate well to the flat surface. Like a face. Draw a face and you can achieve technical accurateness relatively easily. However, the face looks flat and unalive. Add a few exagerations on the nose or cheekbone, an extra, unexpected shadow below the bottom lip and on the cleft of the chin, etc..and suddenly you have a face that jumps off the page and looks like it's talking to you! What I'm wondering is if maybe you added some various shadings and unexpected colors and the odd curve or bump here and there to give the viewer a intuitive impression of teeth, in addition to their anatomically correct shapes. They already come alive. I'm wondering if you could possibly make them both alive and at the same time an immediate realization that hey, these are TEETH!!! I dunno...I'm offering critique on something that I'd have given my right hand to have been able to achieve! It's really quite impressive!

http://www.irish-studios.com/deathoftarzan.mov

This is really good! It really looks like it's alive and is really having to put some effort into jumping.

OK. Here are the details for anyone who might be interested. I apologize up front that this is going to be boring. First of all, I only wanted something I could do quickly and learn more about A:M and most of all, to have some fun with along the way. I honestly did not even have a story idea in mind when I first started this. I just wanted to play with the biplane and airship model that comes with A:M. So I layed out a couple of quick sequences of those two models together over a jpeg I had of some clouds. When I rendered them I thought, "That's pretty cool. I wonder if I can create a WWI movie without putting much work into it." I then took the two renders (about 13 seconds total) and imported them into my Sony Vegas Studio editing software. Sony has a really great, affordable!, professional quality video editing package ( http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Products/...on=4.0&Build=42 ) which I'd purchased last fall for some online video tutorials I created for a tech website (those videos can be found here in case you are really bored out of your mind and want to see what they look like: http://www.irish-studios.com/Articles.htm#VideoTutorials ). Within Vegas Studio there are dozens of film effects you can overlay onto your video. One of them is called Circa 1908 which basically gives you several properties you can control including dust, jitter, scratches, grain, hair, tones, etc.. I added this effect to the video and then played around with the values of those various properties. I then also added a Sepia color to it (I debated between Sepia and Aged Newspaper but Sepia won out as it wasn't quite as yellowed looking). Vegas Studio allows you to burst video streams which makes it really easy to pick and choose which frames you want to use. In addition, there are several CHROMA-key effects you can add to your video using overlays. I decided to use myself as Captain Leo because I work for less than scale and because I didn't want to try to figure out how to model a set of goggles and hat and scarf for the Tarzan model (my second choice for Captain Leo). I went to Wal-Mart and bought a $2.00 pair of kids swim goggles, I used the wool face mask I wear when I plow snow on my tractor, I tossed on a leather jacket I have and then grabbed a ratty old dish towel from the sink for the scarf. And that was the costume. I then set up my Logitech web-cam on a plant stand in front of my bed, hung a blue bed sheet from the ceiling behind me with thumb tacks and set some lamps up around the bed for lighting. I then set my laptop up where I could see it while the web cam was running and I basically just started thinking about how I might want the film to go and I filmed a whole bunch of sequences with me reacting to imaginary events that might or might not ever make it into the final film. Once I had all of that, I then went back into A:M and started creating a whole bunch of sequences, most of them about 6 to 10 seconds long. The flak was made from the EXPLOSION material which comes with A:M and which I added to a 128 patch sphere from the PRIMITIVES folder. I played with the properties of the model in the CHOR to remove some of the fire and make it look more smoky. The reason I didn't rotate the prop was because I thought that was going to be a lot of work trying to figure out how to add bones to that model so that I could rotate it. As it turns out, I just added a couple of bones to that prop on the biplane model a few minutes ago and it was much easier than I thought. A rotating prop will make it into the new version of this film. Most of the time spent making this film was spent rendering the A:M sequences. But I purposely kept each sequence short so that I wouldn't have to wait a long time to get some output which I could import into Vegas Studio. So...that's about it. I edited all the live action sequences as separate Vegas projects to break each into individual scenes and I then took that output and created a chroma-key sequence of me sitting in the Biplane model. That came out much worse than I had hoped for, mostly because I did not have proper lighting on my blue-bed sheet background and I did not get an even blue color which the chroma-key could work with. Still, I played around with the chroma-key properties for a long time on each live action sequence to try to blend it as best I could with what I had to work from. For the final film, I added a 16mm film projector wav file as a background noise and I found some nifty jazz music on the web to use as the sound track. I've actually written to the jazz musician via email asking for permission to use their music for my project, but if I don't get an affirmative from them on that, I'll be removing that music from the "final" version of this film. I may end up banging out my own theme music on the keyboard. My standards are low so I expect I'll be very pleased with whatever I come up with on that front. And that's it. I've been reading all of these great suggestions for the new version of this film and I've begun work on incorporating them into it. I also took the suggestion about watching some other silent films for inspiration and I've got a DVD on its way with a large collection of silent films on it from the first part of the 20th century. I expect that'll give me a lot of great ideas. Thanks again for all the nice feedback!

OK! :-) I know when I'm licked! I'm going to go back and edit the film and make it tighter. I sincerely appreciate the feedback from all of you. It helps me to create a better fill-um. :-)

I really enjoyed that! I am truly in awe with the talent shown in the A:M community and with the versatility and output of the A:M software!

Thanks for the comments! HEATH_NAYLOR: I purchased A:M last July and played with it a fair amount for a couple of months. Then I didn't touch it all again until about 2 months ago and so now I play with it about, oh...maybe 3 to 4 hours a week. My modeling skills are really awful still, which is why I did the live action of the Captain Leo character. If I was a good enough modeler, and someday I hope to be, I'll replace all those shots with some better shots with an animated model. Also though, I wanted to play around with using Chroma-keying to insert myself over the animation and see how that looked, so.... VF124: I did not do the piano playing. JOHNNYSWAY: I understand what you meant about it being a bit long, but I did that on purpose so that it would be a faithful rendition of an actual silent film. If you watch many silent films of that era, they spend a lot of time on the title cards and on the actors reactions to things. So I left some of the titles up a really long time, and had them jitter a lot here and there, just to lend a note of authenticity to it. I'm sorry you didn't watch the whole thing. It is a story with a beginning middle and end and you missed out on the whole "effect" so to speak, by not watching it through to the end. But that being said, I'm glad you watched as much as you did and gave me your feedback!

This was a weekend project. I wanted to experiment with some composting and chroma screens (harder than I thought! You've gotta get the lighting just right!) and basically just do something fun that I could also use to learn more about the software. So...here it is! My five minute silent film: Death Over France http://www.irish-studios.com/DeathOverFrance.mov Be warned...this is a 39.5 meg download so if you don't have broadband, you probably don't want to try downloading this. Enjoy!

OH MY GOSH! This was one of the best things I've ever seen! Excellent!

Thanks everyone!

Some folks had trouble opening the windows media version of that film so I've redone it as a much smaller Quick Time Movie file which can be viewed here: http://www.irish-studios.com/F4andTieFighterMovie-small.mov

I know this is not that good, animation-wise, but I'm learning a lot about A:M by working on this. I build a scene, render it, change something, render it again, add some different materials, render it again, etc... and I'm trying to learn more about about compositing and all that that entails. So it's a good exercise for me. Here's the link to the film: http://www.irish-studios.com/F4andTieFighterMovie.wmv I thought I'd post this just for the heck of it. The audio needs a lot of work, especially the dialogue as it's almost indecipherable unless you know what it says. But if you're interested, the dialogue goes: "Houston, this is Sub-Flight One. I just saw something fall out of space. Are you showing anything on radar? Over." "Roger that Sub-Flight One. We don't know what it is, but it's coming up fast on your six. Over." "Roger Houston. I'm going to try to lose it in the clouds." "10-4. Keep us posted." "Houston! They're shooting at me! They're shooting at me."

I know it's stupid... but I haven't been using A:M at all for the last few months and I was wanting to do something fast just to get myself reaquainted with the software. http://www.irish-studios.com/ and then click on the only link on that page.

Check the very first post on page one of this topic. It lists the times the film festival is showing. There were some really interesting films on there. Quite a breadth of medium to create them too. Other than <ETC>, which was visually much better looking than any of the others, I really enjoyed the one with the little boy telling the story of his new dog the best. I was trying to figure out if they recorded this little kid telling an actual story about a dog and then decided to create an animation around that...or if they made up the whole story and added the animation to go with it. I suspect the former.

Saw your movie on Nick Toons a few minutes ago. Very, very cool.

Thanks everyone! Excellent feedback! Very useful to me! I guess now that I've had a little bit of fun using other people's models and played with putting together some choreographies, that now I'll start working on my modeling skills. I want to figure out how to build a reusable environment or set so that I don't have to recreate the wheel each time I go to a new chor. Thanks again!