markeh

Just adding another thumbs up. Exceptional work!

I think you've already got quite a keen eye as it is. That must come from doing what you've been doing for so long. If I had to really reach for a crit it might be that the car looks like it follows the movement of the truck too much. I had to watch it several times to even come with anything at all. I think it looks great. The drivers of those vehicles are a couple of real nobodys though eh? Edit: Also it looks to be an overcast day. It looks like your shadows are quite soft as they are. I'm just wondering if they should be even more soft. There isn't a good object in the background to reference the shadows. Here again this is really reaching. They might be correct but just something to take a look at.

Once you hit the space bar to refresh, it looks as it should. Edit: I take that back. There's still some freakiness going on. Edit again: I have for sure found the culprit. The streak emitter misbehaves when it is on 5 point patches ( I didn't check 3 point patches). I won't go through the process of how I found out but I may need to take up tennis or some other activity where I get out more.

Not a darn thing wrong with this unless you count the right fingers sunk into her chest when her arms are folded. Extremely minor in my book (mesh in mesh is my middle name) because of the exceptional animation that eclipses it. I can't imagine you would have to go through boot camp to be accepted as a TWO animator if you show your 10 second "demo".

http://www.sgross.com/plugins/ http://www.kci-group.com/z/plugins.htm http://www.ypoart.com/downloads.htm http://members.lycos.co.uk/toonnation/newest.html http://www.dotnet.se/aaver/ http://www.moscafilms.com.br/emilioleroux/workshop.html This is an incomplete academy award winning list but with kickin' plugins. STDS? You're talking about DEM files? Someone ought to write a good tut on that someday (meaning I've been meaning to unless there's a good link somewhere).

You'll also notice that on a progressive render that it looks proper, but on a final render you get what you described. When the new 11 hair came out, hash decided that it wasn't important enough to get that detailed with color gradation. I haven't verified this to be true for sure in 12 or 13. You can still get good looking grass though anyway. If you were going to be close enough to see a lady bug on a blade, it would be better to model the blade with a few instances and use a gradient material on the model etc. The rest of the grass could be in the background. Edit: I just tested it in 13 and I think they are doing a much better job with the gradation. I upped the number of control points to 8 and made the bow = 0 and it looked like a very smooth transition. In any case, upping the number of control points will get better results as far as gradation is concerned. I also did the same test in 11 and - yes once again upping the number of control points will get you better results there as well.

Mechanical and nonmechanical greatness!

Point taken. I have a rock slide animation coming up and will try to improve on the dynamics and believability.

There's absolutely no disagreement. This clip is just a small snippet in a much larger narrative that my father is doing. The order was to put something out that gave a point about what was generally going on but could have a certain amount of whimsey. Here is another clip that will be part of his narrative that is even more whimsical. molly.mov

I so agree with the slow movement of the rocks. Either they should be faster or pretend they are huge and they shoot up really high. There are other issues but none so prevelant as the rocks. I had also put in some sprites on the fore part of the churn but they don't really show up. I had mentioned this in the wip form about the main flood water. I ended up rigging the water model and cp weighting it and then snaking and contorting it through the canyon. It's churn movement is the result of changing the translate values of a turbulence material (with displacement percentage applied) in the choreography over time. The dam is in two parts and I exploded each with Steffens newton plugin. You almost don't even see it exploding. As Dan had said, the rocks should more or less roll a bit but this is very much highly embellished for it purposes (I was once with my sister on a hike when it started to rain and she had stories to tell of a large wall of water coming down the canyon. I was there. It was no more than 2 inches. It was cute.). The rocks were forced into the air through newton physics as well. I think my scaling was off. I mean it was definitely off. I did each newton simulation separately so as not to hang the computer. In other words blow up half of dam - turn that model off, kick up rocks - turn that model off etc. Thankyou for all the kind remarks. I wasn't able to pull that fork out. Edit: Ah dang it's that one rock especially at the end that really puts everything out of place. I may just have to rerender those frames. (I keep rewatching it and now it's starting to haunt me)

You finish these things and then say to yourself, "this is wrong and why didn't I pay more attention to this over here...etc", but I've done put a fork in it. 1.6 mb Flash FLood

When you had this as a "work in progress", you had actual voice and it was hilarious. Now, you've just plain scared the macabre out of me. I'm going back to church!

openexr plugin for saving and opening in photoshop 7 here.

I think if there's going to be interaction with specifically a terrain, you're still going to need a semi dense mesh to get trees on it and to constrain objects to its surface. But with pixel displacement, you can get rocks and crags like never before. Pixel grass? On the right is with displacement set to 0 and the cactus are where they should be. On theleft has lots of displacement and the cactus have no home. This cactus is from a hair material.

Good grief - all this time without knowing this. I've been progressive rendering all this time to see my displacement. Edit: Oh but it doesn't work obviously on a material with a displacement percentage. But still good to know. Is there another Ctrl+something that does that too?

That might be a fellows only link I wonder. The link was broken for lowly me.

Ok I've jumped up and down enough. Am I to understand that with pixel displacement the renderer pays attention to how close you are to the mapping as far as how much detail you can get from the displacement? This sounds similar to what terragen does if that's right. In any case it's very cool just wanted the specifics. Not that it matters but just curious if there is a render hit as well?

Doggone I'm poor as all heck and now I'm forced to upgrade! Doggone!!!

Thanks for all the compliments. Here is a .....eh hem.....a watered down version of the project for those who are interested. Animated distortion - yes once I wrap my head around that it would make things tons easier to improve on. This was a semi starting point as I didn't know if it would be somewhat convincing. So I plan on taking all suggestions and hopefully implementing them (including the doggone dam - Thankyou Vern for taking the heat on the correct phrasing). I'll update when I have a chance. info.zip

Here's my water model. I just mozy it on down the canyon. The water model has a gradient material with one side a cell turb where the water starts to pour down and the other is a fractal turbulance but I probably could have made the whole thing a cell turb. I gave that a dispacement percentage and keyframed, in this case, the x and y translate values of the cell turb and fractal turb translate values over time. The canyon walls do a great job of hiding its simplicity and imperfections. My wife wants it to bank on the corners and I explained to her that it isn't fluid dynamics and while you could bone the water model into a snake to get the bank effect, that would be to much like........like..........animating and that just hurts my mouse pointin' index finger.

This will be part of a project that breaks a dam although I don't even think you'll see the darn dam breaking. flood.mov

I have an older brother who has subjected me to these kinds of creatures all my life. These are my demons. These are what I'm comfortable with. Your models and their movements are fantabulous (that's in my dictionary).

How about exceptional, Mr. humble!

Ah yes, the grooming of the trees - I guess I haven't read that New York best seller quite yet. In this case it is several stamps just because I had more control on the resolution. But experimentation would be good on different resolutions to be applied as an image because that would make things more easy in the long run (I probably stamped only about 10% of of my entire mountain mesh). Thankyou for the praises.

I'm glad you wrote something funny. My wife called me a dufus for writing a subtitle like that. Anders wrote a plugin with excellent instructions and there are several examples of normal maps here Will Sutton also pointed out this website that has a photoshop plugin that you can change regular photos into normal maps. Thank goodness there really is a Molly's nipple in southern Utah. Good grief I've forgotten her last name though.