Eric2575

Well, I just tried a different approach with no luck. I created an action with the OX object and controlled it's ambiance there. Then I tried to drag that action on top of the OX action object in the chor, but AM doesn't like that. Back to square one.

I have a main object that has an action that adds several other ojects to it in the chor. Now I want to control the ambient intensity in a pulsating fashion of one of the action objects (call it OX) being added. So I made a percentage pose with OX and adjusted the ambience from 0 to 100 with a pose slider. This is where I'm stuck - when I open the main object in the chor and click the OX action object, there is no pose slider to manipulate, even though I have the drivers icon unchecked. If I add the OX object to the chor by itself, the pose slider is there and works fine. When the OX object is added to the main object via the action, I can't find a way to access the pose I made for the OX object. Maybe I'm looking at this wrong and there is a different way to do this. Bottom line is that I need to add the OX object to the main object and then I need to be able to change the OX ambient intensity in the chor. Thanks in advance for any insight. Eric

Start with the wheelwell outline and extrude back. Very similar to the back wheelwell. You are doing great, just keep experimenting. Every shape is a new challenge.

Go to the tools menu and select units. In that section on the bottom right you will find "Paste/extrude offset". Enter the number of x offset units you want to move and uncheck "Use cp spacing for extrude".

Smoothing it out comes last. Finish all the rest of the panels and everything else. Patience, patience, patience. Besides, from that angle it looks pretty smooth. Once you are done with all the panels, put a high spec and med intensity value on all the panels and look at it from all sorts of different directions. The spec values will give a clearer indication of where the panels need to be straightened. Then smooth, then post final and wireframe render of trouble spots for us to examine.

Viper: I don't want to detract from what you are doing, so I am not going to model the NIXUS now. You are doing great and should keep this thread for yourself. If I can be of any help, I will. I will certainly keep checking back in here. Keep up the good work. Eric

That's a great start!

Using Actions per Nancy blinking light Sorry, I'll get that link working in a sec - fixed! Anyone know of a FREE web space provider that has more than 10 GB of storage?

Thank you Luuk, I will also give this a try. What resource did you use to learn about expressions?

I'll try that out right now. Thank you Nancy!

I thought if I used an expression, I wouldn't have to worry about keying all those frames and manually updating the on/off properties? It doesn't matter if it's an expression or not, just the most economic way to turn properties on/off over a given length of time. Wouldn't the use of an action also require manual updating of all the settings? I wanted to automate that if possible.

As it stands, I added 10 key frames to a clip, one every second, and alternated 0 and 100% for the ambiance settings of a model bulb. Setting the interpolation to "hold" gave the quick blink. Clumsy, but it works. Never having used expressions before, could someone give me an idea of how to do this over a 10 second clip? This would be more elegant than keyframing, especially if I wanted to do this for a longer clip. Thanks

I'd like a crack at that car too if you don't mind.

Economy of splines in every facet...um, wait, I've done the impossible,,,detected a surplus, a waste of splines in Stian's work???? Yes, there it is...the tires....egads, the tires and rims are bursting with superfluous splines.... Seriously, love your work!!!! Awesome!!!! Eric p.s. How did you make the smoke around the Bismark?

The jiggle problem had me thinking about this all day, so I examined the tgas' frame by frame, all 280 of them. So what do you know, the jiggles were caused by frames being out of sync. This happened when I tried to import the TGAs back into AM. Selecting all 280 frames was too much for AM, it flat out refused to let me do it and told me so in a short message - too many files at once! So then I grabbed about 50 at a time and this seemd to work. After importing all 280 this way, I thought I was set, only to have the jigglies. Well, after repeating the steps, I found that AM takes the last frame of any given set and jumps it in order to the top. Say you are importing frames 1-37, well in my case, all frames import, but frame #37 gets placed at the top of the heap before frame #1. This happened every time I grabbed a set of 50. So after everything was imported, every 50th frame was pushed to the top of the stack resulting in a missed frame every 50 frames - jiggle. After manually putting them back in order, I had a relatively smooth animation. Now I am working on compositing a scrolling starfield together with Challenger to make it really shine. Glad you like it Mr. C

Yup, already ran into that problem and corrected it. Premiere wants to have three digit sequential numbers in the tga's. Photoshop's browser has a nifty batch rename feature that took care of this. I haven't played around with the file today because we have too much to do to prepare for a big party this weekend - lotsa friends and relatives coming over prior to a wedding this weekend. Once all the hoopla is over, I want to get this figured out - a 14 hour render to TGAs should not be wasted.

Mike: I don't have quicktime pro, but I do have access to Adobe Premiere. I just don't have any experience with it. Still experimenting. draagn: Booleons worked fine for me in toon render, see attached. ruscular: I rendered the sequence out to TGA at 1280 x 720. Now I am trying to compress it to either an avi or mov file for viewing. The trouble I'm having is that when I import into Adobe Premiere, the movie skips back and forth upon replay. I'm not sure what's going on. The AM movie rendered fine, but the file is too big. 143 MB for about 9 seconds worth of footage is rather large, isn't it? Does anyone know the steps to converting an AM TGA sequence to a movie file that is playable on a DVD so it can be viewed on a big screen TV?

Try a search on compositing or bluescreen.m

Julian: I forgot all about Ignore Fog - you were right! Thanks for the reminder. Cheers Eric

Hi all: I am resurrecting an old model, Disney's Nautilus, and am having a strange thing happen. When I try to render the submarine with fog, the fog does not show up in the final render. To compare, I rendered a whale and it came out fine, fog n' all. The attached pic shows both models, the Nautilus and the whale positioned in the same space in the chor to show you what I mean. As you can see, the whale's back end is shrouded in the fog as intended, but the Nautilus's stern is rendering like there is no fog applied. Mind you, this is not two renders superimposed, this is one render with fog and two models in the same general area. Why and how does the Nautilus model ignore the fog? It must be the model, since the fog renders fine on the whale.

I rendered it all default AM AVI. Nothing special. The Ship was actually something I just started a month before the contest. I didn't intend to enter, but since I was pleased with the result, I entered it. Having finished a 14 hour tga sequence for a better flyby, I am somewhat stumped at going any further with it. I have access to After Effects and Premiere, but am unable to get a good looking video out of the sequence. I import the tga's and try to play them back, but the frames seem to skip forward and then back a few frames over and over. The result is less than pleasing. I am not that familiar with both programs, but it seems the approach should work. I wanted DVD quality and size, just to see what it would look like on a HDTV. I did import the frames back into AM and rendered an AVI out, but the size is 143.6 MB. Oh, the AM rendered quicktime movie shows the lensflare at the end, but when I import into After Effects or Premiere, no lens flare.

Lance Walker

Very impressive skills you've got there. Someone further up in the post asked about the eyes? What are your basic steps (or detailed, if you are so inclined) to get them to look as real as they do? m

Thank you for the encouragement John. So far this has been a hair raising experience - geez, I crack myself up. In any case, whatever comes out of this will be my next contest entry!

Tanner: I just hear about muhHair from your hair post. Read just a blurb about it - a new shader AM has in V.13. Since it is a shader, I'm gonna set up my hair the way I want and then I'll try and render with the shader. This is my first stab at learning hair. Always something new to learn in AM!