Eric2575

Dingo: I as wondering, are you using your work just for stills or will you be making clips? Reason I'm asking is because of render times with AO. Also, AO is great for simulating an outside lighting environment which you really don't need for outer space and actually don't want since AO lights all around an object. What I'm trying to say is, lighting for outer space is pretty simple to set up since most of the light will come from one major source, such as a sun and then maybe a planet's glow, not really from all around an object. You can get some nice space lighting effects with just a couple of lights and some specular tricks. If you do a search in the AM Stills library (you have to log out from AM forum and log in as a guest) with the search term "Enterprise", you'll find some nice examples of spaceships. Out of these, all of mine were done in V.13t without AO but with displacement maps. Faster render times, looks great, and...you can use displacement maps ♪♫♪♫♫♪♪♫ Hope that helps Eric Edit: Could you give us a render with the hull plating turned up a bit, they are so very faint on my monitor.

I'll have to double check that Robert. William, you modeled an octopus a while back. I never saw the finished render of that. Would you post it here? Eric

Must have been something messed up in the pose. I deleted the pose and started another one. IK Kinematic Constrained the last bone in the chain to the null. Now I am able to manipulate the tentacle with the null, but it's a bit strange since there is a delay in the movement of the tentacle following the null. When I move the null a small distance, the movement is fine, but when I move it over a larger range, the tentacle lags behind and does not even get to the same position as the null. I would like the tentacle to move in unison with the null. I suppose IK Kinematic is not the proper constraint for this?

Ok, I have a chain of bones, parent, child, child, etc. They are assigned to the tentacle and move pretty good in a pose when I manipulate the end bone. Now I want to constrain the last bone in the chain to a null for easier control in the pose/choir. I thought adding a "translate to" and "orient like" null would do the trick, but it doesn't. When I manipulate the null the constrained end bone does not follow. Does this have something to do with IK or should it work as is? If this is the wrong way to constrain the null, what is the right way?

Thank you

What is the shortcut to open a hierarchy of bone with one keystroke? Like shift j to make them all visible or invisible.

Very impressive and entertaining Gene ♪ Couldn't resist

One more link to throw in the pot for the problem I'm working on: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...34169&st=40

Shelton: could you show us the arrow quiver example? David: will this rig be available to us in the future? Or is it available somewhere now? I think it's overkill for my tentacle, but so far it looks better than anything else.

Thank you Holmes, I already downloaded that last night and went through it. Nice tutorial and very helpful. Now that I have a basic grasp on setting up the bones, can someone provide me with a link to fan bone or weighting info? I recall a very small tut in which a four or five segment tube was used to show weighting of the bones to make a smoother bend.

Still studying and weighting all the options. Robert, I found these great tutorials you did for TSM2 and wanted to link them to this thread: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=35908 I got a test tentacle rigged with TSM2 but haven't found out how to animate it yet. I'm going through your tutorials now and will probably get the answer in the last clip. These are really great and a must see for anyone wanting to use TSM2. Thanks Robert.

Holmes, could you give me a screenshot of the bone setup or a rigged model I could dissect? I just did a ton of searching the forum and reading the posts. Had no idea this might be so complex.

My apologies, I never know what level of experience members have here. I did not mean to sound condescending or aloof when I talked about bump maps. Keep up the good work. Eric

Thanks Gene, I'll do a search on it. "First, I recommend putting the spline ring in the middle of the bone." I'm not sure I follow you, the bones are pretty much in the center of the tentacle?

Hi guys: I'm modeling a tentacle to go with my Nautilus and need some advice on how to rig the sucker for some smooth manipulation. So far I have a simple tentacle with linked bones for every segment. Bone 1 has spline ring 1 assigned to it, bone 2 has the second spline ring assigned to it, and so on down the tentacle. I have no fall off or anything else set up. I also don't have any experience in rigging. Soooo, if someone could walk me through the steps I need to take to get a nicely maneuverable tentacle, I'd be much obliged. Attached is a cap of the tentacle, bones, and the way it moves now. Not very pretty. Eric Edit: One thing I do know and made sure of, the bone handles are all pointing up in the same direction.

Nancy, you are right about blurring for smoother transitions, but since Dingo wants to have a sharp drop off for the window edges, it is necessary to get a tight smooth transition which blurring doesn't give you. Dingo never had tight lines in the jpg, so that needed to be cleaned up for a crisp displacement map. Here is the Photoshop image of a selection without anti aliasing. It should have selected just the black, not what you see here. Dingo (don't know your real name) I am coming to the conclusion that on my meager Laptop, AM V.13t, AO, and displacement don't like each other. I have created three different displacement maps and created three different modelsto render with AO, and each one comes out with more grain and artifacts than AO usually produces. I am going to try another render with the AO in the chor turned up to 45, but I have meager hopes. I am also rendering an AO pass with bump instead of displacement to see if that will work for you in case this is a bug with V.13. Here is the bump version. Depending on how close you get to the model, I think this is your best bet. Any closer and you should build a high detail part of that section anyway This render is with an additional ambiance and color map. These are the maps I used: Window_Ambiance_Lights_out.zip Windows TGA2 Bump at 300%, Windows Ambiance Lights out at 44%, Windows Blue color 100% Hope this helps Btw, I've been fighting the flu for the last several days, so this is what I can do throughout the day so I don't die of boredom Eric

I seem to remember that I was also having problems with V.13 and displacement maps. If I recall, on my system it had a bit to do with how much memory AM had when rendering. If I didn't open any other programs, AM did fine, but if I opened memory intensive programs, then I would get weird renders. This is happening again. I am rendering now with Firefox open, as well as Photoshop and I get major artifacts when rendering displacement with AO. I'm also on a pretty weak (1.25GB ram) laptop, which is not helping any. Let me shut everything down except AM and see what goes on. Eric

I did some further examination of your decal in PS and found that you have different levels in your black windows causing the blurring. I'll make them solid black and that should take care of the problem. Edit: Rendering now with full black and saved as TGA

Even if you decide not to use it, you might want to try using the Simbiont rust material. It will give you more insight into the way different aspects such as color, bump, and specular work together. What version of AM are you using? It also doesn't look like you applied a proper bump map to your chisel. Bump maps are supposed to help bring out the material and surface details. Look at your reference picture. You'll notice how sharply defined some of the details of the rust crud are. To quote Webopedia: "Bumps are applied by matching up a series of grayscale pixels with colored pixels on the rendered, colored object. Lighter grayscale pixels create a sense of maximum relief or maximum indentation; darker pixels have less effect." Although this definition states that grayscale pixels should be matched up with color pixels, that is not always true, especially if you are dealing with grunge and rusty surfaces. I took the liberty of applying a simple desaturated rust map to your blade and adding a very light yellow/red specular color with 43 spec size and 50 spec intensity. As you can see it gave your blade more definition, making it look more 3d. I got the rust color map from CGTextures. It's a great site for free textures. http://www.cgtextures.com This is the rust color map from cgtextures that I desaturated (took the color information out in an image editing software) and applied to your blade This is the basic no AO no radiosity 9x render with the bump and specular additions. I hope this helps explain what I meant about bump maps. Cheers Eric

I looked at your decal in PS and that looks fine. Then I rendered without AO and like you said, that's fine too. Now I'm rendering using 9x AO. I'll post when it's done. I'm using V.13t Edit: first 2 passes show a significant amount of roughness - aborted render and checking some other variables

I love the second clip.

How the final render comes out also really depends on how you set everything else up. If you get it too realistic, the render times go up pretty fast. I didn't even finish the render below since it takes 7 minutes on my laptop for every pass. Thought I'd give it a shot though.

Reduce the spec size and increase the spec intensity a bit. Right now it looks a bit milky. It might be the transparency isn't high enough.

Since you are showing several hues in the red range on the blade, I'm assuming it's pretty rusty? Try the Simbiont rusty steel material found here: http://www.darksim.com/html/download_simbiont2.shtml Also, a diffuse map is terrible for detail bump mapping, don't use it for that.

Bump map will make it shine.