Sevenar

Heck, we're all New Users to one feature or another... Consider me entered, too.

If you happen to be in the Astoria/Queens area this Saturday, the Museum of the Moving Image is hosting the 2005 Machinima Festival from 11am to 6pm. Ordinarily, this would have nothing to do with Animation:Master, except that two of my films made the cut this year as Official Selections, and each of them has at least one scene I had to use A:M to complete. Cheers, Reece

I'm not a lawyer, but I've read a bit on the subject over the years. Here's some things you can do to keep the similarities down: 1) Alter the insignia on the uniforms. Give them hats, whatever. 2) Change the names a LOT. Sound-alikes are a bad idea. If you want a "Data" character, call him "Info" or "Diskdrive". Play on the names, too. Parody Picard's hyphenated first name by calling your guy "Jean-Luc-Marc-Mathieu Piccup-Truc" or something similarly blatant. 3) Add crazy stuff to the hull of the starship so that there is no chance it could ever be mistaken for the Enterprise. Lawn chairs, steer horns, maybe even an outhouse. Give it a paint job, too--maybe flames down the sides or neon glow-tubes and spinners. Have it bounce through space on some hydraulic lifters, perhaps. 4) Change the character's voices completely. Make the Captain have a really cheesy French accent. Have the Riker character speak like a pirate all the time--give him an eyepatch and a parrot. "Yarh! I be feelin' like a sandwich!" 5) Do NOT use any of the music. Weird Al Yankovic can write all the parody lyrics he likes, but he still has to get clearance to use the tunes. Good luck, Sev

John, you are the man! Thanks!

I've been looking for a model of a panda bear for a website project. Anyone have one they'd be willing to let me use? I thought there was one on the A:M disc, but I can't find it, and the old "Panda on Fire" project isn't up on the FTP mirror anymore. (If an actual panda isn't available, a regular bear may be ok, I'll just have to re-texture it.) Thanks! Sev

I'm hoping I can get there for at least one day--to bug the guys at the Hash booth, at least! D*C 2003 is where I first saw A:M...and bought it.

Will: Yeah, I realize that the computations involved would make hundreds of individual SimCloth droplets unwieldy at best (nigh-impossible at worst.) Plus, they don't exhibit Blobby behavior like merging together, either. Oh well. I was just trying to think "outside the box" with the SimCloth thing. Maybe someone with more experience could use the cloth effect for some other unusual application no one else has thought of yet. The rain looked realistic, but the video was kind of dark on my PC, so I couldn't see any bounce or deflection of the streaks in your example. I'll take your word for it, though. Regards, Sev

Just some ideas off the top of my head (which may or may not work): --City sections, squares perhaps, with a rotoscope render of the next section on each of the boundaries. Keeps the city in manageable chunks, but the rotoscope/matte painting idea might not produce good results except at the point where the camera made the render. --Some sort of Level-of-Detail proxy? One model with just decaled-boxes for long range shots and flyovers, one with the full-detail buildings. --Inhabitants. 'Nuff said. --Country-specific prop sets. Traffic signs, police uniforms/cars, etc. --Every road/sidewalk to have a 2 built-in antiparallel paths to constrain a car/pedestrian model to. (so you can have 2-way traffic easier...) --Royalty-free use. --maybe a pose-slider wind system for direction and magnitude of wind forces for flags, chimney smoke, etc. (?) (0/100% = north, 25% = east, 50% = south, 75% = west, etc.) --at least 1 side have a sea/water coast of some sort. That's all I can think of at the moment...

One more, with transparent drops... drops4.mov

And here's the project file for it. drops3.zip

Here's a slightly better version. I tweaked the shapes of the deflector and the "water" drops. drops3.mov

Sure, but like I said, it's a five-minute job so don't expect anything miraculous! Probably need to tweak the Friction params on the SimCloth to make it more real-looking. drops.zip

Just a mirror of the Water splashing thread on the main A:M forum, to allow me to post a QuickTime. This is a really fast and crude demo, but the blue patches are just small 2x2 grids and the cyan objects are spheres with the tops & bottoms truncated (have to do that, otherwise SimCloth tells you it's unsolvable.) Obviously, the model & SimCloth parameters would have to be tweaked to allow the "drops" to deform more naturally, but it looks like the idea of using SimCloth to simulate water might just be doable after all. Regards, Sev drops2.mov

I wonder...if you constrained the nulls for the vanes to the nose of a spaceship, and put some Lag on them, couldn't they be made to turn automatically when you turned the ship? Just a thought...

Lazlo: You've got a couple of good starts, you just need some polish. In the juggling story, you need to give Mike some sort of goal that good juggling would help him achieve (win a talent contest, impress a girl, whatever) and stretch out the good side of magic juggling balls a little more. As it stands, he really has no motivation that the audience would know about. If we know why he wants to juggle, and what's in it for him if he succeeds, we feel happy for him when he finally gets the magic balls. Then we squirm with him as we find out they're more trouble than they're worth, and stay focused as he finally finds a way to both get rid of them and reach his goal without them. There's all sorts of funny stuff you could try to work in. Perhaps he has to hide his juggling from his boss/girlfriend/VIP by standing in a doorway and juggling them one-handed around the corner, perhaps having to bounce them against a wall, which leads him to come up with some fast story to explain away the thump-thump-thump... All sorts of stuff to try. In the Apartment sketch, there needs to be something minor wrong with the bathroom, too. Just something small to foreshadow bigger problems to come. Perhaps some loose tiles, no medicine cabinet, whatever, it just has to be small and something a person would easily concede if the rest of the deal was good. In a comedy sketch like this, you want to build from minor problems to major ones to keep the audience both laughing and interested to find out "what could go wrong next?" Keep at it! Sevenar's First Rule of Screenwriting: All first drafts suck. There are no exceptions. It's not being able to write that makes you successful, it's being able to re-write that makes all the difference. Good luck! Reece

The Halo 2 MC was a lot cleaner model than the Halo 1 MC. Now, if you want to see my version of the H1MC in action, go to www.sponsorsvsfreeloaders.com and download Episode 7. The final scene has the animated MC model in it...plus a surprise or two. Big thanks to Roughy and Pia for their trailblazing efforts in bringing the Halo stuff to A:M!!! My current project is rigging the Halo 2 Flood Combat Form model--kind of tricky since the extra appendages are on the left arm! I have to start TSM2 with 2 arm pairs, then delete the right arm #2 after running TSM FLipper.

Well, I tried it. The same Halo MasterChief model that loads in about 40 seconds in the importer took over three hours to import as a prop. Then, when I tried to go to the shaded preview mode, A:M ate all of my virtual memory before throwing up an unhandled exception error and crashing. The model's not horribly complex, either. A few thousand polys at most. Looks like it's back to the drawing board for a 3DS solution that's acceptable to everyone.

"looks bad"? It's IDENTICAL to the game model, save for the color, which I intentionally altered for another project. At any rate, no multi-million polygon model is ever going to play nice with A:M, regardless of how you try to import it. Might as well take a couple of nice renders in 3D Studio and use them as splining rotoscopes instead if the model is that complex.

I've posted this before, but if you create a new empty model, then right click in the window, pick Wizards/Import/Autodesk 3DS file, it will pull a 3DS file in --as a MODEL, not a prop--and it will be UV mapped to whatever texture files were saved with the 3DS model. It doesn't import bones or materials, just vertices and UV maps. You still have to bone and rig it like you would any other model, but it does work. I used it to import 3DS conversions of OBJ models from Microsoft's Halo game into A:M, then bone & rig with TSM2. (see MasterChief's helmet in my avatar) No problems.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to miss this one since I'm headed up to Toronto this weekend for a last-minute convention...

What time?

I think Colin was talking about July 9 instead.

I just wonder if the user groups forum might be of more widespread use if it were higher up on the main page...?

How about June 25th? That's the weekend after Father's Day. The location doesn't really matter to me. The previous place is fine, or maybe someplace a bit less busy.

Isn't it about time we thought of doing this one again?