Sevenar

You can zip it up and email it to me at sevenar AT bellsouth D0T net (can you tell how much I hate spambots?) I really, really appreciate it. Please let me know how you'd like to be credited in the email. Roughy, if you'd do the same, that'd be cool. I fully believe in giving credit where it's due. Thanks again, Sev

Wow. I sure am glad there are people out there who know what the heck they're doing. That's fantastic! I think it looks great! If you can get me that rigged version, I'll gladly credit you both in the video. It would save me an enormous amount of time. Thanks! Sev

The problem in my particular case is that most of the film footage will be shot with the game engine so the whole thing won't have to be hand-animated, which would take a total novice like me thousands of hours. Unfortunately, the Halo game engine doesn't let you do anything but run, jump, crouch, shoot, throw, hit, and drive. You can't drop your gun at all (except in one hackable instance) and even then, you can't move your arms once you drop it. Soooo....for any shot that requires the Master Chief to do anything with his hands where he doesn't have a gun in them, you simply have to have an external animation to composite into the game backgrounds. He can't point, punch a button, lift anything, etc. Now most of that I can work around with clever camera angles and judicious editing, but there are going to be a few shots where he'll just have to use his hands, so if I can just get a close approximation in A:M, he doesn't have to be a perfectly-animatable model. Just enough to move one arm independently should be enough, although being able to bend and pose the whole model would be ideal. If the patches distort, I'll just have to figure out a camera angle to minimize the flaw, shoot wide shots so the A:M model is too small to notice the bugs, but big enough where you can see the action, etc. It's just the vagaries of "machinima". It's sort of a cross between animation and a marionette show. If I can just get the decals from Roughy, I'll be in business... Sev

Roughy: Thank you soooo much! One minor problem--the CYBORG2.BMP and FACEPLATECHROME.BMP files are missing. Can I get those from you too? Thanks! Sev

Roughy: Ouch.... Well, stuff happens. Just let me know when you're back up to speed, please! Thanks, Sev

I couldn't find Bungie's 3DS version, but then again I didn't exhaust all the Halo mod sites either. I think Roughy's work looks great, though, and I can't wait to get my hands on the finished product. I'm really glad the A:M user community is so helpful. Perhaps someday I can return the favor. Sev

That's a good idea, but as Roughy said, the original model I found didn't have the patches connected so there wouldn't have been much point. (no pun intended!) Regards, Sev

Fantastic! I humbly await your next display of your masterful A:M kung-fu...

Holy cow! I didn't think I'd ever see anything even close to that! I could certainly work around the bare spots with judicious camera positioning. Even if I couldn't get the right arm rigged, I might be able to fake it enough to complete the shots I can't manufacture in the game engine. Roughy, that's some really good work. How can I get that project from you? Many, many thanks, Sev

Rats. I was afraid of that. I can't model worth a hoot. There's no way to get the arms to move independently in the game engine, so I have to have an external animation solution in order to do what I want to do. Nothing's ever easy, is it? Thanks for trying, though. If anyone else has any good ideas, please let me know. Thanks, Sev

Could the aliasing on the frets actually be the shadows cast by the strings? Just a newbie's guess, Sev

This is a Wings3D import of a 3DS model of the Master Chief character from the Xbox game "Halo". Master Chief A:M model About all I can get it to do is load. Neither the bones nor the skin made it across the translation. Anyway, is there any way at all to get this mesh rigged? I wouldn't know where to start on something like this. Is there any way to kind of spline "over" it to make a true A:M model instead of a poly mesh? It's for an amateur fan video a bunch of friends and I are making for the Halo 2 launch in November. If anybody has any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate them. If there are any professionals out there, how much would a job like this cost (bearing in mind that this project isn't going to be sold, obviously, due to Microsoft's copyrights) ? Any advice gladly accepted, Sevenar

I got it from here: http://www.yayap.com/models.html

Oh, if you manage to find or rig up an A:M Halo Master Chief, please let me know! Thanks, Sev

It's a freeware modeler, and one of the few that can output an Animation:Master .MDL file. I think the site is www.wings3d.com, but you can Google it for more precise info. The latest version already has the A:M export built in, so you don't need the old plugin.

Man, I wish I could get a rigged A:M Master Chief model... I do Halo machinima like Red vs. Blue (although I am not affiliated with them at all, to be clear) and there are some things that are really frustrating (i.e., impossible) to animate with the Halo engine. If I could get a posable A:M model, I could animate it in A:M and greenscreen it into other shots. I managed to use Wings3D to pull in a 3DS Max model of the Master Chief, but it didn't import the textures or the bones of course. And since I'm a total klutz with A:M, I doubt seriously I could really rig and texture that version. I kind of wonder if a competent A:M guru could use the imported 3DS model as a rotoscope and do a splined version over the polygons. Actually, someone with The Setup Machine might be able to just drop a ready made skeleton into that model and then it would just be a matter of making materials. I would really appreciate it if anyone actually has an A:M Master Chief, or would be willing to use their godlike powers to help me out with one. I'd certainly credit you in every video I used it in. If you can help, mail me at sevenar AT bellsouth D0T net. (maybe that will foil any lurking spambots...)

I hate to nitpick, but the astro-geek in me just has to point out that the Moon can never be viewed from that angle on Earth. Mare Orientale is never fully exposed (the dark spot at lower left) even at maximum libration. Other than that, great pic!

Yves & Tony: Simply beautiful work. This is the kind of image that belongs in Hash's new marketing strategies...

I'm curious--just what is a "carronade"? I know it's some sort of cannon-type weapon, but what makes it different from an ordinary cannon? Thanks, Sevenar

That is excellent work! Kind of reminds me of a half-bald Johnny Carson, in a way.

It's a large set of 3rd-party plugins. They were running a 40%-off special on them up through the 20th, the whole set for just US$30. There's more discussion on them on the main A:M forum. I'm not affiliated with them, I just thought I'd post some of the ones I thought were cool so folks could take advantage of the special if they thought the same.

Okay, here's a mix of 12 more neat Enhance A:M materials. All were simply dragged and dropped, no settings were altered. Two are of combined textures, but again, both were just dragged onto the model with no tweaking. From upper left, they are: 1. GlowLattice 2. Windowframe 3. FlamingEdges 4. LickPlasma 5. FresnelGlass 6. LightRidges 7. GlowLines 8. SootyParticles 9. DragonHide 10. Lattice 11. FresnelGlass+FlamingEdge 12. Xray+EdgeGlow

This is a quick render of the Holed-Cube primitive with the Enhance AM_EdgeGlow applied...

Two other minor corrections: 1) When Ebin is leaving the pub, he's walking way too slowly. I realize the pause is to punch up Valkyn's transformation, but you might want to have Ebin turn a corner to get out of the shot faster (if you want to keep the pacing/time the same) or just edit a second or two out of the shot with a video editor. 2) At around 1:54 in, there's a CU on Ebin's hand as he reveals the necklace to May. There's a little ambiguity to the shot because it turns out to be his left hand, and therefore crosses the 180 between the two actors in the previous shot. This one's an easy fix, though. Slightly adjust the camera angle to get any piece of Ebin's body to the up and right of the hand in the reveal, and the shot context will be complete from that background cue. Ebin's hand also appears to enter from above the frame (very briefly, in only a frame or two), yet in the previous shot he had his hand behind his back at waist level. That means the hand should enter the shot from below or from the same level, otherwise, it means he had to bring his closed hand around to the front of his body, lift it up, and then bring it back down before opening it, all in the tiny cut interval. Apologies for being a nitpic--uh, constructive critic...yeah, that's it... Sevenar

They also must have a helluva set of inertial dampeners on that ship... (I know, I know, it's comedic for effect...)