Drakkheim

Just a HUGE thank you for letting me know that TSM2 still works with v14. I had given up on it ever working again when it stopped in 13q(?) I installed it with my v14 install this morning and everything works! It's like christmas came a little early this year

How about applying a material with an edge gradient going from 100% transparent to Opaque to the object.

Lovely as always Stian!

Hmm. That's strange.. Using v 13?

yeah thats exactly what i did.. then I actually started a second copy of AM and set the affinity to the other core. and had them both rendering at the same time.

If I ever do anything at full rez it sure will. But I dont think its gonna be needed for the final sprites. Oh and a handy note for those who don't have v14 yet but have a dual core (or quad) system If you bind master.exe to the second core there's a chance you'll get a hefty performance increase in rendering since windows isnt dualcore supported yet. (XP that is) So by binding it to the core that isnt running the majority of the OS you get more cycles for AM. I bound AM to the second core and my render times went from 12:20 a frame to 8:30 so almost a 33% increase.

Well Got her hands put in and got the Squetch pose install put in tonight. I got her cp's assigned for everything except the hands using bones with falloff & CP weights and I must say I only had to tweak 3-4 little areas. And she distorts and bends beautifully. BIG BIG kudos to the hash guys for making those so easy to use and tweak. Also think I came up with an acceptable 'wet' look.. I increased the transparency a little and reflectivity and put in a large 'sun disc' which is a 100% ambient white disc just behind the light. I also broke out the reflectivity with and transparency with a seperate material with an edge gradient so the edges are more reflective (90%+) and almost opaque. It makes her sparkle a bit more. Unfortunatly render time is now at 12:20 per frame at 320x240.... Gotta save those pennies so I can use both cores asap with v14... Its rendering a 2second animation which should be done around lunch tomorrow.

Any chance we can request this thread to be stickied.. Its too invaluable a resource to be allowed to slip to page 5.

Ooh that's very lovely. Nice job you must have. Wanna trade?

Well asides from the hands and eyeballs she's mostly done modeling. I'm having a hard time making it look 'wet' enough.. Render time is painful on her though... ~40 min for this shot (2 1/2 min per pass roughly) Update: Here's a final animation Water elemental animation 840Kb SWF Ignore the black speckles theyre fixed in v14 im told and I had to re-render the last 10 frames and of course somehow my lighting settings got changed.

How about if we set up a community tutorial Wiki? then anyone can add new tutorials at any time and we could transcribe the existing ones as a group effort. I've got a hosting account (drakkheim.com) that I'm not actively using for anything except for storage... I could pop up a subdomain and get somthing set up in short order?

Wow I just looked at the date on those tutorials... Hard to imagine how much has changed since 1998.. I checked the internet WayBack machine.. and they didn't have any archives of the tutorials either.. They may have dissolved into the ether for all time.

Turns out that worked wonderfully. Thanks David! Now I've got to get back to work work..

Wow, thank you guys. I'll let ya know how it turns out

Good Idea. Here is the model. I left some leg geometry to make it easier to visualize. Stone_Elemental__Barren_Rigged.mdl And thanks for the help.

Thanks guys. Been plugging a bunch of little holes that you cant see until the dang thing starts moving. Have been tracking down the wonkiness with the feet. It looks like when the leg bends the foot geometry bone's heel end swings outward, sorta rolling the ankle. I think I might have re-compensated something I didn't need to and thus broke something. Oh and somehow His left arm is longer than his right. so all the hand bones are off by a bit. so when he closes his hand it looks like a swarm of pebbles. Sigh.. and there's a looong list of other things that I should fix with this guy.. but since the final result is gonna be an itty bitty sprite. I may just call him done after I resolve the angle flipping issue. Gotta keep reminding myself otherwise, I'll go all OCD on it and never finish the other 10 units... Here's QT of the angle roll thing.. and you can also really see the crap behind the curtain StoneElemental_ankleshift.mov

Stone Elemental Walk cycle. Flash 2mb Still dicovering new problems with the model and such but, hey, progress is progress.. Next up fix the wobbly ankle, lift the shoulders and rebuild the floating left hand.

Ahh many thanks for the pointers. After a good amount of .... well .. guessing really... I tracked it down. It was a combination of the foot_control_IK's needing to be re-compensated and The euler limits for the calves. Unlike the problem with the fire elemental, this time it was the negative Y constraint that needed to be -1 instead of 0. Actually a smaller value than -1 worked fine.. it just seemed to be 0 that was causing the hitch. Thanks for the help guys, and I'm feeling way better about tinkering with the rig after having spend a couple hours with it.. (ps, man there are a LOT of bones when you unhide everything...)

Thanks a bunch guys, I appreciate the kind comments. Well rigging the guy wasn't hard with the new Squetch posable rig. Dare I say downright enjoyable. Assigning the cps to the geometry bones.. Well It's been educational. With a little refresher help from Bob's CP weighting tech talk Things are going pretty smoothly. However I have run into another Rig related problem. The model's thighs are rotated 45 degrees when the model is in it's default position. However as soon as I move the foot nulls up or down the thighs snap back into their proper position. I've tried Messing with the Calf euler limits.. and It seemed to help it some..(the thighs were rotating 90 degrees) I tried re-compensating the thigh_orienter but it didn't make much of a difference. Here's an image Illustrating the problem. And here's 10 frames showing the issue in action. StoneElemental_kneebug.mov

Wow I just started installing this. Very easy. Very very slick. Big pat on the back. And to anyone who's afraid of rigging.. It really doesnt get much easier than this. Seriously.

Thanks guys, Frosternal nailed it .. gonna be a lot of CP weighting with the balance connected. It should keep the stones as steady as possible. Believe it or not most of the joints have fairly straight seams to bend across, they're just hard to see. I just hope they work as intended I'll find out tonight I guess.

Its about 150 rock shaped blobs with a slight displacement material on em. With the exception of the hands & eyes no 2 rocks are identical (very similar yes, identical no) Oh and these are for my game (2-d) . I was orginally working with a sci-fi theme but the robots were just so impersonal so I opted to switch to a fantasy based game instead.. There are going to be 4 sides with 3 units each. The elementals are the first side (still have to do the water elemental) I'm taking a break from the coding side of things since my day job has me coding all day long lately and I need a break after work. The end result of these guys are going to be some itty bitty 64x64 sprites. But I plan on using the models for marketing materials, splash screens etc etc.

Well hot off the ol renderer, the second elemental unit. Gonna try rigging this fella with the posable squetch install this evening. Which promises to be a challenge. Hey at least this guy has facial features so I might even try hooking up some of the FACE controls. oh an here's a second smaller shot from when Iwas in the middle of texturing him. Updates to follow as I get into rigging him.

That's music to my ears man. Rock on. And yes, the Hash guys are pretty damn awesome

Sweet that was it. And as for the foot bones.. i accidentally installed the foot gizmo version which had a bunch of stuff i didnt need. so those bones are just floating there. doing nothing. Thanks bunches.