Drakkheim

Umm.. hinge? I can barely follow the instructions for installing this thing much less comprehend how the two million bones actually work and where they're supposed to be.... Can you explain where to find and what they're supposed to look like? If it helps, just pretend you're explaining it to a second grader.. in special ed. after drinking a bottle of ny-quil.. in the dark.. with crayons.. in a mud hut in the middle of the serengeti.. or something..

Hmm so I ran into a problem that I can't seem to fix. I noticed that when I move the left or right foot null down beyond the reach of the leg it 'kicks backward' a little bit. I've dug around in the poses looking for something which a)had a label 'i am the problem or was associated with the leg and I could do the re-compensation to fix it.. Unfortunately I found neither of those... Any suggestions would be more than welcome.

Thanks martin & john! I finished re-assigning the cps to the rig which got rid of some of the more serious lumps, and made some changes to the surfaces that emit the particles (like the underside of the chin was causing the head to look detached) So now he's posable. [edit] Fixed the texture problem. Using 100% AO shadows was going wonky.. so setting it to a nice 55% made all the diference[/edit] Definatly noticed some jumpiness in the rig which I can only assume is because I havent adjusted the compensation on the poses. So that's tonight's project.

Doing this guy manually.. Will try the posable one on the stone elemental next.

So it's been a while since I hunkered down and actually got some work done in A:M. So I spent this weekend playing with particles and materials trying to get a good molten rock effect. so I wound up with this guy. Then seeing as my TSM2 no longer works I watched the video tutorials on setting up the squetch rig. Turned out it was not as bad as I thought. I still have to fix the CP assignments (autoassign mangled it a bit) and figure out the compensate mode adjustments, but I'm making progress. Installing the rig was easier than I expected so a big kudos to everyone who has been working on it. (and I'm looking forward to the action Install and compensate plugin to make things easier) Here's a little quicktime of the guy standing around looking hot (No AO on it, so the eyes are a bit distracting and he's a bit overbright and I didnt animate the lava texture yet.) elemental_rigged_sorta_.mov

very cool. I had a thought that might save you some rendering time.. What if for the layers below the first(outer) layer of pipes you simply had a flat patch with a normal mapped decal of a layer of pipes on it.. That should look convincing enough except for the closeups where you can bring in the full patch version.

Why not assemble the ship in an action of the base model? Then in the chor you can just apply the action to the base model. Unless I'm missing something.. which could be.. it is a weekday after all..

Ummm... Collin? I think I did something wrong with the collar.. The dog just ate the wombat and won't let me leave the house... Maybe it was because I used a generic brand Reddish Blonde.... No more shopping at wally world for me. Now I just gotta pull the cat off the fanblade and start the contrary conversation about the yellow pansies and petunias to harmonize the synnergy and restore the litter box so I can get back to work.

The Chihuahuas ate the red Diode and are injecting our ankles with the purple hilarity while we sleep! Soon we're all gonna wind up in the litter box. Sleep lightly and keep the wombat armed.

Wombat class plasma powered batteries often implode upon discussion of civil discourse. Unless, of course, the asbestos monkey is present in which case you can reverse the polarity of the magnetic field in synch.

Check to see if you have a double surface on that part of the laptop. ie, 2 patches sharing the exact same space.

Ahh back from vacation.. The game is going to be on an Isometric 2d 10x10 grid board. I'm using the Tourqe Game Builder (formerly T2d) Engine. It supports PNG files with alpha channels and lets you mange sprites fairly well. So I can use translucent shadows, antialiased edges, and motion blur. so I'm rendering everything at 30 fps but every 3rd frame, (like you did), with a seperate shadow pass, which I'm compositing in afterEffects. Then I use GlueIT to take those PNG files and create sprite sheets to import into the engine. Each sprite is 256x256 but the engine is resolution independent and dynamically scales all art assets to the currently set screen resolution. (I will probably scale em down to 128x128 though since I can't justify the file size for just playing nice with resolutions greater than 1600x1280) for example here's a final composited PNG sprite sheet. My biggest issues that I'm afraid I'll run into are that loading 40-60 megs of graphics into memory all at once will grind system's to a halt. But I havent really gotten that far yet so It may be a non issue. And making sure the sprites dont jerk too badly when changing animation. Well that and marketing.. *shiver* I really appreciate the offer of advice and I'll be sure to pop you a question when I run into a wall. --Simon

Here's a render of a couple little guys i've been working on for a pet project. The one in the back still needs toes, textures and rigging. Full size image (1280x600) here. And there are some walk cycle gifs for the bomb guy for his sprite sheet. Over on the development blog.

not impossible but notably harder it would be much like actualy writing the firmware for a digital display. there would be a ton of if statements. each digit would be a seven segment display each segment would nead its own code each segment is either on or off for any numerical value. so we are looking at around 70 lines of code per digit. there are short cuts in modeling that could seriouly reduce the amount of code, but they won't become aparant until I think about it more What if each number was an on-off pose slider.

Whats interesting, I didn't apply bloom post effect to it. The tubes just had glow enabled on the one of the attributes or the combiner. When I added the 3 overexposing lights (red white and blue for some fun edges of the shadows) the 'bloom' just kinda happened.

Beautiful work Z! <checks website> oOOooooh 5 days... There better be trumpets and fanfare and stuff next week. Does anyone know the etimated pricetag so I can start saving?

So after finally getting my act together and upgrading to 13 I realized that it's been a looong time since I spent some quality time with am's renderer. That's right, I'm a modelling tweaking addict, nothing is ever good enough to render for me. So I decided to make an abstract simple scene and use it to play around with and try to make it drastically different each time I render it. I constrained myself to only changing rendering options, lights, and materials. The camera position and geometry are locked down, you have no idea how tempting it is to twiddle with these for me . So here are the first 3 in hopefully what may become a large series. I'll attach the project too if anyone else wants to play. sweep_base.zip

the tutorials make it make more sense http://www.hash.com/sweeper/

Well if you're shooting for real glass its somewhere between 1.45 and 1.8ish http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical...nIndexList.html

Hey that was educational! (ok so i speedwatched a couple parts) Nicely done, how long did this take you? Oh, and kudos on the sound quality everything was nice and understandable. man 14 minutes would take me like a decade to animate....

Wow, what a beautiful style. Absolutely a great proposal as well, enough to know what's needed but definatly leaves you wanting more. Best of luck and keep us updated --Simon

sure do. here's the Newton needle project I posted a while back. Newton Needles Project (note: It should be ready for calculation so you can play with it all ya want, its got a slightly better result set than the movie I posted a while ago) And A PDF tutorial i Wrote a while ago (that I need to update slightly as soon as I get v13) NewtonTutorial.PDF

Been playing around with the newton plugin for v12. Had too much fun so I just had to share http://www.drakkheim.com/movies/needles.mov

seriously wow!

wow that's snappy. i get 3 & 4 seconds respectively on the first set. ~2 seconds for the new one. Xp Pro on a 15/2Mb Fios connection These video made me crack open AM again for the first time in 6 months...