mouseman

Aah, yes. So I'd have the option of using the decal method or do as John Bigboote suggested in his tutorial and use an additional higher density mesh dedicated to the hair. Well, it all sounds so obvious when you say it like that! That makes perfect sense, thanks Nancy! I think I might try out hair in my next project. (Which will not involve a shaggier Shaggy!)

Just a quick test of hair, first time outside of TAOAM. Attached is a ZIP of the project and movie. Sorry, AVI only. [bTW, when uploading an AVI, the forum says "Upload failed. You are not permitted to upload this type of file".] Some of the hairs go through the ears, but the effect seems to be okay. Is there a good strategy for getting hair to be routed in areas that don't necessarily match the splinage? ETA: Just found John Bigboote's post on HAIR. ShaggyHair_cam.zip

I personally would not mind seeing a certain cathedral every time I open up A:M.

Joke: You took something beautiful and made it dirty! Serious: I'm loving watching what you are coming up with! Both skill and creativity!

Really well done! High quality, I like it! I'm also impressed there were no music puns in the comments so far.

I wikied HomeSlice and Robcat's advice for posterity.

A couple others: xls - excel odt - open office text odc - open office calc

Wow, this is a really good blocking pass! Way to go! It really captures the timing, mood, and placement! And now for the hard part ... the second 90%! Go get 'em!

Looking good. One suggestion ... The original has calf muscles on the legs. It might be worthwhile to try to mimic those, as well.

Everything I've tried before has worked. To prime the pump, here's a list of what I can think of possibly needing: Archives: ZIP Images: BMP GIF PNG JPG TIF or TIFF PSD PS EPS A:M: PRJ MDL MAT etc. Sound: WAV AIF AIFF AU MP3 OGG Video: MOV MP4 AVI Office: XLS ODS DOC DOCX ODT PPT ODP?

That was amazing! Quite inspiring! If you want a couple of ideas to "plus" it (make it a little better): - The little girl at the end on the planet surface, her head only turns left and right or up and down, which seems very robotic. Moving the head slightly up and down as she turns it would make it less mechanical. - I don't know her capabilities (e.g. is she like Superman?), however ... The heroine is in space, but exposed to space. Maybe if you had some kind of clear suit around her? Great job! It was very exciting and enjoyable to watch!

Truly bizarre. I couldn't stop watching.

Finally done. Sorry for the wait. I ended up doing a single foley-style track for each character's footsteps. Anyways, the sound is attached to an otherwise blank video. I also created a WAV file with a commentary audio track. Let me know if these work for you. Here is the URL: http://home.intranet.org/~mouse/creative/3d/busstop/

I got some of the sound added. I'm mixing it within A:M in the project I used to assemble the JPG files into a test animation. Question ... I have 3 or 4 "footstep" sounds that I'd like to use and alternate between. Do I have to drag them down multiple times to the chor and place them, one for each footstep? Or is there a better way of repeating the sound in specific spots?

BTW, do both you and Robcat live in Austin? Have you ever gotten together? Collaborated on something? [ETA: Sorry, robcat lives down the road a ways.]

I hope to get a friend of mine to help me out with sound tomorrow night. It's a little hard to keep him on track, so we'll see.

Don't know where else to say this ... I had to replace my old laptop, which would give "Disk error" on bootup for the first 3 minutes or so after turning it on, and then work fine until it hibernated or was shut off. Since it is my main work computer, I decided it was too dicey. So I bought a new laptop. I've always bought trailing edge technology, trying to get the most bang per buck. Things like A:M ran, but I could never do big things (such as TWO or SO scenes). It had a shared RAM video card, and I bought it 4 years ago. I had to take action, and I decided to splurge. I got the best that I could get. ASUS G73JW-A1 Win7HP-64 Intel i7-740QM processor (quad core, with hyperthreading shows up as 8 CPUs) Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M; 1.5GB VRAM 17.3" Full HD (1920x1080) screen 8GB RAM 2x500GB HD Blue-Ray (read-only) and DVD R/W I just now got A:M running (THANKS HASH SUPPORT!). I cannot believe the difference. I opened up scenes from TWO and SO that I had opened before on the old laptop. The old laptop would get seconds per frame with everything in wireframe and all detail turned off, many things in either block mode or just don't render mode. With the new machine I can do an actual playback in the chor window with shaded mode. And I can easily get 8 frames per second on the more complicated scenes! (Ok, I admit I was getting 3 FPS on the throne room until I changed the background to display as vector instead of curved, then it was 8-9 FPS.) For my Bus Stop scene, frames that were taking on average 5 minutes on the old laptop are now taking one minute. Wow. This changes everything!

I'm sure most of us will feel like we could have done better, but the important thing is we got it in! [ETA: By which I mean WAY TO GO!]

Summary: COMPLETED! I got it all rendered. There are a couple of snafus (see attached test video), but I ended up fixing them. I don't know whether they are my fault or not. They might correspond to places where I stopped rendering to relocate my laptop. For the first problem occurring around 29:15 and 29:16 (frames 711 and 712), I re-rendered them and I think that worked well. I don't know if this was the right way, but I did it by changing the name of the file number part to 0711 and then telling it to render begin and end with those two times. Could I have changed the times only, with it magically coming up with the right frame numbers? For the two other frames near the end, I just copied the frames before and after it to those frames, since it's basically still around that time anyways. The corrected files (all 56MB of them) are here: http://home.intranet.org/~mouse/creative/3...ileyBusStop.zip Let me know when you have them, and I'll delete them off of the server. If I get really ambitious, I'll try to make a sound track and a director's commentary. ChrisDailey_final2.mov

Crazy idea, but ... It would be cool if Hash extended their store so users could sell things through it similar to the Mac app store or Android app store or iTunes store etc ...

My poor little laptop is rendering furiously. Current stats: Elapsed: 21:26:13 Est: 20:37:30 47% 442/937 frames File size: 58K (one example: 59,423 bytes; others are close to that) Average Frame Render Time: 0:05:01 # cores: 2 # of render clients: 2 CPU: AMD Turion 64 x2 Mobile TL-50 - 1.6 GHz. Laptop. Purchased in October 2006. I rendered overnight, then took the laptop into work and was rendering today in the background while I was working (writing software) on the same computer. I had to restart the render server when I went into work and then came home, because my DHCP IP address changed. I am guessing that my rendering will finish up about this time tomorrow!

Wow! It looks WONDERFUL! You have a winner! (Though it wasn't a contest, per se.) I'm a little surprised how much the sounds added to it!

I started rendering the final version. v15 took about 4:02 (minutes:seconds) for the first frame, v16 is running around 3:25 per frame. It was saying about 53 hours remaining. I tried to get RenderServer running, and eventually succeeded. It is currently estimating 30:23:15. Now up to 32:29:26. Each frame is now taking between 4:05 and 4:34, but presumably it is half the time because there are 2 processes. I ran into a few problems getting RenderServer running, but I posted those on the v16.0 Beta thread.

Looking very very good! I like it!

The action for turning around seemed to work quite well. I really like the model, and the moon-like low gravity motion. A couple of very minor suggestions or "quickie" ideas to consider: In the walk cycle, when his left foot is about to hit the ground, it is slightly ... jumpy? I mean just before it hits the ground. That's the one place that seems to jar me slightly out of the illusion of low gravity. Sound! I have 2 suggestions for sound. One is for when his feet hit the ground, maybe a brief scrunching in dirt kind of sound. The second is breathing, as if he's breathing through a ventilator, almost Darth Vader type breathing, but slower and with a bit of pause between breaths. A cute and easy little gag is maybe at the end have him look at his watch, maybe right after the toe taps. That might mean adding a watch onto the model. You've got a really nice entry!