robcat2075

Lots of great contributions from Alain over the years.

Rodger, all the images in this thread have turned to links and I only get a broken graphics symbol when I click on them. Today they show properly! How about an image sequence containing maybe 10 different treatments and use a pose slider to select one for each car?

It will be a good topic for next week end! Ultra short cylindrical concept... You can "cylindrical" apply a decal to a head and have just one seam at the back but there will be overlaps, like the back of the ears or the inside of the nose or under the chin... What if you made a Pose that unfolded those features so that they were all outwardly exposed around the vertical axis? Then apply the decal in that pose. Everything is covered once and only once, with minimal patch distortion and there is just one seam on the back to have to paint around.

Live Answer Time is cancelled but we could uncancel it if this is an emergency.

The smearing on the edge is because the splines need to turn such a tight corner from the front side to the back. It's not obvious with the color map because there doesn't seem to be small color details that would reveal it. My preference for face decaling is to use cylindrical mapping which leaves only one seam on the very back of the head instead of one on each side. The adjustment of the mesh before decaling is also easier than the "flatten" method. Describing that is a bit beyond a few sentences, however. Here is my series on the conventional "Flatten" approach which will still get you two seams, but farther back so they are less obvious.

Are you available at the regular LIve Answer Time tomorrow? I'd be curious to see what you are doing up close.

You mean this, right?

Are you sure you mean you used "Add Image"? That tiles one image onto every patch.

I'll note that in a FOR loop you always have at least two values available to do calculations with... the counter value, which is being incremented with each new pass through the loop the limit, the value that if reached causes the loop to stop. It stays the same for every pass. If you need a growing value in the loop you can do something with that incrementing counter value. If you need a shrinking value you can subtract that incrementing counter value from something else that stays the same. In a nested loop there will be... four values you can do calculations with. The counter and limit of the outside loop and the counter and limit of the inside loop.

This would be a great question for... Live Answer Time! But we're not having Live Answer Time this week. Happy Fourth! Yours is the classic wagon wheel problem, the bane of every western stagecoach, generally known a "strobing" There is no perfect solution for this, you mostly need to distract the viewer's eye from it. In "Timing for Animation", Tom Sito gives advice similar to all the other animation books... You need some large scale feature or texture that will not strobe. We don't have "dry brush" in 3D but we do have motion blur. For this animation of a gear with small teeth, I have widely spaced spokes, a non-repeating texture and motion blur set to 100%. Strobe5D_2000.mp4 The teeth still strobe but it is not painfully obvious. We are fortunate that, in A:M, we can have 100% motion blur. A real film camera can only smear about 50% Motion blur is best done with multi-pass. The number of passes you need to get an adequate blur depends on how far something moves on screen. You're on the right track by including a discolored link. More of that, perhaps more subtly colored... and lots of blur. On a separate note, it looks like you are using an environment map to create the chrome reflection effect. It is best to that to "Global axis" ON so it won't rotate with the object.

It's possible that just exporting the two sections as named groups with in one model may be enough for you to identify which should be the cutter in the polygon program.

My suggestion would be to export the model and the cutter as separate models, then do the boolean cut in one of those programs that one uses to clean up/fix polygon meshes for printing, using one to cut the other.

It occurs to me that July 4th is also the 4th of July so, in honor of that coincidence, we will have no Live Answer Time. Live Answer Time will return next week! So, Jeannie, don't come from Alabama, don't come from your old Kentucky home, have a happy Fourth of July and remember to yank your doodle-dandy safely. July Fourth is the birth date of a suspiciously large number of Americans, including America's first professional songwriter, Stephen Foster. It is also the birthday of the aerodynamic Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, born on this day in 1927.

The baked files are all rather inscrutable binary, unlike most A:M files. However, I presume with some comparative analysis one could deduce the format and figure out a way to reverse it.

If "Bake Particle Systems" created keyframes in the chor one could select them and do rmb>flip>X-axis. However, baking isn't editable like that. Reversing the video in post likely the way to do it.