robcat2075

Fixed, William... wherever you are!

I've been re-visiting Walt Stanchfield's "Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes", a posthumously published collection of his handouts to his life drawing classes at Disney. It is not a book of eye-candy animation art. A number of the early chapters are a bit more about 2D animation process than a 3D animator will find useful, but most of the two volume set is about making clearer, stronger poses, which is useful for the 3D animator. Much of it takes the form of a rough student drawing (they are probably doing 5 minute poses) and then an even rougher sketch by Stanchfield showing what he thinks would make the pose better. Rodney and I were talking about these books and he noted that, "You have to read the text." It's not a book you can just look at, you have to read the commentary to get the intent of it. Sometimes he wanders off on weird philosophical, metaphysical California things which may be an insight into the times, somewhere between "Roger Rabbit" and "Lion King," as are the student names that pop up, like Keane and Vilppu and Deja. The chapters are typically a page or two. One of those per day is enough for me. It's not a book to storm through in a day.

Can we make a Material in A:M that creates a leopard spot pattern? Well... sort of. Here are some results from Saturday's investigation. Some more time spent might get a more-convincing result. Custom programming a leopard spot combiner material would be best of all. LeopardSpots005 all mats.prj has most of the better Material versions we came up with. No hair. LeopardSpotsBaked.zip has one of the Materials baked into a decal, which is then used to drive hair color. Version 05 and 05a 05b: 05d: 07: 05a baked for decal: @Tom @Roger

I look forward to your animation that details how that all works. New York and several other cities used to have a pneumatic tube mail system. Big enough to carry a cat apparently! Of course the need to mail a cat was very small, even in 1897, so I'm not surprised the system eventually went out of business.

Thank you, for posting this very detailed behind-the-scenes peek, Charles! All most of us know about animatronics is that last chapter in "The Illusion of Life". It is very cool to see what's been happening in modern times and that A:M has been part of it!

That's how my cat wakes me up in the morning.

It is indeed hard to see the bevel in that small screen capture. I'll take your word for it that it is there. The easiest way to have bevels in Spline models is to put rounded corners in an outline, like I did in the example on the right, and then extrude that outline. If you go to my tutorial page and search on "bevel," I have a few entries about bevels.

I like modeling characters in A:M because I like the all spline environment. It is best to start with simple ideas for first characters. I made my first character in A:M back in the 90s and I've enjoyed re-using him in new scenes. You can see another character on my profile page. Here are more. Other people around here are quite prolific character modelers and i enjoy helping them with rigging questions.

That is a fine-looking first model! Idea... you can make more appealing edges by modeling them with a "bevel" instead of a sharp corner.

Here is who i was thinking... the Tea Lady! She was on a V8 CD. Tea Lady.zip Change her dress to red and white... put a Santa hat on her... Mrs. Claus! She'll need some re-rigging to be highly useful.

She used to be one of the free models that came on the A:M CD. Does @Rodney know?

I dimly recall that there was a schoolmarm type character on one of the CD archives that might be repurposed. She was a character from Hash's "Why Does The Wind Blow?" CD?

Many years ago I was part of an effort to start an animation studio in Dallas. One day animator Tom Young came by to talk to us and he gave us each a "Jot" cel. Much like "Davey and Goliath" was funded by the Lutheran Church, "Jot" was funded by the Southern Baptist Convention. In every episode the little boy, Jot, would experience some moral dilemma and learn a lesson from it.

The most troublesome objection to the "hyperloop" I've read is that it is an impossibly large vacuum space to maintain. Hundreds of times larger than any built so far. Fortunately, animation can sidestep that problem!

A few people have reported an error message when running v19.5c for the first time, saying that mcf100.dll was missing. Steffen recommends running the Service Pack at this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170#visual-studio-2010-vc-100-sp1-no-longer-supported It is in this portion of the page, although the above link should take one to this directly... This solved the problem of the missing dll. Steffen tells me that the A:M installer is built to install this dll so it is uncertain why it didn't work in this case.