robcat2075

Take... a trip to live answers to your A:M questions at Live Answer Time at Noon CDT, Saturday April 20, 2024. Starship Enterprise helmsman George Takei was born on this day in 1937.

I put a bump map on this model to simulate some wrinkles on the top, but although both top patches have their normals facing out, one patch shows the inverse bump result of the other... Just to try it, I did RMB>Renumber CPs... That fixed it! Don't know why, don't know how, but that did fix it.

We can do that! Now with more leg... KiltWalk18b.mp4

That's how they do Southpark!

Today at Live Answer Time we tried all the wrong ways to put a skirt on someone, then we did it the right way... simcloth! KiltWalk18.mp4 @Roger

A modern render of my 20-years-ago Showdown entry, now with lighted dance floor!

BTW, Steffen's page documenting the settings in Transfer_AW can be found... http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin24/index.html

Look at this fabulously flexible result of rigging a face with the Transfer_AW plugin. Steve @Shelton modeled this great character (right) and then we pulled out a lo-res version (left) with just enough splines to cover the essential landmarks of the face. We rigged and CP-weighted that with some minimal bones for the jaw and lip corners and then used Transfer_AW to interpolate that lo-res rig to the hi-res mesh. It would need some further fine-tuning but this is a huge time saver for rigging a face. TAW Hans.mp4

As I dimly understand it... Z-buffered lighting works by rendering a depth map from the viewpoint of the light. Every pixel of that map is really a number that is the distance from the light to the surface point that pixel lands on. then when the real camera image is being rendered, every pixel is checked to see if the surface point it lands on is farther from the light than that same surface point is in the depth map. If it is farther, then that means some other surface is in front of it from the light's point of view and it must be in shadow and should not get the light's intensity added to it's surface color. Apparently this is usually faster than computing an actual ray form teh camera to the light. So why can't this process accommodate the Boolean cutter? I dont' know, but it doesn't.

A modern render of this Showdown entry, now with lighting, atmosphere and sound...

A forum member has posed this problem... LightSource.prj That is the correct behavior. Only ray-traced lights can accurately account for the shadowing created by boolean cutters. So, with the box as a boolean cutter, the sphere is completely "cut" and casts no shadow from the ray-traced light. The z-buffered light can not handle that complex situation, so even though the box cuts the sphere from the camera's view, the z-buffered light still sees it and a shadow is cast. Interesting way to get a shadow-only pass! I shall remember that!

That is some hard-core tattooing.

Here is the full program that puts him in context. Yup, he still screams a lot.

Thanks, Roger and Gerald! I hope I can be helpful for a while longer!

Beautiful, Myron! Thanks!

You don't really need to download a new install if you already had A:M installed. delete the expired master0.lic file from the AM folder of your expired AM, then run it and it will prompt you for your new key

It is definitely to late now. But for future ref you can always find the link in my signature.

Is that computer on the internet? Can you bring it to live answer time?

Here's a variation a bit more organic looking...

Displacement experiment today.

It also remembers the location of tool bars. What is it not doing for you, Edward?

Would you believe... I've never tried that before? 😄 When I save and reload a layout it seems to recall a specific arrangement and visibility of interface panels like PWS, Properties, Poses... the things you toggle with ALT-1 through 7 It does not seem to recall an arrangement of model or chor windows within the view port

And here I am 20 years later with a new render and added sound effects. This is a radiosity render. The scene is lit by one light pointed up at a white dome that covers everything. If you'd like to try it with your character, put him in this scene and load this render preset when rendering. RadiosityDome.prj RadiosityDome.pre

Is that one of the ducks from TWO?

Yes, dressing up these old animations was what got me on that track! Yes, they could cast shadows on the ground, although you'd need the camera to have a much higher angle to see that and I'm not sure about the scale they would have.