robcat2075

that looks Super!

The Squares you see in the model window are A:M's quick way of showing sprites when you are in wire frame mode. They are basically a wireframe of the square image map that is on the sprite. We normally don't think of the model window having "time" but in this case you can drag the time pointer in the PWS to see the sprites develop. I just loaded the PRJ again and I'm not sure why only one cloud shows sprites in real-time mode. It must be a new bug/feature in v19, when I load it in v16 all the clouds show sprites in real-time mode.

Yes. The "AW" stands for "Anzovin Weightmover" I believe. However, Steffen wrote this from scratch after they stopped upgrading it for new versions of A:M. TSM2 I haven't shown the best practices workflow here. Ideally you'd run Transfer_AW on a lo-res model that had just the TSM2 geometry bones in it, before Rigger was run on it. THEN.. you'd run TSM Rigger on the newly weighted hi-res model.

In my "Paintfall" thread you can see gif that show my minimal way of doing it with three bones on the eyebrow. If your eyebrow covers more patches you may need more. https://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=48269&p=414210

She's alive! I would suggest rigging the eyebrows so they can be shaped rather than moved as unison forms. It's really parts nearest the nose that are most mobile.

We don't have that. I have wondered if a compositing solution might work... You'd render three passes. One is your "high SSS" settings. The second is your "low SSS" settings. The third is a grayscale map that depicts high vs. low areas and you use that to composite the two SSS renders into one final image. It wouldn't be quite the same as the dedicated feature but might do well enough for character animation. But it wouldn't be a lot more manual work since you have to paint a control map either way.

TAoA:M has a hair tut. Can't hurt to revisit that one.

I chatted with him briefly today. He is recovering, although I'm sure he wishes it were faster.

Here's a Steve Shelton model with SSS set at 4 3 2

making red largest lets more red scatter to the shadow side. Tricky to set the green and blue so the bright side doesn't look weird.

I have done that. I thought 1.0 might be "default"

Here is a test with more conservative values. The left has no SSS, the right does. This head is about 25 cm wide. Although they are slightly different angles to the camera, they are both identical angle to the light.

Mark, I'll also note that I shrunk the objects down quite a bit from your sample PRJ. the extinction distances seem to be real distances, centimeters I presume, so the visible effect of "2" will appear to be much less on a giant object seen from a distance than "2" will make ona small object seen up close. the cubes in my example above are about human head width. small distances, less than 1.0, may be scientifically accurate for skin, but also are very long to render, and produce such a slight effect that they may seem not worth the time. Larger values, greater than 1, render faster and produce a more visible scattering effect. It may be the "exaggeration" you need to get the effect you need across on the screen.

I haven't done much with SSS so this is my uninformed attempt. I hope others will chime in. My first gambit is to set some absurdly large settings to see if anything happens. Yes, it does! This scene has two identical objects facing a single Sun light at identical angles. Both have identical materials on them except the right one has SSS ON with the settings shown. They do indeed appear different. The light seems to flow through the second cube instead of getting cut at the corner. Notice how the shadow the first cube casts on the second one is blurry even though the Sun light is just a simple sharp-shadow light. These settings are more like what you'd use for a waxy candle than human skin. The high values for "extinction" seem to require large values for density of SSS Samples in order to shade smoothly. Here is the PRJ... Marcajun_test sss_03.prj

As I see it, making the matching groups is so easy that it's probably easier than whatever interventions you'd have to do to make some other automatic discriminatory power to work.

If you can make that work, I'm all for it! But note how in the picture you've posted, for example, the two thighs are the same color but you would definitely not want them to be communicating weights. Also note that those bone colors fade from one to the next. Where would one group end and the next start? Here's a result with no leg Groups... the thighs get stuck together.

I thought so too, but it seems that mere proximity in space is enough for influence to happen. For example, the right big toe and left big toe are very close to each other in space even though they are far away from each other in the spline mesh. You don't want either to be partially attached to the other.

One other tip... After Transfer_AW is done, force a save. This causes all the new CP weights to be in effect.

You will get a result. Part of success with Transfer_AW is to use "exclusion groups" When there are body parts that lie near each other but should not share any CP weighting, like a right and left leg, then you make an exclusion group for each body part in each model. For the right leg you would make a "lo-res rightleg" Group in the lo-res mesh, and an analogous "hi-res rightleg" Group in the hi-res mesh. Likewise for other body parts. For this demo I just did the absolute bare minimum of Exclusion Grouping to get a functional result. Here is Steffan's page for Transfer_AW http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin24/index.html Here is the demo PRJ in the video, before Transfer_AW has been run lo-hi015a demo.prj

Great lookin' head! Wild guess... This may be something as simple as needing to explicitly set a color property where, before, the default "not set" would work. I'm sure it is still possible to set a color for hair so I'm sure there is a solution somewhere.

Is it magic? Is it a trick? I will note that Transfer AW is not a one-button solution and sometimes makes mistaken assignments that are rather odd. But if you had to get a body moving quickly... it's there.

Hooray for complication!

I'll note that you can always load these files directly as files from the CD or folder they are in without needing to use the Library process.

The squares? Can you show me a couple frames with those? I'm sure I'm not the inventor of this technique. I'm thinking I tried it after either hearing someone talk about something in another program that sounded a lot like our sprites or maybe even seeing some CG clouds in a movie and thinking they looked suspiciously like sprites we could make in A:M. It's not very different from how we've been doing sprite smoke except it's not getting blown away. I also recall a shot someone did a long time ago showing the white contrail smoke trailing a rocket and that was pretty much the same technique except their sprite was more toony with harder edge. Yes, you may use this technique and re-use my sprite. The biggest limitation of this technique is that you have to craft the sprite to match direction of the sunlight in your scene as seen by the camera. If your camera swings around to see clouds from another angle those clouds will need a different sprite made to match their surrounding illumination.

It is indeed a slow technique. The more typical technique of using an image backdrop will always be faster but this is an option for when you need to fly among the clouds or build a particular shape which the other techniques can never do no matter how fast they are..