robcat2075

Welcome back to A:M! If you ever have questions, this is the place to bring them! Oddly enough, the cat in my name is not about cats, although I am a cat (and dog) person.

Here's another old toon project from 2004. I was trying to make model that would toon-render to look like the giant bird Taarna rides in "Heavy Metal"

The workflow has been the same since v11, which is good. You should find no surprises there. That is a rather old item. It's not like modern terrain generators that grow trees and everything.

I recommend the annual subscription. It's inexpensive and keeps you up to date.

For me, it's stability and speed. In the bad old days I remember feeling like I needed to save every 2 minutes or risk losing something important. I don't have to do that now but if you're still worried, there's an automatic backup feature that will save your work every X minutes if you want that. And A:M is much faster now. It's not as fast as the competing GPU renderers out there but I'm not going to go relearn everything I do in 3D in Blender or Maya just to render faster when "rendering" is not the thing that consumes the most of my brain time anyway. NetRender is included now and works on multi-core CPUs so you don't actually need a "net" to use net render. Your 4-core CPU is now a render farm and if you want more, the cost a license for additional nodes is really cheap. Steffen Gross has done a lot of work on improving render A:M times...

For a heavy walk the feet need to solidly plant on the ground with no sliding. There will also be a span where both feet are on the ground not moving. Watch this guy's rear legs from about 1:14 on... the leading foot is always fully planted and stuck on the ground before the trailing foot is lifted up to move it forward. Same with the front pair of legs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWBxQ74i6E Here's another good one... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IMDtBmgFD8 Very smooth motion as each leg is lifted, moved forward, then pushed into the ground before the trailing leg is pulled up to do the same thing.

The character isn't rigged yet so I did some movement with a distortion box to test the cloth more... direct YouTube link Here is what the distortion box looks like... direct YouTube link

None, really, except that it was fast. Originally that character was going to have a modeled-on long-sleeve shirt, no simcloth, so what you are seeing is the old shirt sleeves turned to skin color to pretend to be bare arms. We haven't rigged the character yet and all the splines are still up for debate so I didn't bother to attach the hands for this cloth test.

Here you go...

Yup, that's pretty much a must-do for putting clothes on. He has lots of inflating to do. (click to animate)

Steve Shelton created this character for a project he and Chris Dailey and I are working on. This is an initial experiment with fitting a simcloth shirt on him.

Baking it will be a suitable workaround, for now.

Yup, I've seen people using it and it being fine. Mine is on cloth. It mostly works but I'm wondering why it doesn't all work.

Yeah, I tried it both way but I get a weird, not staying in place problem.

Is it possible to use BitMapPlus textures on objects that animate like characters do rather than just objects that retain a rigid form? Is it possible to make the texture stick to the surface as materials and decals do as the object changes shape?

Here's a toon test from waaaayyyy back in 2004 (click to animate) I tried to copy this walk cycle from an old Walter Foster animation book.

Among the things we'll be looking at over the next few weeks at LAT is rigging. Steve Shelton has made this wonderful dragon and we'll try to figure out the best way to bring this non-typical, non-biped creature to life. Live Answer Time is Saturday at Noon CDT!

Mmmm... looks like ginger bread.

For anyone looking in... you can go to Tools>Customize>Appearance and set the "Grid" to a non-black color if needed...

Silly question, but... you have "Has Stride Length" ON and it's not appearing?

You have cheap friends. I can't imagine adults throwing a BYOB party but perhaps that is a new peril for the elderly in our current economy. Or is there a legal liability angle to this? Was this party hosted by lawyers?

I wonder who had to read 10,000 screen plays or if anyone ever did. I recall when the Beatles started "Apple" they thought they were going be a great new place for undiscovered songwriters, but after a few months of stuff piling in they said, "OK, stop sending us your crap!"

How long had they been doing this?

Might wanna give the other plugins a try while you're at it.

Crashes for me in v19e, also.