robcat2075

when you come back to that face you'll probably see splines you could delete or end in hooks sooner. Some of that isn't obvious until have more of the face built. One thing I'd do differently on that face is that i'd have patches follow the eyebrow line rather than crossing them at an angle. On my Al Capone head I made it so the eyebrows are sitting squarely in some patches. Eye brow movement is a big deal in facial expression and it will be easy to move the CPs that bound those patches as a unit. It's harder to move them without distorting them when they are splayed across patches that don't follow their shape. The eyebrow line is also just an important shape contour that divides the forehead from the eyesockets.

My strategy has been to build the fiddly parts, like nose and mouth and eyes so they have the splines they need and then figure out the best way to connect them together. I think it's important to enjoy this stuff. If something has become a frustration, put it aside and come back to it.

The advantage of A:M splines is that you are always manipulating points that are the actual surface of your model rather than on a cage that influences the surface. The ideal is to only have splines where the contour needs them to be shaped. In my Al Capone thread there are several wireframe views that show possibilities for splining the nose.

What happened between saving it and being able to reload it fine and later not being able to reload it? I don't know. I'm absolutely, totally, completely, 100% baffled that such a problem should be recurring. I'm baffled because i didn't have that problem happen when I was using the software 10 years ago and I don't have it happening today. I never had v12 myself but I had v11 and v13 and they worked great for me, just like v18 is working great for me today. There is no explanation for what you are describing. Something, somewhere has to have changed or something is happening differently. The only remaining thing that comes to mind is that, based on your description, this happens after you add rotoscopes. It's possible that one of the rotoscopes is not truly in the format the the image reader is expecting. I always use targas and only use targas. They are the most reliable image format. v12 IS ten year-old software that was not written for the OS you are running today and won't run at all without that hack to the OS mentioned previously. That's possibly a big deal, but i have no way to investigate that. I have software older than that. Some runs on my computer today, some doesn't no matter what accommodations I try to make for it. Again, I'm baffled. I don't know how to solve a problem that i can't see happen. I'm disappointed you are disappointed but the whole thing is a mystery.

The five-bone IK spine in TSM2 is very handy

Hooray! Come back if you have questions!

I have the disk before the Sorceror disk and the disk after but I don't have the Sorceror disk itself so i don't have a way to immediately test them. To try: Go up a level. There's an AM2006.EXE in the AM2006 directory. That should be the final release. The v12 folder holds previous releases.

Rigging a CG sack to have all the flexibility of a hand drawn sack is really hard.

Get the last v12 update off the server that will run with your CD. I think it will be in the AM2006 folder. I recall the version on the CD is whatever state it was in when the CD was made but updates were issued after that. Let's see if that fixes the reliability. They shouldn't be but anything is possible if it's a bug.

It is tough doing a good flour sack in CG.

I dimly recall someone else having this problem and they were able to use v17 instead. You can run v17 with the same license you have now. Copy the master0.lic file from your v18 folder to your v17 folder.

I'm baffled about how the files could be going so bad so fast. Something is absolutely, unimaginably wrong and if I don't explicitly suggest definite things I wont' know you're not doing them. Are you using the version that was installed from the CD?

You put a copy of it on the forum. How can it be gone? Do not keep resaving over old file names.

Generally a CD covered the final release of one version number and then the testing stage releases of the next. What picture is on your CD?

You can do Help>Reset settings to kick A:M back to its default state. But I'm not a Mac user so i can't investigate further.

I'm still on Windows Stone-Knives-and-Bearskins but I look forward to reports from more modern users.

I think, for this project, Mitovo was working entirely in v12 so i suspect the file corruption problem was one of those blips that occasionally happened in v12 and not because of moving between versions. This sort of thing is much rarer today. Another reason to upgrade. However, it is concerning that v19 crashed when reading the file. It should have some graceful error message ending when a file is unintelligible, so i sent it to AMReports as a bug.

Really? That's odd. The installation says it's Version 12. Hmmm... They may have forgotten to update that marker when they went to v12.

The instructions are in the first post. Do you have questions about them?

I did succeed in opening it in v18 after some text editor surgery. A file I save from v18 won't open in your v11, however. If you have a text editor try this... create a new empty model and save it to a .mdl file (not a .prj) open that in a text editor and you will see tags that say [MESH] [ENDMESH] Open your corrupted file in a text editor and copy everything between the [MESH]...[ENDMESH] tags into the same tags in the blank model file and then resave that with a new name and try opening that in A:M. If that opens, do a CTRL-A to copy the whole mesh and then paste that into a new blank model window. If that much works come back and I'll tell you more.

That file says you're using v11.

Send me the corrupted file in a PM, I'll look at it. I recommend never merely saving over files. Save to new filenames each time you save.

Looks like a nostril! If you show wireframes you may get suggestions on efficient splining.

Now that I think about it... you could select a portion of a model to create a Group, then set the transparency of that Group to 100% in its Surface properties.

Everything in a model window has the same render mode. You can Hide unwanted portions to reduce clutter. You can also Lock portions which makes them grayer and unselectable so they are easier to distinguish from what ever portion you are working on.