robcat2075

I believe it is possible to animate the ON/OFF status of rotoscopes in the camera; storyboard drawings could be displayed that way. Also... If they were in a numbered image sequence, they could be imported that way and the "frame" parameter animated to advance them when needed.

It is possible to box select a spline and then SHIFT-select one CP on it and do a lathe, however, this lathe will be around the pivot point of the selected group. That is useful because, prior to the Lathe, you can move and rotate the pivot point of the group to get a Lathe that is not around the default Y axis.

It looks cool! I'm way behind on LEGO lore. You should add "A:M" "Hash" and "Animation:Master" tags to these videos so they might come up in searches.

Another solution is to lathe the ball with twice as many Lathe cross sections. Tools>Options>Modeling has that parameter.

You will need alternating groups. A Group is really a selection of splines and CPs rather than a selection of patches so you will need to have an unselected spline between the selected ones. Alternatively, you can make a stripe pattern like that with materials and then it can be completely independent of the mesh.

I like to think that Lathe requiring that the last thing you did was select one CP is a bit of a safety measure.

And he was a TD at Pixar so there's wise insight to be found there.

Oh geez... about 20 years ago... when I worked at Nortel they they set up a group to do "VR" and they bought an $80,000 SGI thing to run $30,000 Alias Power Animator, the predecessor to "maya" Just to make simple low-poly models of phones and offices for a VR engine that Superscape had sold them for $1,000,000 After the dust settled from that debacle, a year later maybe, I went over to give Alias Power Animator a try. "What does this do that my $299 A:M v5 on a $2000 Power Mac doesn't do?" I asked myself. Nothing! There's no way that was worth the money it cost but people around the industry were lining up to get soaked and eager to boast how much money it cost them.

My advice is do a bouncing ball with no squetch the first time out. There are essential issues of gravity and curve editing that can be learned there. But, yes, bone scaling is a typical way of doing squetch for bouncing ball exercises.

If you wanted to bring a bouncing ball animation to Live Answer Time that would be a discussable thing.

It is overwhelming. Pick something small as an early project and do that to completion. I guess you've already done the TAoA:M tutorials to get your feet wet.

-A lot of thin splining happens with experimenting while I'm modeling. I don't necessarily know at the beginning where every one is going to be. -After you copy-flip-attach that nose you'll probably feel you can lose the first spline to the side of the center spline. Without the CFA, it rounds out the shape but once the other side is attached, the shape is round without it.

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?