robcat2075

On another forum someone asked how to "study" a shot Here was my response... At AnimationMentor they told us it's better to study live action shots than to study animated shots. You don't want to be re-creating other animators' mannerisms if you can help it. None-the-less there are some things you can ask yourself about any shot, live or animated... -What is the goal of the character? What are you seeing getting done that advances the story? -How does the character visibly change to show thought or action? -What are the main poses and changes of appearance the character goes through to show you what he is thinking or doing? When a character comes to a hold is an obvious pose but some poses are extremes that are passed through and not paused at. They define the motion of the action without being a stopping point. -What is the "secondary action?" If a character is pouring a cup of coffee and something outside the window gets his attention, the secondary action is probably the coffee pouring. The change in his attention focus is the primary storytelling action, it probably leads to him doing the next thing in the story because of what he saw. On the other hand, he could have been doing anything else when his attention was distracted, the coffee-pouring was just one of many possibilities (making toast, washing dishes, cooking) to give a reason to be near that window. The coffee-pouring was something his attention could be pulled away from so the change to out-side-the-window would be clear. Secondary action (not to be confused with "over-lapping action") is particularly useful in dialog shots because real people rarely stand and deliver lines while doing nothing else. Characters who stand and gesticulate with their arms while they are talking get tedious very fast. If you are trying to figure out the timing of an action it is useful to count frames and track the paths of body parts but animators generally try to make you NOT feel like you are seeing a series poses so keyframes may not be obvious just as there are no keyframes in real life. Character animation is a process of starting out with just the essential poses and then successively refining the motion between them but real life doesn't happen that way. Character animation tries to make it look like it didn't happen that way either.

Contest Prize Announcement In addition to the previous prizes announced, medals will be awarded to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place entries! The exact nature and design of the medal is still being worked out but it will be specific and unique to this contest; something you will be proud to display near your workstation. Fourth through tenth place entrants will receive a certificate of runner-upness also suitable for framing and display. Ken Citron (AKA Pixelplucker) is providing his professional custom medal-making expertise to this endeavor and we shall strive to make it classy looking (and i don't mean Trump classy). This medal will be so classy it will even have Latin on it! If you've been sitting on the sidelines get your side off that line and get working on your entry, you still have three weeks to get it polished up!

The manual covers this basic operation but is perhaps not entirely clear. A screencam of a plugin texture being deployed in a Material can found in post #7 of this thread.

Hi Tom, here is a screencam of me doing it. Does this look like what you are seeing? clip3829MakingPluginMaterial.mov

New Pluto pics released today look like A:M's "Perlin" turbulence combiner... PlutoDentedTexture05 troughs.zip

When I saw the new Pluto pictures from the New Horizons probe... I thought, "Hey, I've seen that before." Pluto resembles the A:M "Dented" material... PlutoDentedTexture.prj

"Cloth wizard" isn't relevant to Simcloth. It was a tool for the old method of creating cloth, now replaced by Simcloth. From your description I'm not sure which one you are doing. First, have you done the "wave the flag" tutorial in "The Art of Animation:Master"? That shows how to create a material that turns a mesh into cloth.

Contest Announcement: The deadline is moved to the evening of Sunday August 9. That gives you two more extra weekends to work on your image and get it submitted!

Contest Announcement: Image size Good question! I'm going to declare that it needs to be a 1080p image. 1080 pixels high and you can make it any format width you wish. A 16:9 image would be 1080 high by 1920 wide. A 4:3 image would be 1080 high by 1440 wide.

It is possible to rotate a "patch image" on a patch by selecting the patch, then >Rotate Images but other transformations are not possible. If you need more freely positioned images use regular decals. UVs can be edited after apply a regular decal. I rarely use patch images because regular decals are more flexible.

Lovely!

Well... it should be on the center line. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

Short Answer: Groups. Select all the CPs that make up a part of the model you want to put a material on and a temporary "Untitled" group will appear in the PWS. Change the name to something useful before you deselect the CPS to make the Group permanent You can drag materials from the Materials folder to a Group in the PWS (you can also click on the Group in the PWS to reselect all its CPs inthe model window.)

I'm trying a light in a model now and I can't get the problem you are describing. If you can post an example model that does that would be... illuminating.

I haven't tried it, but possibly this is a result of the conversion from Euler input to Quad keyframes. You might try converting the lights to Euler rotation first. alternate suggestion... if you don't need to actually shadow any object near the light on the roof, how about one light above with a mask to simulate the pattern you want.

If you wanna send me the Brent I'll look at it.

If you want to see some spline fixing done live on-screen go to this post and watch my "rerouting splines " video.

One possible solution ( I just did the two left fingers)

Hello Bryan... Most polygon models make very poor candidates for conversion into spline models but you can import them to see what happens. If you import it as a model A:M will make an attempt to convert all the separate facet edges into continuous splines but this is never a perfect conversion. This is a very slow process. The density of polygon models makes them mostly impractical to use with A:M rigging concepts. You can also import a polygon model as a "Prop". This is fast but this result is not editable, it is only for use of the rigid shape. There is a Snap to Surface tool now if you wish to use the imported shape as a template for recreating the model in proper A:M splines.

I saw a mention of it on Facebook. I can't quite see what it does that isn't done already, to be honest.

31 days to the end of the contest. Deadline August 9. You still have time to get your entry started!

One crucial detail for most human hair is to use the "MuhHair" options in the Diffuse and Specular shaders at the bottom of the surface settings in the hair material properties. They are powerful but complicated. They have quite a few settings that interact with each other so it is daunting to get it looking good the first time out. I recommend you get the lighting in your scene done first, then start adjusting MuhHair settings for the desired look.

My own feeling is that RAM and Disk space are cheap these days and A:M models are very economical in bytes anyway. I'm fine with brute repetition in most cases.

I'm most worried about AfterEffects 5.0. If that stopped working all my old projects would become accessible. The current version of AfterEffects CS won't load my legacy projects (I've tried the trial version) and there is no intermediate version for sale that would convert them except pirate/used copies as you find on ebay.

Maybe Windows 10 will have compatibility settings for old programs?