robcat2075

The MuhHair and Kajiya-Kay plugin shaders work to make Particle Hair look better by re-shaping the Diffuse and Specular response of their surfaces. Kajiya-Kay is the easier one since it has no parameters of its own, it's just ON or not. However, unlike MuhHair, that lets you fine-tune the placement of highlights on the hair, Kajiya-Kay requires you to carefully place your specular light source... as you would in real life lighting. Here is hair with no extra shader and Specular Intensity 0 in the surface properties. Same hair, but with Specular Intensity greater than 0. The renderer seems to regard the hair as one simple mass and paints the specular highlight on top of that. Same hair but with Kajiya-Kay. A more individual-strand appearance to the specular highlights. Note that for ANY material using a plugin shader, you must Set Plugin Shaders ON in your Render Options. And for this particular PRJ you must set Options>Rendering>Use Settings from> The Camera. KajiyaKayTest007.prj

Do you have a shader on the hair? You could get appealing highlights with the Mu-hair or Kajiya-Kay (easier) shaders

Yay! Is it anyone you know?

Some weird shapes i made with the Duplicator Wizard. I had never experimented with the "Tumble" parameters before. DuplicatorShapes004.prj

Animation Mentor has posted the recording of their November 13 webinar. Animating Natural Walk Cycles. That sounds like a great topic!

Hooray! Good work, Steve! Arcs, anticipations, strong poses, clear staging, weight... everything we strive for in well-done character animation. Onward and upward!

BUMP...For Halloween! PRJ added to top post. BOO!

We're going to get you animating even if it kills you.

Yeah, animate it back and forth a bit and add a creak and it would be most disturbing! 😮

I think he is long gone, but I recall we tried making one of these a while back at Live Answer Time.

A:M's font wizard should work with both Truetype (.ttf) and Opentype (.otf) fonts. The rare "raster" fonts won't work. If you're asking about installing a new font... It only needs to be installed in regular Windows fashion. Suppose you have downloaded some .ttf files. Go to the folder you downloaded them to, on the font and do Install for all users.

First idea... You could make the video a camera rotoscope, with "On Top" set to OFF Add your animated name to the chor and render to a new file. If you are uncertain about this... We have a live Answer Time tomorrow!

I recall we discussed laser blasts at a previous LAT... https://forums.hash.com/topic/53007-blaster-pistol-blast/

Is this the real Vern? It has been a long time! But we said your name three times at the last Live Answer Time... and here you are! Subdivisions? Page Up and Page Down. BTW, you can ascertain or change any current keyboard shortcut at Tools>Customize>Keyboard

I've added a PRJ minus the character in the post with the YouTube video.

I'm trying to work out how to explain it to the bot from the beginning: An A:M model is made of patches. Patches are made of splines. Splines are a sequence of connected Control Points also known as CPs. A sequence of connected Control Points is found between every pair of <SPLINE> </SPLINE> tags in the model file. Every line between the <SPLINE> </SPLINE> tags defines a Control Point. The line has several values separated by spaces an integer that defines style properties like peaked v. unpeaked a 0 or 1 that flags if the Control Point is a duplicate of an existing CP a unique ID number for that Control Point x position in Cartesian coordinates y position z position other numbers may follow to define additional properties or two dots may indicate those properties are at default values. If the second value is a 1 then the fourth value will be the ID number of an existing CP in another Spline and this Control Point's X Y Z location will be inherited from that existing CP. The two CPs form an intersection between the current Spline and the Spline the other existing CP is a member of. A Spline Segment is the portion of a Spline from one Control Point to the next or the previous Control Point in a sequence with no intervening Control Points. To be continued...

I think counting splines and control points is the right idea. We know that every CP on a five pointer is five spline segments away from itself... If we limit our search to finding "proper" five-pointers, five-pointers that have a different spline on each side, we could just check every five-segment path from a CP that changes splines at each intersection. If a five-segment path doesn't lead back to the starting CP then that set of CPs is not a five-pointer. If a five-segment path leads back to the starting CP, then that set of CPs can be made a five-pointer... There should be 4 * 2^4, or 64, possible paths to check for each CP. in a 2000 CP model that would be 128,000 paths to check. If each path took 1/100th of a second to check, the whole model would take 21.3 minutes. The number of paths to check could be greatly reduced by limiting the search to the "current selection".

Remaining to be described... how to search a large mesh for 5-point candidates without having to test every possible set of five CPs in it? Google says the formula for combinations of n points in a set of k points is... the number of 5 point sets in 1000 points is Which is about 8.25 trillion In 2000 CPs there would be 265 trillion 5 point sets If it took 1 millionth of a second to test each possible 5 point set it would still take 8.4 years to finish a search of 2000 CPs. And yet identifying 5 pointers is instantly obvious to us when we look at a mesh.

Today we speculated on how to get AI to do mundane tasks like closing 5 point patches in A:M. I think the rules for 5-point patchs are like this... A patch is a set of 3, 4 or 5 CPs connected by two or more splines. Each CP in the set is connected by splines to two and only two other CPs in the set. For any two CPs in the set, a spline that connects them has no other CPs between the two CPs. (This will be true only for patches in which each side is a different spline.) [some rule about how the splines can be followed to loop around the patch to all the other CPs and return to the starting CP] If a set of five points meets those rules it can be a five-point patch. However, Rodney notes... What is a CP? What is a Spline? Perhaps we can deduce some rules from a sample file like this. A Spline is a sequence of CPs Each CP is defined by a 6-digit number that defines some style properties like peaked v. unpeaked a 0 or 1 that flags if the CP is a duplicate of an existing CP a unique ID number x position y position z position two dots means bias values are defaults if the duplicate flag is a 1 then the ID number is followed by the ID number of an existing CP and the XYZ info will be taken from that existing CP. 262145 is binary 0100 0000 0000 0000 0001 This signifies a Smooth CP 262144 is binary 0100 0000 0000 0000 0000 This signifies a Peaked CP

I believe you can drag a bone hierarchy from one model to another in the PWS , but the easiest way to copy "skin and bones" in the PWS is to drag the model name onto another model name...

Are you able to repeat that? I can't make that happen with CTRL-Scale but it does happen with SHIFT-J (I was testing with v19.5) J is the keyboard shortcut to hide/unhide a bone. SHIFT-J will do that for a bone and its children. Maybe you knicked it accidentally? But Hooray for being able to diagnose and solve the problem yourself! You are a with-it user!

I need new voxel glasses... which are the A:M parts?

It's unlikely many people will have time to download and test all those models. Images and animation of your work using them will be easier to assess.

I have no idea what any of that means so I'm still unsure of what the visual (A:M) component of a presentation might be.

Good to see you back again, Paul. I'm sorry you've had such troubles over the last year. First question... what is it your software does that needs to be explained?