robcat2075

Some of you are wrestling with storyboarding your animation projects. Here are some real production storyboards from the Hanna Barbera series "Cow & Chicken." They look quite different from the storyboards that one might make to present an idea to non-film-makers, such as the clients of an ad agency who want a commercial to advertise their product. Here the artist has drawn just enough to identify the setting, the characters, the camera angle, the action. These are for creatives to talk to creatives. But LOTs of drawings. Each one might account for only a small slice of screen time. The whole 150 drawings might cover three minutes? While each drawing is not highly detailed, the sum is very detailed... there isn't much doubt about what is seen and what happens. if clicking on first image below doesn't work, try this link: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0k972sE2df2kEF9i4447mQSXkJy6wo5TkLQSivKnvWZWtNGxN7ZToqyhHnZv1Piool&id=100005239264503

Glad you're still here!

A new render of my March 4 2004 entry in the Animation Showdown, now with scenery and sound. The animation is an Action cycle, repeated three times. I was excited when i got that to work. I made the sound effects of the foot thumps and the cubes landing by hitting a cardboard box in various ways and shifting the recordings down an octave.

This is the profile of common "spur gear". The edge where a gear tooth will contact the tooth of a neighboring gear has a special curve called an "involute," designed to allow the gear teeth to smoothly slide over each other as their gears turn on their axes. This curve varies depending on how many teeth a gear has (and other factors) but the tooth overall tends to have six landmark points that are easily distinguished, which I have marked in red... A spline made with six points per tooth can approximate this shape. Here I have fit six points to one tooth and used the Duplicator wizard to copy that around the remainder of the gear... The resulting A:M spline shape closely matches the intended contact interaction.. Possibly a wizard could be made to create proper gear outlines (for any size gear and any number of teeth) in A:M for 3D printing projects. I realize dedicated CAD programs usually have some tool for gear design but it would be fun to be able to create working mechanisms with native A:M models.

I agree that Wayback machine is your best path for recovering old user-written tutorials. I recently reconstructed Jeff Cantin's splinesmanship tut from that. If you know an old URL, it is a place to start. Note that the Wayback Machine may have archived a site many times, but not all of them may have the same resources (like JPGs, files to download, etc.)... so you have to check many of them. Some may be incomplete in every instance.

A worthwhile effort, none-the-less! I like that you had an artistic vision and followed it!

Hi Rusty! try this... https://forums.hash.com/topic/52729-how-do-you-start-treez/#comment-430487

A new render of this Feb 19 2004 entry in the Animation Showdown. I was pleased with this one. This was the first time I felt like i got a suggestion of weight in the motion.

He needs horns!

First, I would not screen capture the view window for a render. If you need anti-aliasing, you want to render to file. (Are you asking how to render to a file?) The real-time view is whatever the graphics card can throw up as fast as possible and anti-aliasing isn't the priority. However, depending on your graphics card you may be able to have some anti-aliasing in the real-time view. v15 had a choice of Direct3D or OpenGL for real-time. Note that to switch between D3D and OGL you need to make the choice, then close and re-open A:M. D3D had a multi-sampling option that could smooth edges (at the cost of slower real-time performance): The "Bi-Linear Filtering" option may smooth the real-time appearance of decals. OpenGL could do some smoothing of wireframe lines: Depending on your graphics card you may need to close and re-open a window or even re-start A:M for the setting change to take effect.

At the December 9 2023 Live Answer Time we talked about the Light "Bias" setting and I now recall the project where that had been a big problem... it was this "Parallel Reload" project! Here is a frame from a render with the bias setting not correctly set. The proper result is at the top of this thread. @Pizza Time

Those look good, Myron! Down the memory hole for that sax player!

A new render of my entry in the February 12 2004 Animation Showdown, now with added environment and context. The sideways shuffle is a walk cycle. I was still trying to economize by using Actions but I found it's hard to get out of them to do the not-cycle part of the animation.

Hi Serg, The best way to request a feature is go to https://reports.hash.com, report an "issue" and set the "Severity" to "feature". You will need to make an account there, which is different from your forum account. That will add it to the pile, which is a large one.

I had something like that happen when i turned the constraints Pose on. 😮 I'm not sure how you got the long pants. Instead of turning the Constraints Pose on in the Chor, turn it on in the original model instance in the objects folder before you put the model in the chor. If you want to save your work you'll need to do Project>Embed All before you save a PRJ

I see Ambiance Blend covered on page 17 of the TechRef

A new rendering of my Animation Showdown "catch something heavy" entry of 20 years ago, now with some context and foley. I got the basic "blocking" poses in but time ran out before I could turn it into real animation.

We can do this in A:M. If you want make a pendulum model and bring it to LAT some day, we could look at this.

If you're having a store problem, I recommend sending a Private Message (envelope icon at upper right of forum) to "Jason Simonds" explaining the difficulty. Note that the $299 version is not "unlimited access", it is a non-expiring license for the current A:M version, it doesn't extend to future versions that may come out. That plan is gone. Limited Time only, as they say. Hash now offers a one-year license for $79 (or the $299 non-expiring version) as standard prices whether one was a previous purchaser or not. The old "upgrade" price during the CD era was $99, I recall, so the current one year sub is still lower.

Try this... clouds58_h3k.mov

Something like this? It's hard to get the bright saturation spot and still have the rest of it look like a cloud.

I have several cloud projects on my tutorials page, have you checked those out?

I'm still guarding my treasure! 🐉

Sunnier skies...

"I love you, brother Thom, but in an arms-length distance sort of way."