robcat2075

I'll note that Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" is a classic book on learning to draw what you see.

Paul. I did something along those lines a few years back. The effect was actually quite easy to achieve using animated maps to control the bump/ displacement, reflection and transparency for the ripples. Later project used cookie cutter decals to get rain drops. A combination of the two might get the effect you want ? regards simon Perhaps you could start a thread and explain how you did it?

We are looking for the two remaining contest entrants who are NOT on this list. Matt Campbell (John Bigboote) Garet Gratien ( ludo_si) Steven Grieve (blixien) Robert Holmén (robcat2075) Mark Largent (largento) John Lemke (johnl3D) David Simmons (itsjustme) Steve Shelton (Shelton) Who are you? Check your email for the message from Hash and respond with your address so you may receive your "Wobbling Dead" DVD!

I notice there's a touch of AO visible. I suppose that helps soften it up some.

Beautiful! Note the number of CG artists credited. Also notice the credit for "Compositor." That means those shots didn't come straight out of the renderer looking like that.

You're right. We should stick to discussing A:M on the A:M forum! Generally I do. However... Martin Hash once made the observation that "Maya bought every customer they have." That means they spent as much or more on advertising and promotional deals as they ever made in sales. How could they stay afloat with a business plan like that? Short answer: they didn't. The money came from outside investors, not the makers of the product. Eventually they ran out of investors willing to put more money into it and Maya, the program, was sold at a firesale price to Autodesk. That happened back around 2005. SoftImage XSI had a similar business plan and had a similar result: sold off to Autodesk when the money ran out. Much money was lost but Maya, the program, did win the market-share battle. How could it not? They were actually paying studios to drop the software they had and use Maya instead. It's excessively complicated and awkward to use but now it is entrenched and not likely to be dislodged in foreseeable future. Martin Hash and A:M never had the money to engage in the promotion war, but for those of us who are not in a studio where every part of the process can be assigned a separate expert in that task, A:M is still here (unlike XSI, now cancelled by Autodesk or Truespace, now canceled by Microsoft) and still powerful for people like you and I who want to get 3D projects done and need to be able to do the whole pipeline ourselves.

I had said I was going to do "cloth" as the topic of my next "It Can't Be Done" series but that is looking to be a major endeavor I don't have time for right now. I hereby re-open the table for nominations. If you have a smaller-scale miracle that you'd like to see done in A:M, suggest it below! If you suggested something last time around and are still interested in that topic, re-nominate it! I will pick one based on based on my own judgement of general interest and feasibility and the winner will, of course, receive their choice of memoir by Martin D. Hash! If, by chance, you missed the previous "It Can't Be Done"... check it out!

I am indeed a shameless A:M flag waver. A:M users sometimes wonder if A:M is the only program with an annoying bug or if somehow the other programs have some secret that makes everything easy. We typically see the work done in other programs... when it's done. Or we may see a sped-up screencam demo that goes from beginning to successful end... by someone who's an expert user who's omitting all the mistakes and wrong turns he made before he got good at it. Many A:M users come from other programs and already know that the other programs have drawbacks, but some A:M users are in 3D for the first time and it's useful for them to know that the other apps aren't a flawless, magical solution.

I bet she loved it!

A (maya) screenshot posted by an AnimationMentor student. Her character is flying apart and even the technical support at the school can't figure out why. That is life with maya for anyone below the guru level. I feel bad for her, I think she has a deadline of midnight tonight for the assignment.

I looked a the PRJ. I'm not sure I see a boomerang effect, the bubbles seem to be going where they are keyed to go. Here is one bubble that does return but it is keyed to do that. (see screen capture) The red channel records the horizontal movement. It starts near zero at the beginning (circled as 1) then moves quite a bit to the right (a larger x value, at key 2) then returns to near zero again because key 3 is near zero. Perhaps you unintentionally made that last key that is dragging the bubble back to its origin? If you didn't know that key was there then it would seem that the bubble was trying to return for no reason.

I tried it. -Damn, that took a long time to load! -it crashed when I changed one of the parameters. -Interesting, but I'd need to see something more familiar than a sci-fi creature (?) to judge the rendering.

I think the best pitch for A:M is the one that somehow communicates, "You can do this!" That was basically the message of Greg Rostami's demonstrations. He showed the step-by-step and showed you didn't have to have a PhD in computer graphics to do cool things. As far as showing work by past users, the big time movie studios sure aren't shy about recalling their previous hits even though the staff that made it has left for somewhere else. If good-looking work was made possible by someone having A:M, then that's a plus for A:M.

What Rodney said. Try "Full Frame (Uncompressed)" There are several old AVI codec choices that will not work in A:M. I don't know if it's possible for A:M to filter those from being displayed.

Animation note: a character is doing a "twist" maneuver is another example of when it's better to not have everything start and stop at the same time. If you can lag something that will loosen the figure up. Lagging his arms would be a easy choice here since they are sticking out. Have their swing always a few frames behind the torso and he won't look so stiff. Overlapping motion is what that is. Animators are always looking for ways to loosen things up with overlapping motion so their characters do not look like sticks being waved around.

A new logo would have to have a huge promotion push behind it to establish it in the public's mind. That's not likely to happen. Without that it's just an unfamiliar element showing up on a web page.

That s a good point. If they could have made this work with just a person talking nearby they would have done it.

I remember when I worked at Nortel someone actually got fired just for proposing to change the logo. Which logo are you guys unhappy with, the paintbrush or the yeti? I recall last time we had a big logo discussion here, about 10 years ago, most of the suggestions were attempts to resemble other prominent logos. That's the wrong way to go.

Those old-style laugh tracks ruin old comedies.

I like the color bubbles!

So every potato chip bag is now an eavesdropping device. It's hard to believe they can recover that from a video image but the sound is so awful... well, maybe. If that really works then no above-ground room is safe for confidential discussions. I once read about a spy technique that involved bouncing a laser off a window pane to read the vibrations caused by the sound in the room. Sort of the same notion. I remember a story about Henry Kissinger. He was in Moscow negotiating an arms treaty and at some point the Russians asked for a copy of a document he was showing them. Just to make the point that he knew they had hidden cameras in the conference room he held the paper up to a chandelier and shouted, "Three copies, please!"

Could you give us a link?

It turns out I have previously reported that as a bug that has returned in v18. Steffen marked it as "closed" so we'll have to wait for his return to pursue that. Let me know if you are stumped on fixing it with text editing.

Bones should not be draggable inthe Chor like that. That should be a fixed bug. What version did you do that in? It is possible to fix that with text editing.

That looks great! Fine work!