robcat2075

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!

So far all I can see is that after you use "Align" the roll handles of the models get weirded out.

Slow hops are hard to do. It isn't possible to stay inthe air longer just because the tempo is slow so you have to absorb some of the time in preparing to jump and the landing after the jump. I like the bear's hops a bit more than the man's The man isn't really launching his mass into the air enough to account for the time he is off the ground. The second hop is the more floaty. Watch his hips as he hops, there's quite a bit of horizontal movement but not much vertical movemetn to carry him through that time off the ground. Think of kids playing hopscotch. They are hopping at about the same speed as your characters. Their feet are off the ground for just an instant, long enough to get them to the next square and then they land again.

It's a properly operating PC with plenty of CPU time to spare. It is not over-taxed. Even if it were throttled down it would still be a faster PC than what this Cintiq was designed for in 2003. The lag I see is similar to what I see in other demonstrations of tablets, like this one at about 3:10 http://youtu.be/jP_Aul3wf1M He's accepts it it, but I don't like it. The paint is always playing catch-up to the pen. It ought to be possible to get the pen position read and re-displayed within one screen refresh interval but it's obviously quite a bit slower than that.

A:M doesn't have the annoying J-Pop playing while you use it. For any new users reading that I'll note that the special rules exist because A:M splines allow topologies that NURBS can not handle. NURBS have the same continuity requirements as A:M Splines but since NURBS never allow hooks, 5-pointers or 3 pointers, the rules about how to make those correctly never come up. This topology is impossible in NURBS but easy in A:M...

John, I'm looking at the PRJ. It has three "Bubble" models in it but the action is still calling to load external Bubble models. did you do "Embed All" before you saved this version?

Hard to tell if they are floating up or down.

In college I went to a number of "new music" concerts of music by the composition faculty and the programs would typically have a note in it saying that this was supported by a grant from some grant-giving organization. I often wondered what the grant made possible that wasn't possible without it. The hall was free for them to use, the performers were students so they were free, likewise for the electronic instruments they were playing with. None of these people were knocking themselves out with heavy teaching loads so it's not like they had to quite their day job to write the opus, which was godawful crap so it was hard to detect where the money had improved it at all. That apparent paradox is perhaps why public support for arts funding is low.

The only way to truly exclude bitmaps is to only use materials and surface properties for texturing. Embedding images as text files is probably inefficient. There have been times I wished that we could use vector graphic images natively. Those probably could be efficiently incorporated into A:M files. What is the current situation that precipitates this desire a non-bitmap workflow?

Hooray!