robcat2075

"Curves" is third on my to-do list so it won't pop out immediately. I'm gettin' to it.

Now I remember why I used that panel. i was doing screen cams for a tut and was trying to start a new take in the middle of a previous take without an obvious jump cut so i used these numbers, copied from the screen capture to try to recreate an exact birdseye view.

It's a wonderful book. It's a rare art history book by artists who were there and know why things happened the way they did.

I can't figure that shadow out if there's no light there. It's not really in the right place for a reflection.

I presume that bone is still a quaternion bone, although I'm wondering where the white channel is.

That's quite convincing! When you say "everything" is set to reflective do you mean everything or just everything on the man?

I just heard from Dhar. He got his PC out of storage and is aiming to have his segment finished by next Wednesday.

I would thing that expressions could be used to implement equations from Isaac Newton's laws of gravity.

A lot depends on what you need this swing to do.

Here's the opposite case as I see it... who ever wins has won against serious competition. I don't think we should dilute that achievement by changing the rules and declaring "a tie". And how far down the line do you go on something like that? Also, it is just a splash screen after all. It's an honor but it's a brief honor that just flashes on the screen for a few seconds. The other entries, I believe, will still be available in a gallery of all the entries. If there isn't a prominently promoted gallery, there ought to be. It's not like they have to fade away to oblivion, their creators can still make projects with them and let them loose upon the world.

A new interface thing I noticed... the rings on the Rotate manipulator get a semi-transparent fill when one is selected. This is most visible if the background color is white as in the "Macintosh" color scheme.

I particularly liked the installation process. Even though it would scare me every time...as I nervously wondered "will it ever work again after the changes I just made?" - but yes. the rigger never failed, and only took 30-60 secs each time, but of course seemed like an eternity when worry-warting. I liked that I could experiment/change the positioning of the geometry bones, and cp weightings and not have to tweak the control bones/structures or constraints relationships to match the changes - all done automagically by the rigger. And once I figured it out, I liked that it was easy to work with the pre-rigged - just geometry boned - model to add my own special face rig, cape rig, etc, with their constraints/relationships. I also eventually realized that it was best to cp weight, texture the pre-rigged model (which is different work flow when installing other rigs) Once rigged, I liked that there is a minimal amount of controls & pose sliders, so that I don't have to wade thru zillions of choices when animating. And I like the "pseudo-squetch" capabilities of the spine, legs, arms. You are a person of superior discernment, those are my reasons too. For torsos and necks, I prefer to put the spline ring in the middle of the bone. That evades needing to fan bone or CP weight the ring between two spine bones. On TSM1 you could delete spine bones. On TSM2 you can't. Not easily anyway. If you needed fewer spine bones you could probably weight to the 1st and 5th ones and make the middle ones very small. Do not delete any arm or leg bones. The 2-bones-per-limb-segment are needed to make the stretching slider work. You can bend at the elbow and knee but the two bones in each segment need to be straight. Always a judgement call depending on the situation. If you need to do it a lot you could temporarily constrain the foot to a null at the spot and manipulate the foot position with that null. As long as v16 still runs you shoudl be able to run TSM2. I ought to give Raf another call about this.

If you need the idea for the opening and closing segments, I have a fairly easy-to-do premise thought out. But if you already have an idea you love, that's OK too.

Welcome back! If you are asking about a "live" 3D view in the interface, no, A:M doesn't support that. A:M will render for 3D. It natively supports side-by-side pair, anaglyph (red/blue) and interlaced formats. I don't know if those are enough to work with your Nvidia card but if they aren't you might try the free Stereo Photo Maker program which can resave Stereo pairs to just about any format that is in use now. http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/

The heavy push is a difficult thing. -The heavy thing must behave as if it is heavy. It shoudl be slow to move and slow to stop moving, and slow to reverse direction. -The person must appear as if he is exerting force against something heavy. Your man rarely positions himself so that the force he can generate with his legs is in line with where he wants that ball to. He needs to get himself between where his feet are planted on the ground and where his hands contact the ball. -Those hands and feet can't be wandering while he is pushing. The hands particularly are floating too much onthe surface of the ball. Just on a staging note... I'd make that ramp the ball is on much narrower so we can see the incline vs. the ground easier. Until I looked at the horizon i wasn't sure there was an incline there.

demonstration: ConstrainToSeeSawH400.mov

I should add that it is not Paul's fault this project is behind. I'm the one he assigned to do this thing that is supposed to get done and i haven't gotten it done.

Paul Harris (fae alba) is the real Producer of this project. Any proposed plan will need to be coordinated with him.

Whenever you constrain something to something that rotates (like a see-saw or a ball) you need to use both a "translate to" constraint and an "orient like" constraint. Are you doing that?

Another great Nancy creation! Nancy, could you talk a bit about why you liked the result you got with TSM2?

Very impressive texturing. Will you add some detail to the rest of him?

That's gotta be a record number of entries! Jason, I have a suggestion... for v19 Make it part of the contest that you will post all the entries for some brief period (48 hours) with voting not enabled and that the artists need to check it in that period to confirm their entry is there and alert you if one is missing. That would allow you to add the occasional overlooked entry without having to restart the voting.

I need to apologize to Paul Harris and everyone who has contributed to this forum project as I have not fulfilled my commitments to it. I'm afraid my ability to focus on and follow-thru on complicated endeavors like this has declined greatly over the past year. If Paul would like to recruit someone else who could put this together sooner than I would I think that would be a fine idea. The project can be completed as intended. The task is fairly straight forward: -Collect all the contributor segments. Aside from the uploaded ones, Dhar Jabouri has a nearly finished segment. I've inquired with him again and he may be able to retrieve it from his computer which is in storage now. That would need to be rendered. Also I recall Matt Campbell had a segment or two to contribute that were not uploaded. -Assess the segments to determine a good order for them and for possibilities to link them. -Assess the segments to determine if any audio is needed. -Create an intro and a conclusion segment to establish the premise of Rear Window. -Create linking animation between segments as needed. -Edit them all together I can probably answer other questions that might arise including about the stereoscopic editing. Again, I apologize for having fallen down on this. I wish I had unbounded enthusiasm and energy for extended projects these days, but i don't and i don't see it returning any time soon.

Right now, distortion boxes give the same kind of deformation that weighted CPs between bones do. For this sort of feature to be a big advantage I think a new style of deforming would need to be created.

When I was in SF recently I went through the museum of Asian art. I was curious to look at some of the statues of those multi-armed gods and goddesses they have but they didn't seem to want to solve the problem in any anatomically plausible way so i didn't get any great ideas from them in that regard although some of them were amazingly intricate in a way that European stone sculptures are not.