robcat2075

Lloyd, I'm afraid I haven't kept up with forum events for while. If you can fill me in on who has been winning this contest, the prizes I offered are still available.

Here's a more significant film-making problem... the "screen direction" is getting flipped from one shot to the next. The master shots are from one side of the table.... But the close-ups are from the other side... If the master shot were from the other side, it would match the viewpoint off the close-ups.... Alternately, you could change the view point for the close-ups to match the original master shot view. This is also known as the 180° rule. It is very important in keeping the cutting of the shots seamless to the viewer. In live action movies they will actually flip the film if they don't notice this until after shooting is done, but in animation it's easy to fix.

That's looking real good. Maybe when the cat is sniffing he could sweep his nose a bit over the plate rather than hold it in one spot.

Bruce, if my Rear Window post was edited, it wasn't edited by me. You should not have taken the Rear Window assets and used them for your own project. That's not what they were created for. I ran you out of Rear Window? No, you just didn't want to do the project we were doing. It's not possible to include everyone's wish-list in one project. You have to make choices and try it. No, there weren't a lot of Rear Window entries, but there are several. It's not edited yet because I've been busy with other A:M things and one of the segments is stuck in a storage locker because the guy is getting divorced. Bruce, if you have a vision for an ideal group project this forum is the place to do it. Announce it, explain it, run it and if people flock to it that will be great.

It's not complex for the participants. You get the topic. You animate. You send it in. You're done. How is that complicated? If you want to spend less than four hours, you certainly can do that and brag about it. We just had a contest where people could spend any amount of time they wanted and only three people entered. Making the time frame more flexible didn't get more entries, did it? This is not about trying to do major productions, this is about simple gestures the people can try and then see how their effort compared with other similar efforts on the same topic. It's not possible to craft a contest that everyone will love. Let's try this and even if it doesn't attract a lot of people it won't be any more a failure than what we've tried already.

You might want to get someone who doesn't want to enter the contest to run the email thing. Someone who can dream up simple topics and surprise us all.

How it works... Here's how it worked so anyone in any timezone could participate on any day of the week they wanted and everyone still got just four hours. -Each new topic wasn't revealed on the forum, it was just announced that a new topic was up and would be up for a week. -When you were ready to do your four hours you would email to a moderator's account that had an autoresponder message set up. It would send you back the topic and since it's email it, of course, records when you were sent the topic. -you had four hours from when you got the topic to animate, render and email back your entry. That email records when you got done. -there was a filesize limit (1 MB) for the entries which had to be in Quicktime form. Lighting and texturing were not part of the contest so render times could be minimal. -When the one week window to enter closed, the mod would make a quick check that the entries were indeed returned in four hours, then post them to the forum and set up a poll so anyone and everyone could vote on their favorite. That poll would be open for a few days, then a winner crowned. I'd make the email address for finished entries different than the one to get the topic, just so the entry email doesn't generate another auto response. The advantage of this is you can do it anytime in the week you want and because you also know no one else is spending the whole week on it you don't feel disadvantaged because you can't spend a week on it.

A bump or displacement map would be my first gambit to make wrinkles.

That's a great looking creature. Hieronymus Bosch would be jealous. Generally, fewer splines are easier for rigging, but if you need a spline to make the shape, you need the spline. You often find that as you are rigging you think of ways to change th splining to make things easier. You seem to understand "hooks" so i would say that is the solution for the excessive splines on the palm. Most of those splines running from the fingers could be terminated in hooks much sooner. You can have up to four hooks attached to one spline segment (they fit at the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 points). If they are in an highly visible area, just one will be smoother. I'll note that you can't make a five-pointer if it has a hook attached to one side, but you CAN attach a hook to the side of a five-pointer AFTER it is made.

Let people use whatever model they want and are familiar with. If you have your own model it's more fun. If the official character is in a rig someone is not familar with, that's another reason for them not to bother entering. I think we should do the contest in the form of the Animation Showdown I mentioned above. What are the reasons to not do that?

I don't think an official color is the answer, since the official color only needed to look right in flat-shaded form. You''ll need to eyeball it to get the impression of a similar color after the 3D shading has done what it does. I'm curious to see what Elroy looks like!

What are the clouds supposed to look like? Are some supposed to be black and others not? Are they supposed to have a very faint moire-like texture on them? Or are they supposed to be flat filled shapes? Part of the problem of diagnosing this is I don't know what the goal is. Also... to be sure you are using the same render settings from one attempt to the next, save a render preset from the render settings panel and use that each time you want to re-run an experiment.

The file size is different because one has more detail to record than the other.

She looks good, although now that I see her i think maybe both their skin color is too dark?

Ouch! If it has to bend that way it looks like you've got it figured out.

I'll note that you can change the interface colors in the Tools>Customize window to make those black lines on dark blue into something more visible.

That sounds like a better starting point. I'll note that to Steffen.

I also have numerous music CDs that could be chosen from

It seems to me there used to be an online, all-html version of the documentation. What happened to that?

Our current built-in A:M documentation, that uses .chm files, is broken because of a change that Microsoft has made to Windows. Steffen would like to convert the Help files from their source PDF to HTML. Does anyone know a tool that will reliably do the conversion including formatting and graphics? We're not looking for a "try this" or "try that" suggestion, we need a robust candidate that is definitely known to work. I've already tried OpenOffice on a variety of PDF files, it is pretty poor, so scratch that one.

I might do it again. Keep an eye open for announcements.

I have some back issues of Cinefex. The winner could pick one of those.

I was probably gong to do something on everyone's.

It costs nothing to try, which is what I'd do before declaring it impossible.. For a dense mesh it wont' matter if they are triangles or not, especially since all you are going to do with it is run a boolean through it. You can select the whole thing and hit P to turn them into flat triangles just as the polygon program thought they were gong to be anyway.