robcat2075

Newspaper in 1943 "Tortoise Wins By a Hare" correctly predicts Hitler's suicide two years in advance...

We must not be talking about the same thing. As I understand the request, it is an add-on to functionality that would diminish nothing else.

I think the desire for a Camera to Birdseye button comes from the fact that navigating in Birdseye view is quite intuitive and we're all well-practiced at it. It should be possible to do since all views, Camera or otherwise, originate from a point in 3D space and have a specific direction in that space and a field of view angle.

He looks surprisingly good in toon. Your lighting will probably be easier in toon and you could use painted backgrounds sometimes instead of modeled.

If you press the \ (backslash key) in any view you can toggle between Perspective and Orthgonal styles. Perspective is a natural appearance where parallel lines will recede into the distance and objects appear smaller as they move farther away. Othogonal is a rather artificial representation with neither of those qualities. The "birdseye" view inherits whatever style you were in before you began birdseyeing around. If you Turn out of the camera view (a Perspective view normally) your birdseye view will remian in Perspective style. If you Turn out of one of the standard Left-Right-Side-Top-Bottom views (normally orthogonal style) the Birdseye view will stay in orthogonal style.

Very cool, Mark! Great looking hair!

Glad to have you.

When the public beta for v18 comes out give this a try again and let us know.

I'm late to the party but Happy Birthday, Rodger!

A:M is not ready to go mouseless an keyboardless yet and I am doubtful it would run adequately on an android tablet anyway.

Basically you need to both "Translate to" and "Orient Like" the hand bone to the axis of the ball for the duration of time the hand needs to be stuck to the ball. "Compensate Mode" should be ON to make the constraint leave the hand in place rather than snap exactly to the axis bone.

She had to, daddy took her T-Bird away. Looks good, Matt.

Does it HAVE to be 128? 256 won't work better?

Welcome to the forum, Carol8! As noted above there is no automatic way to snap a camera to the birds eye view. I have asked for that feature in the past but it's probably a low priority If you look in the lower right corner of the A:M interface there are some numbers that describe the position and rotation of the real time view and if you click on those numbers you get a window that lets you input specific values. However, i haven't quite figured how to translate those numbers to camera coordinates to move a camera to a birdseye view point. Perhaps you will!

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!