robcat2075

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.

Power Puff Girls? My Little Pony? I haven't watched TV since the 90's either

there's no way to add a Boolean to a prop because there's no way to add bones to a Prop. When I say import it into a model, I really mean import it into a model. Not as a prop. -Open a new model window. ->Plugins>Import>STL or whatever polygon format works best. Yes, it will take a long time for a big model. Let it go overnight if it needs to. When it's done you have an A:M mesh you can add bones and Boolean cutters to.

For a typical corporate client (not an animation studio) a good-looking George Jetson could be an eyecatcher. Unless it's some 20-something who's never heard of George Jetson. Mark, you might wanna do some research on what the kids are watching these days.

Explain to me again why importing an STL into an AM model that you can do the Boolean slicing on is not an option. That is so much more what you want to do than a depth map process that I can't figure out why you are not pursuing that.

Import it into a model. It's slow but you only have to wait once. Do you have After Effects? Put the depthmap in that and keyframe some levels/threshold operation to make your near slice and far slice and stretch that out over as many frames as you meed slices. If you use the depthmap in OpenEXR your slices can be nearly infinite because it records teh depth in floating pint format rather than 8 bit integer.

Another reason to do the Boolean slicing method rather than the depthmap is that Boolean slicing will get you the contours that would be hidden from the single viewpoint that a depthmap represents.

What's the time frame on this contest?

Happy Birthday, Luuk! For those who haven't seen them, here is one of Luuk's RC helicopter videos... dnvWII6Oz-Q