robcat2075

If you know how many slices you want and want to create a series of slices as separate images, Matt's Boolean suggestion can work well. There is a thread around here somewhere where I as asking a similar need for a different purpose and someone showed how to do it.

I just saw those 2 seconds ago n your Facebook page and wondered why we hadn't seen them here!

If the manual covered everything, no one would come to the forum!

For me I find I can't do real animation without being glued to my seat for many hours straight so I might as well be home on a desktop to do it. Is there any laptop that you can actually see outdoors? I always fantasize about living the café life.

Do you have "Particles/Hair always off" checked in Options>Global?

New weird thing I just noticed... after the rollers have moved into place, the belt starts moving as if they were turning one frame before they actually start turning. I suppose the cloth is reacting to the inter-frame movement between the last stationary frame and the first moving frame. We don't' see it but the cloth does because it is simulating its movement in fractions of a frame time increments.

That's a very ambitious first project and it has turned out well. A:M is a great tool for someone who has a story they want to get told and you have demonstrated that. Welcome to the A:M forum!

May your soul be uncaged today! Happy birthday!

There are a number of "Tak" commercials and "cut scenes" out there and I think those are all A:M footage.

Was "Tak and the Power of Juju" by Avalanche?

A more complex arrangement with three rollers RollerTowelB.mov Here's the PRJ if anyone wishes to play with it. To simulate the cloth right-click in the chor and do Plugins>Simcloth Simulate. ClothBelt04b_three_rollers.prj

I notice that the cloth changes direction immediately when the roller changes direction but when the roller stops the cloth coasts on a little bit further. That is odd.

When I was little that's how I envisioned it working.

While researching a solution to another problem I wanted to see if a cloth loop would properly react to the mechanical input of a roller... RollerTowel.mov

Call me on this. I'm not sure what I'm looking at.

Is this something you could show me? If I saw it the solution might be more obvious. Changing the path will probably have the effect of changing the length of the path which will either stretch or squish the distance between bones, so that is an added complication.

It will be necessary to slightly overlap the beginning and end of the path so the bones can return to their starting point. the "post-extraoplation " can make the looping automatic The trick is to force a keyframe on every ease channel at the first and last frames that the spacing is properly staggered and delete the 0% and 100% keys outside of those example PRJ SimpleWormDemo03_loop.prj If it's like a chain saw, do you really need to traverse the entire loop? couldn't you just travel far enough to reach where the next identical link started and repeat that? It would look the same

When I first happened upon that Animation Showdown contest I was was just floored at seeing people getting anything done in four hours. I had spent months on things like walk cycles and never got very far. And there they were getting something done in just four hours.

I think I remember that one. It seems like just yesterday we were doing that, doesn't it?

I'm going to need convincing

Parented location... do you mean the bones have to be literally attached and not just look like it?

A fine first project!

It can be done and will be easy to do in Animation:Master! BasicWormCrawl.mov I used that basic workflow to do my Worms! animation and played with the staggering and interpolation between keys to make for the squishing crawling motion 8wDmFzHPXTA

I think some non-animation topics might cool too. I recall we had a few four hour modeling challenges and I got a somewhat less elaborate version of this "game controller" done for that. A materials topic might be fun too. Or rigging. I'm not sure what a four hour rigging topic would be but maybe there are some.

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. Was it possible to cheat and get more than four hours? Yes, there were a few times I thought that happened but once those people realized they were cheating to win a contest with no prize they drifted off. None of those entries i thought were suspiciously elaborate ever won anyway.