robcat2075

For him, a facile drawer, it seems to be worthwhile, but still i was baffled when he said he went back to 2D to test eye directions. Are they not able to just move an eye target around like we do?

I watched the webinar today. I presume they will post a recording later. Something that surprised me was him mentioning needing to work around "gimbal lock". Gimbal lock? They still have gimbal lock at Pixar? That sounds insane. I was also surprised that the "layout" he gets for a sequence is as animated as it is. Someone in Pixar is doing a lot of character animation that never is seen on screen.

AnimationMentor has another free webinar upcoming on Oct 1. How a Pixar Animator Uses 2D Update... Animation Mentor has posted the recorded Zoom session:

Looks like it's almost ready to 3D print!

Some video of The Frog doing one of his songs... And some "Lady Birds"...

Eddie and KeeKat have been around forever so they may not represent the ultimate best in splining. Careful adjustment of the CP biases would eliminate that lumpiness. It is also possible that When they were made, the default shading of splines was somewhat different (see the Biased v Perpendicular below) This post has a video about bias editing... https://forums.hash.com/topic/44047-smartskin-question/?do=findComment&comment=379014 One quick fix is to select a Group and set Average Normals ON and set the Normal Weight to something higher than 0% 0 is the most accurate shading of the splineage, 100 the smoothest. Another gambit is to switch the group from "Perpendicular Normals" to "Biased Normals". A brief video about Biased v. Perpendicular can be found here... https://forums.hash.com/topic/39863-asymmetry/?do=findComment&comment=349256. "Perpendicular Normals" and "Biased Normals" are optional tools that you can add to a toolbar. This tutorial show how to edit toolbars... https://forums.hash.com/topic/45739-creating-and-editing-custom-toolbars/

KeeKat! I presume you are asking about the transparent patches with the "whisker" dots. That seems to be a real-time graphics bug that is new to v19.5. The model will render correctly in Final renders but for real-time viewing try either of these... - Edit the Percentage value of the "KeeKat-whiskers-COL" image to be 99.9% instead of 100. You can save a new version of KeeKat if you wish. (to see that parameter in the PWS you will need to enable "Show property triangle" in the Tools>options>Global Tab... see below) 0r... - In the Tools>Options>Global Tab change from OpenGL3 to OpenGL

There are many possible reasons. We'd have to see the example to know more.

Fixed, William... wherever you are!

I've been re-visiting Walt Stanchfield's "Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes", a posthumously published collection of his handouts to his life drawing classes at Disney. It is not a book of eye-candy animation art. A number of the early chapters are a bit more about 2D animation process than a 3D animator will find useful, but most of the two volume set is about making clearer, stronger poses, which is useful for the 3D animator. Much of it takes the form of a rough student drawing (they are probably doing 5 minute poses) and then an even rougher sketch by Stanchfield showing what he thinks would make the pose better. Rodney and I were talking about these books and he noted that, "You have to read the text." It's not a book you can just look at, you have to read the commentary to get the intent of it. Sometimes he wanders off on weird philosophical, metaphysical California things which may be an insight into the times, somewhere between "Roger Rabbit" and "Lion King," as are the student names that pop up, like Keane and Vilppu and Deja. The chapters are typically a page or two. One of those per day is enough for me. It's not a book to storm through in a day.

I look forward to your animation that details how that all works. New York and several other cities used to have a pneumatic tube mail system. Big enough to carry a cat apparently! Of course the need to mail a cat was very small, even in 1897, so I'm not surprised the system eventually went out of business.

Thank you, for posting this very detailed behind-the-scenes peek, Charles! All most of us know about animatronics is that last chapter in "The Illusion of Life". It is very cool to see what's been happening in modern times and that A:M has been part of it!

That's how my cat wakes me up in the morning.

It is indeed hard to see the bevel in that small screen capture. I'll take your word for it that it is there. The easiest way to have bevels in Spline models is to put rounded corners in an outline, like I did in the example on the right, and then extrude that outline. If you go to my tutorial page and search on "bevel," I have a few entries about bevels.

I like modeling characters in A:M because I like the all spline environment. It is best to start with simple ideas for first characters. I made my first character in A:M back in the 90s and I've enjoyed re-using him in new scenes. You can see another character on my profile page. Here are more. Other people around here are quite prolific character modelers and i enjoy helping them with rigging questions.

That is a fine-looking first model! Idea... you can make more appealing edges by modeling them with a "bevel" instead of a sharp corner.

Here is who i was thinking... the Tea Lady! She was on a V8 CD. Tea Lady.zip Change her dress to red and white... put a Santa hat on her... Mrs. Claus! She'll need some re-rigging to be highly useful.

She used to be one of the free models that came on the A:M CD. Does @Rodney know?

I dimly recall that there was a schoolmarm type character on one of the CD archives that might be repurposed. She was a character from Hash's "Why Does The Wind Blow?" CD?

The most troublesome objection to the "hyperloop" I've read is that it is an impossibly large vacuum space to maintain. Hundreds of times larger than any built so far. Fortunately, animation can sidestep that problem!

A few people have reported an error message when running v19.5c for the first time, saying that mcf100.dll was missing. Steffen recommends running the Service Pack at this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist?view=msvc-170#visual-studio-2010-vc-100-sp1-no-longer-supported It is in this portion of the page, although the above link should take one to this directly... This solved the problem of the missing dll. Steffen tells me that the A:M installer is built to install this dll so it is uncertain why it didn't work in this case.

I'm afraid GIF doesn't support sound. Video only. For sound, some other format like MP4 would be needed. A:M can render to AVI, which does include sound. However, AVI files are exceedingly large. One work-around is to render to Uncompressed AVI in A:M and then compress the resulting file in some other video editing app to a format like .MP4 (which is different from MPEG4, incidentally).

I remember them from your "Prehistoric" entry...

It is installed like a normal program and has its own uninstaller. You may already have it but it's not working.

If you are not already familiar with imaging and restoring your C drive, that would be a good thing to know how to do, regardless.