robcat2075

I'll give it a shot! However, I shall probably be absent for the rest of this week until after Thanksgiving. Just in the interest of thoroughness you might want to see if there are better candidates since you have time.

You could make them cranberries... mmmm....

Did the other thread you started not answer your question? http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...mp;#entry378830

When I was a boy we had 4-bit sound on our Commodore-64... and we liked it!

He looks good! Aiming at the camera is tricky because it's the hardest angle to detect the shape of the hand. Maybe aiming just below the camera would work better? I'd keep the fingers in the gun pose while he's blowing the smoke away.

I've probably asked this before and gotten good answers but... I know that CTRL-click is the one-button mac equivalent of a right-click in A:M Is "Command+" still the MacOS equivalent for CTRL+ combinations on a PC? What is the equivalent of holding ALT on a PC to subtract things from a selection?

Another possibility is voice acting forums like this one: http://voiceactingalliance.com/board/forum.php They seem to be mostly people who do fan versions of anime, but you might get a Scottish gravedigger out of them.

Walks are difficult to do. I would make these quick notes... -I'd make the stride much shorter in distance, especially for a woman unless she is in a very big hurry or stepping over puddles. maybe 1-2 foot lengths. -the legs will be nearly straight at the moment the heel touches the ground. Legs. Not one leg. Both. The front leg is ALMOST straight because it is reaching to touch the ground. The back leg is ALMOST straight because it has been holding the body up and pushing it forward as the other leg is brought up. It's like a pole vault stick that the body is vaulting over to the next step. -The hips and body do not begin moving up at the same instant the heel touches he ground. they continue down for a bit because the weight of the body has been dropped onto that front leg and it is not able to instantly reverse that inertia. after a few frames the body begins up again, pushed up by that vaulting pole leg. - the rear foot does not leave the ground at the instant the front foot touches down. It extends to push off with the toes for a few more frames. How many more? The slower the walk, the longer both feet are on the ground simultaneously. You almost have to be in a jog before the rear foot begins to leave at the moment the front foot contacts the ground. -animate the swinging arms in FK and they will be much easier to make look natural.

If you have Quicktime Pro you can go to File>Export and choose Export>Sound to Wave If you don't have QT Pro, Audacity is free and can load most audio and export to wav.

Will it be like a scene where he is making a logo?

Pricing animation by the second is like pricing cars by the foot. Think of a tactful way to say that.

Happy Birthday to Steffen Gross, who debugs A:M, adds new features and does a fabulous job with it!

Here's the basic problem that needs working around... You can copy and paste keys within a pose but what you are copying and pasting are offsets from the original position of the model's CPs. You can't paste an external shape into a pose, even though it may appear to be the same model, because it is a different kind of data. It is a model of absolute positions in space, not a collection of offsets. Since the Soulcage guys seem to have this solved I'd say pursuing them for more information woudl be a good way to go.

Distantly related... the Transfer-AW plugin works by knowing when CPs from different meshes are close or in the same place. Presumably, some plugin could be devised that would rename the CPs in mesh A based on same-located CPs in Mesh B. Did you ever get the MDD import thing working?

This is the product of reading "How to Talk With a Scottish Accent" on the internet. It's possible this may not be completely authentic. 5minuteScot.mov

I know of no way to automatically place many bone like that at once. If this is a pressing business need I'd suggest hiring a file format guru who can engineer a more direct translation of the morph-target info to an A:M pose. I presume the morph targets are similar to A:M muscle poses in that they are translations of a point in XYZ space to a new point in XYZ space.

Have you solved the problem of getting the morph shapes from the other Polygon app into A:M? Even to the heavy mesh version? If you don't have that I'm not sure what the rest of this will get you.

I think a good answer to the client would be... "There are so many variable factors in animation now that 'cost-per-second' isn't a reliable metric anymore. Projects need to be to be defined, budgeted and bid as a turn-key whole."

Choose "uncompressed" in the compression settings for AVI. That's the only off-the-shelf AVI codec that works with A:M. It will make a huge file. Recompressing to Quicktime with Quicktime Pro or in 32-bit A:M is recommended for web posting.

Now, i THINK...you can... -in a pose, "Group" constrain a bone to a named group, even a group with one CP. (you'll have to zero the offsets manually) -put that model in a chor and turn the pose on, causing the bone to move to that group -export that model from the chor as a new model with the pose alteration baked in the bone placement -reload that new model with altered bone placement how close does that get you?

Technically possible idea... If every CP were attached to its own bone , that set of bones could be dragged into another model and the other model's CPs attached to the bones. An Action that worked on bones would work on either.

Or... instead of "manta ray inspired" ... But still a bit complicated.

Closer to the George Pal version, but still too fiddly...

Couldn't quite get it down to 60 seconds.

I'm looking forward to watching your progress on this. Looks good!