robcat2075

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!

This started out as a project to use to talk about extrusion and five-pointers and holes but got too complicated for that purpose. SpaceRay!

Thanks, Mark!

Under the Newton properties for an object there is the line Extended Material Click to Select Is anything supposed to happen when i click that? The first time i tried it I got a little dialog box that said "Big Problem" But since then nothing, even after doing "reset all settings"

I have trouble with the green body color. Is that a 70's avocado thing?

I recall some old Saturday morning cartoon where some supervillain escaped by changing the color of his jet in midflight. Like that.

It's very dark in here.

Very cool, marcos!

In short, CG images are created backwards. In real life light is coming from a source, bouncing off something and then into a camera... In CG, a line is drawn from the camera until it hits an object surface, That surface is examined to see which way it is facing. If it is facing a "light" (really just a point in XYZ space) it is drawn brighter, if it is facing away it is drawn darker. So there's nothing really "bright" about the "light" itself. It's really just a marker that the computer uses to calculate if the object should be light or dark. In A:M, when a light is given "width" other than 0, it isn't like a large sphere that is emitting light outward. The position of the light is jittered randomly around that space. It's possible that if a light width were larger than an object at the center some of the jitters might result in a surface being illuminated.

Are those particles or Newtons?

Too bad you can't control particle emissions with a bitmap like you can on hair.