robcat2075

no I do not Rodney is trying various things. Keep your eye peeled at the bottom of the forum.

Paul, can you see the Private Lessons> Victory through A:M Power forum at the bottom of the forums?

I have alerted the authorities.

Do what makes you happy, that's what these things are for. If it would be a relief to table it, go for it. You can always say "We're on hiatus". That's what the big wheels do!

The bones have to be there, because the script in Rigger expects them to be there. The script will fail if it encounters a bone name that isn't present in the model.

In TSM2 you DO have to use all of the spine bones. In TSM1 it was possible to not use some. For a situation where the ribcage is a large portion of the torso, you might make the last spoine bone larger to accomodate it and the others shorter.

Since this is still only a rough beta draft of tutorials I hope to present later we're gong to do this in private subforum for now. Ilidrake, Spleen, Fae Alba and Roger (new student)... go over to this thread http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=43718 and post a "here!" there if you can. If you can't, post something here.

I believe you can curve the spine bones. Do a quick test with the in a empty model window with a curved spine. After you run rigger, make spine 2,3and4 visible and see it they follow the upper control.

It's all real ball. I present it as an example of motion analysis that's part of the lesson. Yes, it does seem to miss the ground, the camera isn't fast enough to catch the instant it is on the ground every time.

This is going to be somewhat more involved than my usual screencam where I just record myself talking for 30 minutes. I'm going to woodshed it some more but I don't think we'll quite get to lift-off tomorrow. Here's a preview BouncingBallPreviewH.mov Stay tuned for further developments.

I hope you got your poster back. I'm glad you had that success, it's well-deserved!

That "linear (square patch)" is pretty odd. An example of how you can graph something in math that you'd never find in the real world. Or is there?

I'll note that we can minimize the "block" stair-stepping of displacement maps by using hi-range maps (OpenEXR in A:M's case) images for our gray-scale maps. I'm not sure if I've seen stair-stepping in bump map cases.

I've got my footage shot, I'm trying to get it put together.... stay tuned.....

Semi-rigid bodies!

I'm kind of lost on why there are 600 frames in a benchmark.

I guess old animators used to brag or moan about how many "feet" they got done in a week. which always seemed like a round-about way of referring to screen time.

I'm pretty sure it took a foot and a half to make one second at 24 frames per second. I think there were 16 frames per foot in 35mm film.

a female skull head. How do they know the difference? I suppose it's the jaw?

I'm only taking a stab at that since I often have stuck images on my screen when modeling or navigating around in AM as if the screen stops refreshing. I don't have a quadro but I sometimes have a case where only a tiny rectangle within the view window will be updating. I've noticed this only happens if i have several windows behind it in "workbook" mode.

Do you know any more about that?

Cool, Fritz Lang could have used you on Metropolis...

For the moment, hold on to it. Either Paul or I will probably collect everything but i don't hink we've thought that far ahead yet. Of course you've looked at your result and it's what you expected, right?

A faster CPU is generally better. A:M v17 is optimized to use the SSE3 and SSE4 processor extensions in modern CPUs so one of those is preferable. A:M now includes Netrender and it works on multi-core CPUS so if you had a quad core CPU you could run four nodes all on one computer. At least 4GB of ram. 64-bit Windows, not 32 A:M doesn't yet use GPU computing so the video card isn't very critical but you want something with decent openGL performance. People differ on whether AMD or NVIDIA is better but generally you don't want on-board graphics, you want a real graphics card with 512 MB or so. I like to have two monitors to work on so a card that can drive two monitors is good. A card for under $100 would be more than adequate. And of course a big hard drive to hold renders. EXR and TGa sequences can eat a lot of space. I'm sure I've forgotten something. Hopefully some others will chime in.

OK, I have a train model in obj format. However, it imports as one large object into A:M and I cannot select anything individually in order to add bones for such like making the wheels turn. Any ideas? Notice the part I've bold-faced. As mentioned above, a good tactic for mechanical things is to separate the parts in the original program and import each as a separate prop model. Then in the chor you can constrain them together and animate the parts that need to animate. It IS possible also to import Polygonal models directly into an A:M model window but most polygonal models are poor candidates for conversion to splines. It's free to try, none-the-less.