robcat2075

hmmm... the girl and thom don't seem to be casting any shadows on themselves even though the light appears to be from nearly overhead. That's what i notice.

That's probably the best way to think about it. For us it's all splines and patches.

I like that very much!

I have not seen that before! Do your previous versions of this chor do that now if you load them? Is this in the new v17a? If you scrub the timeline a frame and back does it change anything? If you fix the position of something, save(under a new name) and reload does it stay fixed? If you take this to v16 does it happen?

I agree that there isn't much of a performance there, although minimalism in dialog is not necessarily bad. We could spend a long time thinking of things to make for a better performance but it would take a long time because there are essential body mechanics principles that are not in play yet and we would be trying to solve many issues at once. A problem with dialog animation is that it is whole-body animation on an extremely subtle level. I dread doing it. For your first steps in character animation do something that can be done BIG. My suggestion is to table this dialog shot and step back to a full body acting test. A good early animation school assignment is to pick two contrasting emotions that can each be shown in a single pose (with no dialog) and animate from one to the other. If you want to do that I would be glad to look in and coach on that. First step, pick the two emotions and pose each one out in a hold with a bare transition between, like i showed in my "blocking" video. then we'll talk about what you have. But back to your present clip for a second... I'll note that there aren't many good occasions to have a character look into the camera. It's rare even in live action, but it' s really tough to make an animated character look good in that situation. If I were doing this I'd have him addressing imaginary listeners off-screen so he never looks at the camera. That pose he has is very symmetrical (another danger of facing into the camera), he almost looks like a tripod. If we were pursuing this shot we'd really want to rethink that. But again, I say table this for now. The way he moves from pose to pose, I realize this is only blocking now, but if we were to pursue this we'd talk about how to shift weight and overlapping action. But again, we could do that better working on a simpler two-pose test. I know why your movie is so big. The "animation" codec will always make large files and you have ti set to "millions +" so there's probably an unnecessary alpha channel hidden in there two. And the audio is uncompressed Stereo A better codec choice would be Sorenson or H.264. You can load a large render into the Images folder and "Save animation as" to a better codec. A neater solution is with Quicktime Pro that not only re-compresses video but also gives you audio compression options. A:M doesn't have any audio compression ability. I applaud you for not gesturing with two fingers and one finger for "two men enter, one man leaves..." That is what they call too "on the nose"

hmmm... this must be some use of the word "flat" that I am not familiar with. Are not all triangles flat?

In the northern hemisphere the sun will set from upper left to lower right. Something is reversed.

Looks good! That must be in the southern hemisphere. Will it do clouds too?

Back in the old,old, old... days of QuickTime it was possible to save a tiny something called a reference file that was quite worthless for anyone not on the same computer. But I can't imagine that you are doing that so something else must be going seriously wrong.

89 bytes? There's no way there's anything in that. Are you by chance rendering to still images and compiling them somehow into a quicktime?

I have trouble keeping track of all the not-up-tp-date users.

What I'm saying is... you can't on a button to find out about it like you can for a property. You'd have to go hunt for it and get the name exactly right. Not that we haven't expected users to be able to do that in the past, but it's something AMA doesn't extend to yet.

Flat triangles are useless. What does that mean?

The new AMA feature has the ability to link to the web also so there' no reason the wiki (where is it?) coulnd't be a part of that. However AFAIK, one problem with AMA is that it only works on actual property parameters, other interface elements like buttons are not in its scope..

I recall spotty trouble with shaded renders long ago. Since you have v14 try switching OpenGLDirectX and restart A:M

Waiting for someone to step up and put the bell on it...

I agree it is needed. Whatever is done needs to work as much as possible with the new online help implemented in v17. I think that is the future rather than a book, although if it were possible to compile that into a coherent book as an option that would be useful too.

That is only 290 bytes so something must be missing. To use a post effect, "Apply Camera's Post effects" needs to be ON in the "Buffers" settings.

Simon, are you on V17? the current move is to put all the techref available interactively. You on a parameter and the text from the tech ref will come up. I think future efforts should go into making that interactive resource contain better information. The Maya Help appears voluminous to me, but after observing numerous Maya users at 11 sec Club I don't think it is a complete solution either. Consider this quick random check... I look up "Save As" the Maya Help takes me to: huh? buried in the text is a use of something similar to "Save As" but not an explanation. But Maya's Help is not a bad one, but who would write all the extra explanatory information? Who actually knows enough about A:M to do that correctly and and can write well enough that no one will complain in the future that the techref is inadequate?

It only happens with shaded renders?

Is there a good example of a complete tech ref that we might model a revised A:M tech ref on? I think what people really want is more context and examples for each feature. That would be a very huge endeavor.

This only happens on this Phoneme project?

It's like putting a bell on the cat. Everyone thinks it's a good idea but... who will do it?

I'm lost... why the displacement when you want a transparent effect?

Do an AMReport for that request. Steffen has changed the baking code several times so he probably knows about it.