robcat2075

When I started at Nortel our media team was very big on "estimates". If we met our estimate of how long something would take that was good for a metric of some sort. However, you couldn't just give a sky-high estimate either, that was bad for the metric. I guess our manager was trying to get us to think in business-like terms. But in the first five years I worked there the estimates were meaningless for me. Every project I had was a completely different thing from any prior ones so there was really no way to make predictions. How do you estimate something that you haven't done before? And there's no one around who's done it either? Regarding a movie... somehow independent movies are made on budgets but they don't reveal much about how they do it or what goes where. On the rare occasions an ACTUAL line-item film budget has been leaked it's like a Hollywood scandal.

He looks cute..

I suppose the way to solve the concept design problem is to recruit talented people who come up with great ideas the first time.

Some other books I'd note on this topic "Save the Cat, The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need" by a guy who screens screenplays for studios. "Screenplay" by Syd Fields has been around for decades and is highly regarded. Directing the Story: Professional Storytelling and Storyboarding Techniques for Live Action and Animation by a former Disney and Dreamworks storyboarder. This book is blurbed by no less than Roy Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg

I think you need to know more about the project before you can apportion resources. And concept design is potentially endless. you go until you have something useful.

And "Quality" setting when you rendered was "Final", yes?

If you enable "Show More than drivers" for the object in the chor you have access to a model's groups and you can animate their transparency settings in the chor.

Hit Q or Shift-Q and right drag a bounding box on the screen to see a final render with current settings. I suspect the artifacts are a real-time render thing only. BTW there are some improvements in real-time transparency display coming in v17. But definitely test a real render.

Cosmic donuts!

I think we've touched on that one before. Here's a search for "shadow" and "only" Try "Shadow Pass" first.

Don't do that at all. Animate to a stationary camera. You don't need the camera to move to animate this shot. Moving the camera is causing trouble.

My impression of McKee after getting about 2/3 of the way through "Story" is that he's not much of a writer himself. Not a great instructional writer, certainly. He has the tone a self-impressed academic professor who babbled observations into a Dictaphone for several days and then told his graduate assistant to "type this up." His own success in the screenwriting field is pretty minimal. Certainly a master screenwriter would have more under his belt than an episode of of "Spenser for Hire" or "Mrs. Columbo"?

I would recommend not to animate via a camera constrained to a character. We do that occasionally with face cams but even that is secondary to the view the camera sees. If you are trying to manipulate a character while you are looking through a camera that is constrained to the character you are creating a feedback loop that will never be manageable. It is making your task 100x harder than it needs to be. It's like trying to move a table while you are standing on the table. You can put cameras anywhere you want, as many as you want, but don't attach them to the character. Send me that PRj and I will look at it.

thanks for the update. On paper it looks good. Their site sure is slow. If they were quite clever they would make an import filter that would let you load an existing Adobe Premiere or FinalCut project. That would get converts

This isn't a camera problem, it's body motion problem. Something basic is wrong and we need to find out.

I'm wondering what it is that you are doing that is causing this very jittery, halting motion as he walks. As I frame thru it there's a spot where the hips actually stop and move backwards a hair even though he's in the middle of walking forward. that can't be right.In general the up and down motion fo the hips seems not to be placed right in the context of the walk motion. His feet are still shuffling parallel to the ground. That will always look odd. You really HAVE to lift the ankles off the ground. In that first set of videos i pointed you to there is some live action that I motion track with dots. Even though the toe of the foot barely clears the ground as it is carried forward, the ankle is clearly lifted up in an arc from footstep to footstep. If you want to send me this project I'll take a look at it.

Based on Steffen's account it would probably require recruiting a serious Mac OS guru to write the new code this would need. Start planning that Kickstarter campaign!

First try dragging the new Action to be above or below the chor action (whatever it is not now). I forget whether above or below has precedence.

Charles Babbage ("Dr. Phibes" on the forum) noted on Facebook that he used A:M to design the fabric patterns for this "Kirby" acclaimed by one observer to be the "cutest mascot" at PAX2012. Charles also explained that the person inside the mascot navigates via a video camera in the character's mouth. Other Related Links of interest: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=41888

You are allowed to make a new spiral for different effects. I'm not sure it even has to be a spiral. **** The Treeez wizard is a rare case of doing something in an Action that changes the actual model and you need to resave the model to keep the change. Actions are usually bits of animation that get used with a model but don't change the original model file. Doing something in the model window, of course, changes the model and will change the copy of the model (notice that the chor calls it "shortcut to...") in the chor. On rare occasion (ex: adding a constraint) you may need to force a save to get the change to go through to the chor. If, in the Material window, you edit a material that is on a model, the appearance of the mode in the Chor will change also. If you edit the material's parameters in its shortcut in the model those changes override the original material parameters in that particular model only (and this will show up in the chor). The original Material is unchanged. If you edit the material's parameters in its shortcut in the model in the chor those changes override the original material parameters in that particular model only in that particular chor only. The original Material is unchanged and the original model is unchanged.

It does seem a bit of a outlier. I'm not sure why that has to be done in an Action. Consider that the Extrude Wizard does something roughly analogous, but does it all in the modeling window.

A tut? I'm not sure. I'd have to know more about what you mean, but the core info-center in A:M is that Project Workspace with its outline view on the left and its timeline on the right. It is a total view of everything currently in your project. The other windows like Properties and Poses and "Timeline" are more context sensitive. They generally just tell you about what you have selected right now.

Here's a screencam I did as a "dress-rehearsal" for a walk tutorial. I haven't "released" it because I decided i could do better on the essential concepts but until I get around to doing better, it may be helpful. This tut addresses making a conventional walk cycle that we put on a path, but the physical mechanics of how bodies walk and what the main poses are for animation are still valid for walks that are directly animated in the Chor BasicPoseToPoseWalkH250_Part_1.mov BasicPoseToPoseWalkH250_Part_2.mov

In my screencam vids (link in my signature) on walks there is discussion of how the foot lifts when it is being brought forward to the next step. That would help reduce the shuffling look you character has. (Those videos were specifically about a walk we were doing for TWO, where a walk action was manually repeated in the chor rather than used on a path, but the essential motions of walks will still apply)

Here's the approach suggested by Pixelplucker earlier VortexH.mov Each spline ring is on its own bone. One pose rotates the bones and the other pose scales them. StarsBlackHole.zip I lifted that picture off of APOD so it's probably not free to use, it's just for this demonstration.