robcat2075

Last year one of my benefactors got me Disney teacher Don Graham's "Composing Pictures", a very deep look at what makes images work. On of the techniques he talks about is "passage" where a band of color or value will cross what would normally be a shape boundary. One example he gave was this classic Chinese painting "Clear Weather in the Valley". you can see the sky color descends down through the whole picture even crossing over the sides of mountains. Here, it's like a low-lying fog. My other contest entry was an attempt to do something a bit like that with A:M. I made a set of flat planes for mountain tops and angled a volumetric effect to obscure as much of the bottom as possible, then added some volumetric lights at the intersections to further hide the contours of the landscape. EDIT: here's the PRJ for anyone interested. JapaneseAerialPerspective11b_vol_lights.zip

Hard to get a good angle on it.

Tell me if I have this right... 1- you have some simple set of bones that can be scaled and turned to fit any character and you do that. 2- this simple set of bones carries (hidden?) children that are named with a convention that that causes the install plugin to create more bones that are in some desirable heirarchy. 3- the constraints that make these new, desirable bones work must still be imported or created somehow

i recognized the spaceship from "BUS STOP"!

That one caught my eye, John. I particularly liked the up and down landscape.

You could do that with an action and play around with it. Really push it and see what happens. If you get the asymmetry it may very well help with the likeness. Based on his mug shot there's a fair amount of opportunity for asymmetry. But I haven't gotten far enough past "Copy/flip/attach often" to be confident the mesh isn't going to change so I'll try asymmetry last. True, they don't radiate like that. That was my quick and dirty solution to get something working for now. i wasn't able to unwrap the collar well-enough to put straight stripes on it and have them look good when it was re-wrapped. I think to do that properly I need to model the collar flat, put the material on it, then use an action to wrap it on the jacket. I'd like to try to make the whole jacket as simcloth. I'll need to redo it anyway since all he is now is a head and shoulders...

Well, it was meant to look like Al Capone. I'll admit it isn't a great likeness yet. It seems like the more i try to make it look like Al Capone, the more it looks like Edward G. Robinson, Richard Nixon, or maybe even Martin. It's not really "done" yet, I'll continue to refine it when i get more time and hopefully rig him and animate him too. - the eyebrows are the element I'm least happy with. They kind of look like glued-on caterpillars - the five o' clock is actual hair. I was surprised that worked. - I'm pleased with how the "Pharr" skin shaders worked (These are plugin shaders at the bottom of the "Surface" properties). I started looking at that when i found SSS and bump maps don't work together well. - However, I ended up not adding bump maps. I didn't like the way my first attempts looked, I'll need more practice painting details like that. - the pinstripes are a material made using the extended grid combiner and applied separately to different groups on the suit. I tried a "dark pinstripe suit" look first but it made the lapels just about invisible and I wanted the wide lapels to be obvious.

Happy Birthday to longtime A:M user and forum contributor Rodger Reynolds! May all your splines be aligned and all your trains on time! Here's one of Rodger's fine non-railroading models: And you can see many other mechanical marvels at Rodger's website: http://www3.sympatico.ca/rodger.reynolds/index.htm

Now that I have accurate sizes this is looking to be a hair more expensive than I thought. But still less expensive than hiring a roofer. Here's something... if I measure the roof along the top ridge it is 46 feet wide. If I measure from the edge to the peak of the dormer, to the next dormer, to the next dormer and to the other edge I get 45 feet. I've remeasured this several times and I keep getting that one foot difference.

Tasteful blood might be OK. No exit wounds on the head. Less is probably more.

How much blood?

I've measured every face of the roof and have laid it out flat... I can use this to visualize how many 4x8 sheets of OSB i'll need to redeck it, how many nails I'll need to fasten those in, how many rolls of roofing felt to go over the OSB, how many staples I'll need to hold down the roofing felt... and so on.

good eyes... I've been think alot about roofs lately. I saw some specks, I'm not sure they'd qualify as dust. They might look more like floating dandelion seeds or coton fuzz in the air. Some plain old camera fog wouldn't hurt.

Hey something I just noticed... the shingles are overlapping the wrong way on the left side of the roof. They'll be scooping in water instead of draining it off.

Without knowing more I will guess something is being misapplied. What does that mean?

For the 3D curious, here are stereoscopic versions of my image... crosseye: anaglyph:

Yay! I won something! I've been entering these contests for nine years and this is the first time I've won something. Thank you very much!

great review!

Hi Simon, -If the 2008 rig has any sort of "auto-balance" feature, make sure you turn that off, it provides no benefit. -the jitter in the legs is probably happening because the leg is moving from being within reach of the IK target to being just beyond it. In general, make sure the IK target is never beyond the reach of the leg's length including any length the heel raiser adds. -when people walk, their hips won't pause in their forward movement from step to step. The hips generally maintain a very constant motion forward. - the staging of the conversation between the two could probably be improved if we saw it from a more diagonal angle rather than have the front guy entirely block our view of teh back guy. -it's hard to see that the back guy has grabbed the front guy because his arm that is dong the grabbing is completely hidden. -Likewise, when the front guy wags his finger at the back guy our view is almost entirely blocked. -if your character can raise his shoulders that will help for poses where the arms are raised above the head. otherwise tilting the shoulders a bit can help make the pose look less square.

I see you have some bones in there already. Can you be more specific about what you are having trouble with?

I'm very impressed with the fit and finish.

I'll note that I talked with Jason earlier about this, he explained that this was done to show a printer how to assemble a project he was hiring them for.

If you peaked the CPs you could solve the bending problem. If you don't like the bending. Is the blank white area just two sides that get glued together?

I didn't mean to cause so much distress. I just thought it would be fun.

The composition is a bit flattish to begin with. I envision moving some of the airborne elements forward to make more use of the 3D space.