robcat2075

Finish the plane, then do the giraffe tut. The Giraffe introduces joining shapes. Then see what questions you still have. Flower Power, FW, and giraffe cover a lot of essential splining techniques.

Which tuts have you done?

That desert looks scorchin'

When you say you gave it a go and it didn't work... I will say you didn't do what I did. It's gobsmackingly easy to attach splines in the right way but if you don't know how to do it, it's impossible. There's a lot to be said for doing the modeling tuts in (free, included with A:M) "The Art of Animation:Master". In order. As trivial as they look they do teach everything you need to know to make shapes and connect them. The cool thing about A:M is that there isn't much to doing that, but if you don't know it... it will seem impossible. I strongly suggest you do those before you frustrate yourself more. And there's a thread for each TAoA:M exercise where you can ask questions if you get stuck.

The simplest was to make a protrusion from a grid is to a- choose a spline intersection b- stitch a circle around it c- delete the spline intersection inside the circle d- extrude the circle e- close the five-point patches you handle will be a bit more complex as it has six CPs around it, i believe. Look for the "Utah Teapot" elsewhere on this forum for exampls of splicing more complex handles and spouts into things.

If you're talking about the render settings windows, just turn them ON, and do nothing more.

Something you might do is search for a few ads of floor mopping products and see how they made that wet-look look, so it was obvious in one image.

Reflective would be the way to go. Make sure there's an obvious difference between the "wet" and the "dry" parts of the floor. There will need to be something distinctive in the background to appear in the reflection.

I've added the PRJ to the top post

I've never used the chat box because I generally don't like chat boxes. I've preferred to do my asking and answering on the forum when it fits my availability, and because more people will see it.

This forum is pretty much the hub of all public things A:M. Regrettably, it doesn't come in audio form. Animation is so visual and the software is too... I haven't seen anyone do much with podcasts for 3D.

I'm not aware of any podcasts about A:M or any about actual how-to nuts and bolts animation in any software. There have been podcasts about animation culture, such as The Animation Podcast which has interviews with "famous" animators. It's mostly ripping yarns rather than how-to information but interesting none-the-less.

I find they are rather inconsistent in their behavior, and there may indeed be something non-functional about some combinations. More investigation woudl be needed to be sure. I found some that appeared to do nothing began to look normal after I scaled them much larger. I don't remember which ones.

Welcome back to A:M! If you have questions, this forum is the place to ask. And, yes, modernizing to a current subscription would be good move. Much faster, much more stable.

BTW, xtaz, in case you missed it... Steffen is needing a version of your mascot with an alpha channel so he can put it in v17.

Don't let that one out of the petri dish, it looks dangerous!

Time to retire Tar to the pantheon of A:M mascots and bring in ... does she have a name? I would suggest using one side or the other of the contest image so there's one mascot showing up on the splash screen.

That's the shape of the volumetric effect. It's a rectangular box, maybe you're seeing it inside-out.

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.