robcat2075

So if I just loaded that it would do the same thing? Can you post that model? I'll try it.

We'll need to see it to see it. If it's something that fixes itself after a screen redraw it might be a videocard driver problem that an update would fix. But I'm just guessing because I haven't seen it.

Here are some previous posts on connecting splines and not making creases... post #4 post 4 and 7

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"!