robcat2075

Hey, Charles... can you talk about what extra you had to do to get that to work? The 3D-printed models I've actually touched seemed very gritty. You must have done some sanding or smoothing after it came out of the printer? And what version of A:M are you using?

Thanks Charles! I was stunned when I saw that steam engine spin up. Extra cool to find out you modeled it with A:M!

Is that 1440 in either dimension? ie. width or height? I presume 1440w means 1440 wide

I got one entry ready to go today and i think I can promise it's something you've never seen done with A:M before.

He's looking good!

Bump, for all the wonderful A:M modelers and image makers out there. It's "anything goes" so there's no reason not to put one of your creations in.

Welcome back to A:M, Josh. Your father did a lot of fine-looking work, the source for most of which probably resides only on his computer. I'm sure you'll be careful with that. If you need help preparing any of that for print for your planned book, I or others on the forum could probably be of assistance. You asked what your father meant to us. Of course, the internet is an odd way to know people, you find out only the small bits they mention. I go through stages of starting out thinking everyone in CG is 20-something and then various reveals add up make a more complete picture. Only recently did I realize he was approaching 60 and he only mentioned his health trouble a few times, to explain extended absences from the forum. So i didn't know your father also did carpentry and jewelry-making but I'm not surprised to hear that he was good at those things and I recall he had shown some of his traditional art here. All those talents seem to have informed the great looking models he was making. He also did some very interesting pure 3D experiments. I was very impressed when he made a character evaporate into particles that blew away like leaves. Paul and I had a few tangles while we were making "The Tin Woodman of Oz", which i regret, but unlike some other regulars who stomped off mad when TWO didn't go exactly to their own plan Paul was big enough to let all that pass and stick around. I'm disappointed that we won't have Paul's new work showing up here anymore but I'm most disappointed that Paul won't get to enjoy a long retirement which I'm sure he would have put to good and productive use.

I like the windblown hair!

It helps to have a very clear picture of the ear. It helps even more if you can have the ear in front of you to study from different angles, but they are generally not detachable.

In that case I continued it on between the red and blue lines for a way and then connected it to the bottom part of the blue line which I had split into two parts. There are a lot of cases where a spline starts out doing something convex and when it gets done snaking around the ear it has ended up doing something concave. Here's the ear so far. CaponeEar.mdl It didn't end up exactly like that first drawing but that was a starting point to get the obvious stuff done, and then i could try to splice together the parts and make guesses about thing I couldn't see in the photograph. There isn't any extruding. This is all attaching splines together manually to complete the patches.

Here's how I strategized the Capone ear before I started splining. The red lines represent splines running on convex areas and the blue represent concave areas.

After some snooping I found that in Windows 7 if you go to Control Panel>All Control Panel Items>Personalization>Window Color you can choose the color of Windows interface elements "3D objects" sets the color of the grey area of the A:M playrange "Window" sets the color of the white area. Both of those control much more than just the color of the playrange, changing them can make for a very odd looking computer display.

You can grab and slide the beginning and end of the play range. Of course you have to be able to see them to do that. Some other visible marker would be a useful thing.

I think that specifically/technically the path of its center of gravity (not necessarily any one body part) is a parabola, but other than that, a big YES! to everything. Well, I did qualify that with a "pretty much".

Your father immortalized in splines! On the ears... Those are a challenge. When I was trying to do ears for my Al Capone head I started out by just making the splines along the obvious contours an peaks and valleys, even if they didn't link up. For example there's an obvious contour running from the front, over the top and down the back of the rim to the ear lobe. And another one just side that that makes the inside of that curled edge. Eventually I had what looked like a contour map of the ear. Not every spline was a complete loop, some just outlined a particular bump and stopped. Then I experimented with running splines across those contour lines to fill in the patches. Eventually i got an ear. You can also do a simple dish for an ear. That's all Pixar does now, they don't even bother with ear holes.

This isn't a substantial tutorial but as it may be helpful I'll share these exchanges I had with several people on the 11Sec club forum who were having trouble doing what is a rather essential body mechanics basic, jumping. They were trying to animate the "Pixar" lamp jumping with results like this: PixoH.mov (NOT done in A:M ) my response was and later, with examples

I'll add that if v16 is running fine you can copy the master0.lic file from it to your v17 folder and that should enable v17.

Yeah, talk your boss down to a minute or 30 seconds for a trailer. Two minutes would have to be amazing to keep people's attention.

I think it was the "Personalization" control panel. I never really found a specific control, but I set it back to plain vanilla Windows 95 colors.

On the PC that turns out to be an interface color adjustment you make on some Windows control panel, so I presume there is some similar Mac control panel too. I discovered this only because some PC color schemes made the color difference invisible.

Congratulations on the release of the game! It looks good.

The looks BBC quality!

Now you're scaring people off! But I'll enter!

Happy birthday! (He's probably out scaring cows with that RC helicopter)

If that's v17 and you can make a sample PRJ that does that , that would make a good bug report.