robcat2075

Good-lookin' Chaplin!

I actually liked the 3/4 view you had before better. Facing him straight into the camera is very flat. On the arms... still too busy. One tactic might be to put one hand on a hip and only gesture with the other one until you go to fold both arms together. I'm not sure what the line is... "I repeat, sir, where is the breeze?"

I'm going to stop looking... too many spoilers!

That is a normals thing. SHIFT 1 will turn the normal pointers on and off so you can see. Or you can turn off "Show back-facing patches" in your render options for shaded mode and see which ones are not pointing out.

Another well-worn animation tip is to avoid symmetrical gestures with the arms and hands. It tends to look stiff and rigid. Humans do it quite a bit but good actors generally don't. If you give one hand a prop to hold like a cup of coffee or a briefcase or have it resting on another surface it's easier think of poses that don't involve symmetrical gesturing with the arms.

Fading a decal FadeDecal.mov

I'll note that if you very much wanted to use a Darktree material and still use Nancy's suggestion to animate the blend property you coudl "bake" the material into a decal.

hmmm... it sounds like Barney Rubble a bit, but it doesn't sound like something from the Flintstones. Is it some other Mel Blanc voice? On Smartskin.. there is some coverage of that in TAoA:M , I forget which chapter. I think a fan bone at each joint might be simpler, however. A note about body mechanics... the natural inclination of the torso is for the top and bottom to act as opposite ends of a lever. If the top (the head and shoulders) goes left, the bottom (hips) go right to balance. If the top goes forward, the bottom goes back to balance. Part of the reason is that the torso is a huge mass that is difficult to move all in one direction at once. Also, because it is a huge mass we tend to keep it centered over our support point on the ground, the feet. Anther useful trick is to dip the hips slightly as they are traveling from one destination to another. Also... feet will look more natural if they are not both pointed straight ahead. The natural tendency is to point them out a bit.

Put the "Modeled, animated and rendered with Martin Hash's Animation:Master" in fine print on the copyright slide. Pixar and Dreamworks give their software a plug in their movies. You can too!

For the material change maybe a material effector would be the easiest manuver.

That looks super, Mark! My one crit upon watching it would be that in some of the dialog you're occasionally cutting too late to the next shot, leaving an awkward pause in there. I just noticed that on a few cuts. But that's a great looking show! (needs an A:M mention in the credits) Perhaps try uploading a Quicktime mov with AAC audio rather than converting to Flash.

I'm guessing either Paul Forewood or Mark Skodacek would be the answer people on this...

I don't think there's a set date yet. I think the public beta arrives when Steffen feels he's done with adding new features and it's just the general torture testing left to do. Short answer... I don't know.

Congrats on the gig!

I wonder if there is a hierarchy that is most transportable and doesn't cause A:M to have look for assets if you transfer it to another drive?

I like the wavy planks, but some of your treasure is going to fall out! Maybe nudge them closer together. I like the larger size planks on the bottom. I think scaling them smaller would get too busy.

Question for someone who really knows the set.... What do we have to key to capture the state of every light and whatever else is affecting the appearance of the set? Is it ALL run by pose sliders?

I am baffled by the idea that the set and fixed camera location are limiting. I've got more ideas for things to do on this set that will be perfectly visible from a fixed camera location than I'll ever have time animate. What is it that someone is proposing to do that requires flying that camera around the set? The BUS STOP scenario was extremely limited, you couldn't even zoom or pan the camera and people still came up with lots of good ideas.

I dont' see a pic.

Also... in the PWS you can drag one model onto another to add it to the second model.

solution for now... These long frames are blank frames? And for some reason you need these frames in the footage? Render the whole thing to targas in shaded mode first. Then just render the frames where the object appears in Final mode. You can set a custom range of frames in render options. In your editor make the footage invisible where ever the shaded frames still show.

Penthouse = that glass thing? If visibility into that is an issue we could just take out every other vertical slat and that would improve the optics as well as swinging the camera across from it.

Here's a test PRJ I just made in v13 VaseTest.prj A vase travels from off screen to on screen to off screen. It took 5 seconds to render 30 frames to TGAs with alpha. That's my long way of saying i can't reproduce that problem based on what i know so far. There must be something more specific about your PRJ.

On SVN... I'm thinking we should not use it at all. It's bit too complicated for an "anyone can play" project like this and even though it could be explained you'd likely spend a lot of time doing it and it might be the initial barrier that stops some people from trying at all. Posting the ZIP on the forum makes it very accessible and email and DropBox are good enough for returning work.

Definitely keep us posted on your progress and the solutions you find along the way.