robcat2075

The "It just crashes all the time" crashes suggest a video card driver problem.

I like Knight. He has fairly normal human proportions, unlike Thom or Shaggy he has identifiable hips and torso and the AM2001 rig in him is adequate for basic purposes. The upgrade I'd make to him is to re-rig him with TSM2

Serendipitously, there's an effort to update the beginner documentation and you may find the first (and only , so far) installment: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=358113

I'm pretty sure people have been using syntheyes or some other app to do motion tracking for A:M for quite a while. I know I've see examples here. Interaction with other apps? A:M has always been sold and promoted as an end-to-end pipeline for narrative character animation without needing to step out to some other app to do part of it. That is what it is designed and developed for. Outside of that purpose you need to study whether A:M and whatever other app you need to use have enough common elements to exchange assets. I know nothing of writing apps for iPhone so I can't tell you either way if A:M is useful for you. Image formats are pretty much universal. OBJ export from A:M seems to work well for people. Advanced users have animated in A:M and exported with MDD to render in other software when they needed to.

Yes, the camera can zoom in or out to whatever is needed. The camera view is a view through binoculars.

Here's the actual view point from the film. This appears slightly lower than the third story of the building on the other side. Here's a previous view from Mark. This is slightly more to the left of center and a bit higher. I think I prefer this not-exactly-centered viewpoint over the one in the film which looks rather flat. Right of center might be an option to try too. It's not necessary to perch the camera on an actual part of the set, we can hang it from an appropriate point in space.

Here's my view on this... We do need to find a chosen place for the camera.. There are two kind of shots n Rear Window: -the things we see thru the eyes of Jimmy Stewart. These are all from the same point of view on the set (or cheated to fool us into thinking they are) because... this conforms to the premise that we are seeing with the same limitations that Jimmy Stewart has: He's stuck in that one room. -everything else. The camera is not looking thru the eyes of Jimmy Stewart. It's showing him in his apartment and what goes on there. The camera is placed wherever it needs to be to show a detail Our short is made up almost entirely of the first kind. The camera can restrict its view one window or use a wide angle to show more of the set but it doesn't move to a different vantage point. The camera can pan around the set but it doesn't move on a dolly to see from a new location. We need the second kind of shot hardly at all. Perhaps one at the start to establish the premise of a charter looking out a window. Possibly other cutaways like it might be needed if two segments come back that absolutely can not be transitioned between with a piece of camera view, but hopefully a camera transition can always be engineered. We won't have a developing plot like Hitchcock's "Rear Window" does. We are borrowing the technical concept of unifying random events by making them all be seen by one observer. Since we are doing a short and not a feature we can strive to make it appear to be literally one continuous shot and not have to cheat it with with cutaways like Hitchcock has to. We need a camera location that is more like the one in the film, centrally located and few stories high so that the whole set can be explored from that one vantage point. It does not need to be in some window that exists in the set. If you want, I can do the first establishing sequence that sets up the premise and makes it look like we're in a building across from the set and we wont' need to build a whole new building on the set just for that purpose.

Just give us your non-binding opinion of what you regard as the most felicitous view.

Welcome back to A:M! A:M has been dramatically more stable since about v11 and crashes are quite rare now. I use the PC version but the Mac users here seem to be happy with it too. There are no more "upgrades" but you can buy the one-year license version for $79. It is locked to the one computer you install it on but you don't need a CD in the drive anymore to start A:M. After one year, it expires and you buy another one.

Hey mark, what would you pick as the ideal camera viewpoint?

None of those look like they have a big rectangle on them, so it's not the bitmap itself. Next guess, I'd go into the decals folder and "recall" the position of each one and see if perhaps they are missing some portion of the mesh. or... Most of the dress is semitransparent? Does the Group that has that transparency setting in it not include those patches at the back? They would be easy to add back in.

First step.... just look at the decal. Does it have that on it? If it does then it's a simple matter to paint over it, save a new version and point the model to that instead of the original.

I missed that one. Wonderful work!

An "elevator pitch" is about the same amount of information that a trailer or poster might convey to try to interest a ticket buyer in a movie. Ok, so a basic question, why would the teacher change his grade? Was it a mistake grade or something? There are lots of possible reasons. That's why Registrar's Offices have "Grade Change" forms. The grade change problem is the MacGuffin that inserts the characters into interesting situations. I see it as a feature film. a Hockey player because: -A hockey player and a university physics professor are conveniently contrasting characters -It's not quite the overused movie cliche that college football or basketball players are but is not so specialized that it needs lots of explaining to the audience. -A hockey player's physical skills of endurance, speed and accuracy may be more credibly useful in adventure situations than other sport skills would be without being too convenient and on-the-nose as an archer's or javelin thrower's might be. -Needing to retain "academic eligibility" is something most of the audience would would understand and appreciate without having to devote a lot of screen time to explaining it. -Hockey players look better than football or basketball players. I regard stone age and ice age as pretty much the same. Yes there definitely would be quite a bit of ice in this movie but the title "Ice Age" itself has already been used in animated features I believe.

Here's my one-sentence "elevator pitch"... A college hockey player has to get his Science 101 teacher to the Registrar's Office by 5pm to change his "D" to a "C" so he can remain academically eligible, but he has to go back to the Stone Age to find him after the professor gets zapped there in a teleportation experiment gone wrong.

The key is knowing your goal. If you don't know how the skin moves to make a proper smile shape or "oo" shape or whatever, no method is going to get you there. Anzovin makes a "Face machine" for Maya. I've seen the result of someone using it (an other wise competent Maya user) who didn't understand the goal and it looked ghastly.

Lovely and charming!

I'm not trying to rush this before it's ready, just wondering what the state of the state is or if I've missed anything.

Not a mac guy here, but... I recall Steffen creating a script that would let you run multiple instances on a Mac. That's around here somewhere. Before that people were actually making another copy of the whole installation on their hard drive and running the physically separate instance. Try duplicating the whole folder.

Someone said "It's like open source software now, but without the open and without the source"

An intermediate exercise between the basic bounce and the obstacle course might the "light ball, heavy ball" test. That's really a terrible name, since light balls do not necessarily bounce more than heavy balls. It would be better called "bouncy and not-very-bouncy balls". The object is to correctly show balls of different qualities. Something else to try is a ball that takes more than one frame to squash and stretch itself off the ground back off the ground. I'd envision this as a ball larger and more massive than a soccer ball.

This happens only when you used the rotate manipulator? It's a known problem with no known cause yet other than it's something to do with the video card.

The best way is the way that gets the job done for you. If you know your goal and know how to get it with pose sliders, that is a good solution. The soulcage guys just showed us a spot they did with a pose slider rigged face and they got it done great.

Node cloner was an easy way to duplicate parts of Materials. Material "Combiners" have branched structures. Node cloner doesn't work with current A:M although it is easy to duplicate /move branches of a material in a text editor. the original set up machine does not work with current A:M files (V13 orlater) TSM2 ( a plugin, not an external program anymore) does still work in 32-bit PC versions of A:M. It does not work in current Mac version of A:M.

Yes, I only recommend this to make the model, not for rigging it.