robcat2075

There are still spring tools in the interface I dont' know if they still work, but there's a "Dynamics Mode" button sitting between the Chor and Skel buttons. I never used it for anything but cloth and never got far with that. Current cloth is WAY more useful.

Thinking out loud here... I bet there are a few vertebra that are like "keyframes" with pretty much straight morphing inbetween them. You could make one master vertebra, with a pose slider to transition it through the key forms. Use Multiple Models On Path to distribute a bunch of copies along a spine path then step through them to tweak the pose setting on each copy of the model. Quick example...

I think smaller bevels on the planks.

Fearsome! I bet AO or FakeAO would do as well and faster than radiosity.

It's OK to ask questions as long as it's OK that we may not have useful answers I'm nearly completely "Game" oblivious. I'm not drawn to play them. They are graphically interesting but the actual game always seems tedious to me so that's why i don't follow that universe much and dont' have much advice to offer on it. The one bit of game commentary I'm aware of is the Penny Arcade webcomic. That seems to have a huge following but I haven't looked at it in a year.

I haven't followed the entire conversation but as far as the good idea/bad idea question... it seems like anything involving animation or games or animation and games is stepping into a brutally competitive and crowded environment.

Is that when Animation:Apprentice came out? Could be...

I thought we established several times here that the current licenses aren't transportable. You have a physical v16 CD? I didn't know that even existed.

The master lic isn't transferable to a different machine, is that what you are trying to do?

that looks nice! What do the white marks on the struts signify? The wings look a bit flattish. Are they really that thin?

I was looking Treasure chest images... the classic chests seem to have a metal corner piece that holds the boards together, and I guess the nails or screws go through that. I wonder why wooden chests don't rot and decay when they are buried in the ground?

But this still needs that plug int that we dont' have any more?

The alpha channel will make the image transparent (to a compositing program) where ever the camera background color shows. If you want alpha channel in a Quicktime .mov file, that is one of the rare times you will want to choose "Animation" as your quicktime codec.

Alpha channels are good when you want to put a computer graphic over some other image such as live action. Basically it makes the background of the computer graphic transparent and lets you use any colors you want without worrying about using a screen color. Color keying is for when you need to place some live action element over another image such as a computer graphic background.

Those look effective! How about some antenna or something on the space ship? I'll note that you can avoid the greenscreening complication by rendering with an alpha channel and using your video editor to composite that way. Presuming your editor understands alpha channels and it probably does. If your video editor has other codec choices you can probably get a much smaller file-size too.

On older versions of A:M the import would appear to freeze A:M but it was really still working, most models would finish if you gave them enough time, perhaps many hours. Resave it as an MDL for normal loading later. Import is faster in V16 but you still have to wait it out a bit for large models.

Possible alternate method.... use some lights set to negative intensity to cast darkness on the chair to give the impression of a shadow.

Something like this with separately modeled boards would be easier to drop materials on and get a look as if it were made of wooden planks.

I can't see much in the image you posted, it looks very dark here. However, DOF in regular render (not Multi-pass) doesn't work well with the default camera background. that may be your trouble. Put a large background-colored patch behind your scene.

The horns definitely moved the needle on the cow!

that one was a bit dark, i have trouble seeing what's there.

He looks quite Seussical!

I took a look at the chor. Can you describe the effect you are trying to get? I'm unclear on the goal.

Lookin' spooky!

Easy way is to paint the LED strip with all lit first and save that as image009, then black out the top LED and save that as image008, then black out the next one and save that as image007... and so on...