robcat2075

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...

I made my image sequence in After effects by animating the a white rectangle to move from the bottom to the top of the black rectangle in 10 frames. Each frame got saved as a JPG with a frame number in the filename meter000.jpg meter001,jpg meter002.jpg... But you don't need After Effects. You could paint ten frames in a paint program and save them with those incremented filenames. Then on the Images folder in A:M and choose to import an "animation or image sequence"

The simplest solution is to make a Pose that moves both the knob and the LED lights together: SimpleMeter.mov

What sort of a chest is this? A pirate chest?

So if the slider moves up the lights move up? How about.... you make a image series of the lights progressing from none on to all on and use a pose to link the "frame" property of that image sequence to the position of the slider.

Are they moving in response to a slider on the console or in response to "sound"?

At AnimationMentor the next assignment would be a ball bouncing off various walls and obstacles. The challenge is to correctly handle bounces and rolls off surfaces that are not horizontal. Also the ball had to jump off the initial surface on its own.

Your squetchy bounce looks great! Here are some notes: squashNotes_200.mov

I don't really have a great eye for this yet, so I'm still getting used to it. Initially, it felt like the ball hung in the air a little long, but the more I look at ball bounces, the more correct it appears. Getting an eye for it is most of the battle. The hang time around the top is something you can play with a bit in animation. My non-pointy approximate parabolas tend to make it a bit longer than normal. Film history story...Silent films started out being shot at fairly low frame rates in the 12-16 fps range. Theater owners found they could get in more shows by speeding up the projector a bit. Film makers tried to counter this by shooting their films at higher frame rates and theater owners countered back by speeding up the projector more. All thru the 10's and 20's there was this frame rate arms race going on, and audiences got accustomed to seeing most motion faster than real-life but accepting that as normal. When sound came in and standardized frame rates and everything had to be shot and projected at the same speed audiences commented that it all looked like it was moving in slow motion!

Now don't those just... feel... better? A lot better. They dont' have the rushed look that the previous takes did. Picky points: If this were for a class, I'd leave the stripe off on a non-rotating ball test, just to avoid the rigid look of it being motionless. Unless they demand a stripe on their non-rotating ball. The moving ball looks fine and slows down appropriately. Maybe it would benefit from an even more gradual slow out at the end. You have a single continuous curve to slow the ball's horizontal motion. Straight line segments between the impact points might be more accurate (the ground can't slow the ball down while it's in the air) but not significant at this time scale. On moving ball tests I've found it effective to start on the upswing, maybe about 1/3 from the top, as if it had been tossed up. It gives the viewer a bit of time to catch up with the ball once it starts moving. It's curve of course would be a mirror of the curve from the peak. Try a squetchy ball next. My basic theory of squetchy balls is to treat the squetch as overlapping motion. A stripe on a squetchy ball is a problem that is difficult to treat well.

Here's an interesting visualization. I've taken the dropped ball and moved it sideways which is much like plotting vertical motion versus time, which is what our channels in A:M do. Theoretically these are near-exact parabolas being traced out. They are a bit sharper at the top and flatter on the sides than I tend to come up with just by eyeballing the shape. BallDropTime.mov I did this with "Time Echo" in After Effects.

Very Charming!

For the moment leave out the squetch and rotation and just do one ball bouncing in place and one that travels from left to right across the screen as it bounces and lets look at those.

Here's my sermon about Bouncing Ball. It's not really about being able to make great bouncing balls. The occasions for actual bouncing balls in animation scenes are pretty few. I don't think there was a single bouncing ball in all of TWO. It's hard to think of any big studio feature that has any significant bouncing ball activity. It IS about animating an object so that is appears to be plausibly under the influence of gravity. That happens all the time in character animation. Anytime a character steps, hops, lurches, falls, or just shifts his weight you have to imply there is gravity at work or you get that floaty, weightless look. It's exceedingly rare that we visibly caricature gravity. Mostly we try to get it very right, if we cheat it it still has to be plausible, not obviously wrong. We use bouncing ball for our first attempts in this gravity thing because it's easy to revise and simplifies the problem down to one mass rather than the 50 or so connected masses of a character. If you can't get it right with the simple ball, you can't get it right with more complicated models. David knows this already, that's why he's doing these bouncing ball exercises, but I say this for anyone else looking in, wondering why Bouncing Ball is such a big deal. David, here's some further explanation of my theory of using that first curve to inform your later bounces... UsingOriginalFall.mov

If you select it in the PWS do you at least get a bounding box showing where it is?

I haven't really followed mo cap closely. Is the BVH an object in the Objects folder before you put it in your Action?