robcat2075

Looks cool! How much is a bus ride in Trondheim these days?

Hand profiles:

On the dragon, I think a small hint of a claw or nail at the end of the toes would add some nice detail. Hands and feet are basically wedge shapes , thicker at the base and tapering out to the end of the digits. That would help make them more natural looking.

Don't worry too much about patch count. 2X the patch count doesn't make for 2X the render. The way the abdomen overhangs the legs bothers me but you're probably going to model clothes over that anyway.

In most other programs, graphic or or otherwise, saving is saving is saving everything you see before you. In A:M, the desire to reuse models and actions and stuff made it necessary to add the possibility of saving them as separate files that can be used by later by other chors or PRJs.

Your doing a walk cycle on a path, perhaps? My first guess is that you have inadvertently made some keyframes on the arms in the chor action, overriding the animation you have in the walk cycle action. There's a video in this post that talks about precedence of actions: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=358986

Follow that car! Do they not use salt on the roads in winter in Canada? In Minnesota a car like that would have big rust holes and dried slush stains. As soon as you drive it off the lot.

Fortunately you can scale them in the chor if you dont' want to scale them in the model, although both should be fine.

This problem of understanding what gets saved when is something I want NewTaoA:M to cover. I've started it by having them just save PRJs in the first exercise and then I hope to introduce the various complications as other exercises run into them. Thank you! I hereby declare you paid up in advance for quite a long time for any future question having you may have.

Can you post that PRJ?

Hi Holly, It's hard to know what to suggest when I'm not sure what your "goal" is. But I guess you feel it's coming out too dark other than the floor. -You might try actually darkening the floor so it's not such a contrast to the walls -you might position very fuzzy, wide Kleig light at the center of the hotspots, pointing up, to simulate the light that would bounce off the floor and illuminate the surroundings a bit more. -possibly, you might reduce the "attenuation" property of the lights so their light doesn't die out so quickly.

Tell me if these clear it up... Rule 1: If you save anything, using the same file-name you had before, your previous version of that file is gone. That has been true since the dawn of time. If you've changed something, always save your new version with a new name. Version numbers are great for this. A:M special rules: Rule 2: If you make something new (a model, chor, material or action) in a Project and save the Project, the new thing is built into the PRJ file. Rule 3: if you save a model, chor, material or action from your Project, it is no longer built into your PRJ. Your PRJ now has a only a link to that item's saved file. Rule 4: If you save the PRJ in Rule 3 now, it will be saved with that link and will look for the saved item when you later reload that PRJ. Rule 5: If you dont' save that PRJ in Rule 3, your old version of the PRJ still has the built-in model, in whatever state it was in when that PRJ was saved and does not have a link to the new version of the item that you saved out in Rule 3. Rule 6: If you load something (a model, chor, material or action) into a Project, it is not yet built into your PRJ. It is like the items in Rule 3, it is only linked to by the PRJ. Rule 7: IF you edit the thing (a model, chor, material or action) you loaded into your PRJ in Rule 6 and save the PRJ, this forces a same-name save on the edited thing also, overwriting the file you loaded previously. Rule 8: If you load something (a model, chor, material or action) into a Project, and embed it, it is now copied and built into your PRJ. It is no longer linked to the file on disk you loaded. That file on disk is still there, but your PRJ no longer looks to it nor uses it.

It's just modeled hair, right? maybe it's not assigned to the right bone?

I like that! notes: - on the cut-zoom to the lizard's head, I think the difference in sizes needs to be greater to sell that effect - the flat-footed walk (0:26) will look stiff and weightless. - don't do a bent knee walk. It's a classic comic strip convention but no one actually walks like that, it doesn't transfer to animation. - he's instantaneously rebounding off the bottom of his walk. That will always look jerky. - the hip swinging of the lizards around 1:16 needs to be much bigger to read in the long shot - the "elbow" of the lizard is popping the wrong way in the close ups of the lizard dances. - When the guy with the heart-hole stands up there's a weird pop to the right at the end. -when you turn the lizard head dont' just swivel it on the end of the neck, pose the whole neck/head line as one flexible curve. - the close up of the lips is hard to do. Instead of having it drift open, use a slight anticipation and slow into the open pose. The right mouth in this comparison anticipates before opening and slows into the open position. lips.mov

That's looking good!

that looks snazzy! Twoing! If your wood is a Material you can scale in in its properties.

May all the flags of Zandoria fly high today. Happy birthday! (for recent forum joiners, Will is the creator of the mascot that appears during boot up of current A:M versions, "Tar of Zandoria")

I have a vague recollection of a Martin's Minute about how SoftImage had tried to claim that.

Perhaps the most important thing is to understand what you are saving and why you are saving it. Then you can do anything you want.

Welcome back! There is a... remedy... for that. In the camera's properties change "Type" from Perspective to Orthogonal. Note that this is not the "Shortcut to camera" properties but the original camera in the Objects folder that needs to be altered.

One of the classics!

Someone familiar with that hand rig should chime in but i presume it has the essential geometry bones that CPs should be assigned to, not to any control bones. Does that makes sense?

There are some useful links in this thread: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...19&hl=jacob

Welcome to the forum JohnP! AFAIK, you dont' really constrain a path to a surface. A path is a spline and you would have to manually shape that spline to follow your ground surface. (There is a tool coming in v17 that will conform a spline to another mesh's shape.) However, the path constraint itself is a fairly basic thing, it moves an object through space along a path, it's not aware of character animation issues like re-posing feet or a character's posture to accommodate walking up or down an incline. I remember sitting through a Softimage demonstration several years ago where they showed a path constraint that was a bit more aware of this than A:M's. But it still didn't look right. It would not have been acceptable for anything but the most undemanding pre-vis work. In finer animation most walks, inclined or otherwise, will be posed out step-by-step.

If I'm working on animation and the models are already "final" and saved separately then i just save chors and let the chor load whatever models it needs. We did all of TWO like that. When I'm doing experimental stuff like building/rigging a model and maybe have a chor set up that I'm testing it in along the way, I like to save PRJs with everything embedded so I can always backtrack to a complete self-contained environment. And either way I'm always saving with incremented version numbers, I never save over old files.