robcat2075

You said you weren't having any success at all, I thought that meant you weren't getting anything at all. Sweeper does a better job of ascertaining how to orient the outline. use my same sample PRJ, select the "spline", then >yadayadayada>Sweeper adn use these settings.

Try this sample PRJ ExtruderTest.prj select the "outline" group >Plugins>Wizards>Extruder try these settings: I find I often have to force the screen to refresh before the extrusion becomes visible.

That's alarming. Is it possible your A:M has been infected somehow? Uninstall and delete your A:M (of course, you'll save your master0.lic file) and download a new installer. Scan it just to be safe, then install it again and see if these alerts go away. What program is doing the alerting on your computer?

The set you have is very close already. A courtyard we don't need. The street and sidewalk you have in front of the building is enough if anyone wanted to do something at ground level. My concern is that these double-hung style windows on your set are about half the width of what jimmy Stewart has to look into. That will certainly save on people having to do a lot of decorating of the interiors, but doesn't give much room for visible action inside the room. If the characters could get on a fire escape or ledge or balcony outside their window, that would open up a lot of options for people to do things and still stay true to the Rear Window concept.

Are you saying each person is going to put the camera inside the room after the transition? That's not "Rear Window" Look at that trailer, every one of the views of the rooms is from Jimmy Stewart's perch across the street, the camera never goes inside. that's the Rear Window concept i thought we were doing.

On the set... -could we add a dark alley between two of the buildings to break it up a bit? Preferably positioned so the camera doesn't see all the way down it. -like-wise can we make the buildings not all the same width. -we need a lighting scheme that is more "night" because the during day you really can't see into rooms. -could we add some balconies, ledges, downspouts and/or fire escapes so there's more of an "outside" option for staging? If everything has to happen within the small frame of the windows that's gong to be very limiting. -the decal on the bricks is noticeably repeating exactly with the windows and the same on each building. That looks odd. Can that be varied more? -have we figured out the procedurewith which any segment can be followed by any other segment without an obvious jump cut? That's not clear to me how that will work.

Fae Alba is the producer, he'll want to make a call on that, I imagine.

He just means showing it. I haven't given it to anyone.

I think those cracks are a decal. A color decal and a bump or displacement decal.

btw, I was thinking the other day that SurfaceConstraint might be the solution to the "train problem", the task of keeping both front and back wheels of a train car on a path. But I haven't investigated further.

restarting the computer he means. You have tried restarting your mac, right?

TAoA:M main goal is to show you how to install a premade rig, AM2001 in that case. For most purposes a standard pre-made rig is the way to go. Lots of features for minimum effort. But for curious users like yourself who want to make their own rig we should either do a better job of explaining why/how a rig works... OR do a better job of talking them out of trying to make their own rig. Your penguin is an example of how one-size-fits all never fits perfectly. I don't know that TAoA:M could ever be comprehensive enough that a new user would instinctively see that solution on his own. Every character has special cases that require some experimenting and trial balloons. Experience, either acquired or borrowed is the only way to navigate that, i think.

I guess i never answered Roger's original question... should we use Smartskin here? We could. I think we could get the same fix with Smartskin, but since you're resculpting CPs in a Smartskin you have to know exactly what you want before you start. I like the way the CP weighting dialog and constraint enforcements let me quickly experiment with different levels of results by just changing a percentage value.

Those look fabulous!

The long-awaited conclusion, Part C, in which we create the baggy pantsed Penguin look. This is a case where our traditional tactic of rotating spline rings around a joint doesn't get the look we want and we need to look deeper into A:M's rigging toolbox for an alternate strategy. This one runs a bit longer due to some unexpected bumps but you get to see me claw my way out of them. Penguin_Rigging_C_Weighting_CPs.mov

Here's an alternate strategy for getting a foot bone at the heel without adding that extra Foot Control bone. Although I called the extra bone a "mistake" it's really a matter of workflow and there are advantages either way. Kinematic_with_Offset.mov This is not "Part 3" yet.

I haven't forgotten part 3. I found a possible bug in a plugin and got distracted with that. But I'll get to part 3. In the meantime, here's a small goof fix tidbit: Mirror_a_Bone_Manually.mov

I like that! I'll try to take a more detailed look at it. One thing I notice first is the way her arm and sword move as a rigid unit at the end of her second swing, everything reverses direction instantly with no overlap. More generally... that's got to be a heavy sword but she swings it about as if it were a cardboard prop. I don't know much about sword play. One thing that bothers me in movies is that they always look like they are trying to miss (which they are), but your character doesn't look like she's trying to miss!

I'm going to say you're doing something fundamentally wrong. I can't think of a time that weights have disappeared on me. Can you show a case of it happening?

I tell people A:M is not intended to provide every possible means of CG production, A:M is intended as an end-to-end pipeline for narrative animation, meaning you want to tell stories with characters. Do you want to pre-test the optics of a 17-element zoom lens you've designed? A:M is not for that. Do you want to study the efficiency of a coolant flowing through an internal combustion engine? A:M is not for that. But if you want to tell a story about a guy who sees something very odd with his zoom lens or a story about someone who gets stranded in a strange place when his engine overheats, that's what people do with A:M. My pitch would be... buy the $80 subscription, give it a fair shot and if you love it the extras will be there waiting for you.

I found my comparison thread... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...80&hl=brand I guess A:M was more than a hair faster. Fine print: My knowledge of Maya is far less than that of A:M, it's possible I wasn't using Maya to its full advantage. But i was following the manual to set things up as similarly as possible. A sun light is a sun light and a cylinder is a cylinder, I figure. It's also possible that, like A:M, Maya has become more clever and faster since that 2007 version. I haven't bothered to upgrade Maya to find out; A:M already does everything I need.

Can you post one of the decals?

Regarding the speed of your CPU...anything you have in a computer today is way better than what we had a few years ago and still did lots of stuff with. There will always be something faster out there teasing us.

In the interest of full disclosure one should note that GPU in A:M is in the very earliest stages of development. There isn't a beta of it we can all test yet and we dont' know how much of A:M's functionality can be made to work with things like that. A:M renders about the same speed as other similar apps that do 3D. A while back I compared the speed of A:M vs. Maya on CPU intensive scenes and found that they were either the same or A:M was a hair faster. That was with v13, A:M has gotten about 50% faster since then.

Thanks Rodney! I just happen to be reading a book on storyboarding at this time.