robcat2075

There's that. Most windows will not be seen at a straight-on angle where that would work. Also, not every thing may happen within the frame of a window. a character may be lean out of the window, may be on the balcony, may be down on the street or in a doorway.

Here's a solution for problem #2 Let's say Nancy, Robert, Gene, Matt and dblhelix all say they are going to do a segment. Each stakes a claim on a location in the set and does their segment. In addition to submitting their rendered footage, they save and submit a chor that has just their camera keyframes in it. Paul, our producer, looks at all the submitted segments and decides that the most felicitous order is Matt, Gene, Robert, dblhelix, Nancy. Paul takes the ending camera keyframe from Matt and the starting keyframe from Gene and pastes them into a new chor that will move the camera from Matt's last position to Gene's starting position. Let's say the move lasts one second. He sends this chor to both Matt and Gene. Matt uses it to render 12 more frames after the end of his animation (the camera swinging away from his characters) and Gene uses it to render 12 frames before the start of his animaiton (the camera continuing to swing over to his characters.) Matt and Gene send their additional frames to Paul. In theory they should hook up exactly. Paul does this for each segment pairing. Paul will need to plan the order of segments so that there is enough distance between each one that at the midpoint of the swing neither segments' characters are visible. Or if he really wants to follow a segment with one that is right next door, he coudl animate the camera motion to temporarily search to some other location in the set before ti reaches it's goal. What if one of the segment makers doesn't render their additional transition frames? Then an insert cut back to voyeur Thom could be used as a transition

We have two problems to solve... 1) making sure everyone isn't using the same 2 or three windows out of the 20+ possibilities. We might avoid that by having people claim a window, first-come-first-served style, and somewhere record windows as "taken" so everyone knows. There is the problem that some people will claim a window and not get a segment finished but we could either live with that or allow some light overlap on the claims if there are more people wanting to play than there are windows available. 2) how to make it possible to transition the binocular view from any window to any window without having to insert a cut back to Thom every time. We could fix the order in advance by assigning it as participants come in, but that doesn't cover the likely hood that some will drop out. It's also likely that the most effective order for the segments will only be apparent after they are all submitted and the editor can assess them.

The one to start with is the smoke and fire tut in TAoA:M. Have you done that ?

Welcome to the A:M forum! When you have questions... someone here has an answer. Perhaps it can be!

So we need to think of a way to make continuous transition work without looking like too much of a cheat and without needing to cut back to Thom every single time.

that's why i called it "the Train Problem"

One potential transitional device would be to cut back to our Voyeur (Thom?) briefly to show him shifting his binoculars to a new view, then cut to the new segment, as they do sometimes in "Rear Window" But i would prefer to be able to do it as a seemingly continuous scene, much like BUS STOP was. Or perhaps cut back to Thom just a few times to break it up a little.

Great crackly material, John! Here's my attempt using a spherical combiner to limit John's crackly material. I transplanted (with a text editor) John's material into the first node of a spherical combiner. I sized Ring1 to make the center area big enough and then sized ring2 to extend the rest of theway past the edge of the object. Spherical scale Y is set to 0 to make it form concentric vertical cylinders rather than concentric spheres. testmat3.prj If you need an irregular area affected by the crackly thing, however, a decal approach is easier.

The spherical combiner can make, for example, a black circle in a white area. It can also make a soft edge to that. If you changed the black attribute to be like the crack material and change the white material to be all default with nothing set it will make the crack material fade out to the edge of what was the black circle and leave everything else to be whatever it was before the material was applied.

remember not to have a bent leg at the heel contact when you're walking.

Regrettably, the TSM2 plugins do not work on the current MacOS. Hash would need to get the source code to fix them for current MacOS and Anzovin hasn't released it. They do work for 32-bit A:M on Windows Other rigging options for mac users would be any of the other premade rigs (read the instructions and follow them) in the "featured Rigs" sub forum.

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.