robcat2075

Don't worry... it only take a mere 10 years of constant daily use to become proficient. But seriously... because toplogy is so important, A:M does take a bit more advance strategery than other modeling paradigms. It's easy to build the bevels into a shape, difficult to add them later. The hard part is recognizing the easy way first.

another example

A few boulders might help the effect. Model a rough lump and put a few larger ones inthe foregournd and smaller ones in the mid ground and maybe none in the distance. There are several Darksim shaders included with A:M that make terrain-looking surfaces. If you do some hunting on "grayscale elevation map" you may find an image that could be applied as a displacement map to give you more surface detail. This one isn't quite a proper elevation map but it's similar, height is represented as brightness:

Making beveled n-gons the A:M way... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=352714

I tried this... I exported my Chor action as an action, loaded the action, deleted my original chor action and dropped the exported action back onto the character, then Baked all Actions with a tolerance of 0 and I got a key on every frame on every bone.

Generally you should build the bevel into any lathe or extrusion profile before you lathe or extrude. That covers most cases. For flat shapes, the AI wizard will import an outline and put a bevel all around the edge. Can you picture other cases are you trying to do?

Sent. Thanks for letting me do a shot! This turned out to be quite a challenge as i have never worked with a character with such short proportions before. It also took me a long time to come up with a performance. But now it's done!

And I'll note that if this is something you should end up doing frequently, you can make a Selection Filter of the bones you are about to delete, making it easy to select them in future instances.

I think this may be done. Close enough? NoMatterC_2.mov

Thanks, Fuchur, and thanks for being the go-to guy for A:M-to-game knowledge!

For control freaks who need to precisely choreograph the coin's death... here's an all manual approach, made easy with bones: CoinRoll_600.mov mp4 version: CoinRoll_600.mp4 RollingCoin03.prj the "Ground level" bone moves the coin around the center. The "axis" bone is a child of the "Ground level" bone and is the axis of the coin and has two poses. One pose keeps it tilted toward the origin of the "Ground level" bone. The other is a slider that moves it closer to the origin of the "Ground level" bone. I only had to make keyframes at the beginning and the end: the "Ground level" bone turns 1440°, 4 revolutions the "axis" bone is spun on Z to make the coin "roll" ( I just eyeballed it quickly, it's not exact here.) the slider moves from 0 to 100 % to move the coin closer to the center.

Muscle animation is for meshes that you need to make some shape-changing change to. A rolling coin wouldn't need to do that. Animating it with bones sounds most likely.

He's very flexible!

Remote control greetings!

What is that?

It's Real Close Now. NoMatterB_2.mov

Best wishes, Paul V.!

If that's v16, screencam it, that would be a good A:M report.

Successories! Looks like one little patch isn't taking its decal well. Maybe a CP got moved?

I think its greatest use may be for quickly blocking in mouth poses for dialog, something that typically involves a number of bones or controls that , for polishing and nuance, need to be not locked to each other as a pose slider control does. There's a $200 add-on for Maya that has the same functionality.

You have to try to imagine where the center of all that mass is. The center of gravity on a person varies depending on how he's standing or bending or crouching or slouching or whatever.

It downloaded for me. Try later or possibly with another browser.

Mine is not really an exploration of the best timing. It's in the ball park, but there are others. Mostly I just wanted to show it's possible to pose his weight farther forward so when he's jumping it really is over his toes when he is pushing with his legs. All your legs can really do is push your body straight away from where ever they are touching. So if you want to go straight away from the earth (up) you need the body to be up from (above) the contact point. If the weight is not directly over, some front or back motion will happen. Look at these three cases. The blue arrow is where they are contacting the ground. Where is each one's mass in relation to that point? The first one is obviously not able to jump straight up from his pose. the second is close but sill has his mass behind the contact point. Only the last one of these is really posed to go straight up when he straightens out

How about putting the sky on a plate behind him so the camera can still move in?

Will the lighting be brighter on my shot? Right now it's so dark I can't see anything unless I turn on the wireframe.