robcat2075

Simple lights will give nice shading on lit surfaces, but the shadow areas will be rather over-simple without some technique such as AO. Why not use the AO effect in your lighting? If you are on v15 you can use the v16 too. less certain about what you mean here. My advice for anything new is to start with simple test cases. A cape? Start with just dropping a square of cloth on a ball to see what various setting do. When you get that looking good then try using those settings on a cape on a stationary character and see if it hangs right. Then try moving him.

have at it! No rush here.

got it, thanks!

Yes, if yours doesn't have a soundtrack yet, make a sound track! And I still want to see commentary tracks from everyone. Simple procedure: -load up your animation in Quicktime player -Start Audacity or some other sound recording software -Press Record on Audacity -say "3... 2... 1..." then press Play on Quicktime and record your commentary. Save your commentary in a Wav.

So send it to me.

Don't expect it to pop out overnight. I'll need to contrive some music or sound for the ones without sound, I'll need to study them to figure out the most felicitous order, I'll need to animate the bus transitions, I'll need to find a bus i can use, and I'll need to finish my segment.

You want actual shadow? That will need a real light. Daylight is pretty strong. agep had some notes on what you are looking to do here.

ya know... maybe something to break up the reflections in the floor so they are not quite so perfect. Maybe slightly wavy or blurry or not all quite so identically aligned?

I call this "the Face Contraption" I made a replacement neck.mdl component for TSM2Builder to call What you do is move and scale a few key parent bones into place to fit the clusters to your face mesh. Then TSM rigger uses my new neck script to create all the fanbones and constraints and pose sliders and control bones and hide everything you don't need to see. Of course you still have to attach CPs and weighting the cheeks is still complicated I used it for a bunch of characters I rigged for Kevin Detwiler and it sped up my work but it never got to the point of being simple enough to throw out on the forum and expect that anyone else would "get it" and not get frustrated. When Kevin gets his show done I'll be able to put a clip up and people can see it working.

I've found the problem; you can't specify "on/off" in a line that also specifies "in folder" in on/off pose unprefixed "eyebrow middle averaging" in folder "Setups - do not touch" compensated orient like constrain "eyebrowleftMiddleOrigin" to "eyebrowleftOuterGeom" It eluded me because if I just ran the script with the first line the relationship and folder would get created (with no bones, of course) but if I added second line I'd get the crash, making it look like the second line was the problem. But if i take the "on/off" out, both lines will be performed correctly. This only took me a week to chase down.

Only new clue so far is that sometimes the bones involved don't display the ring at the tip that bones normally do. Anyone know what causes that?

I'm using v15 and also tried v13, but no go so far.

By the process of elimination I've found one line in my TSM2 script that is causing a crash. The second line here: in on/off pose unprefixed "eyebrow middle averaging" in folder "Setups - do not touch" compensated orient like constrain "eyebrowleftMiddleOrigin" to "eyebrowleftOuterGeom" My experience is that when a script crashes TSM2 it is because a bone name in quotes is misspelled. (A misspelled script command only causes TSM2 to give up without a crash.) But both those bone names are spelled correctly including capitalization. I can make this constraint manually so it's not an illegal circular constraint.

inquire about that. I think when a new version comes out all the variants get updated

You really ought to do the free update to v15j+, to make sure you're not dealing with some bug that's been fixed and to get all the other fixes and updates. However... there was a big change with v15f regarding how plugins had to be compiled. It *may* be that your AMxTex plugin really wants to be used in a version before v15f. You might install some prior version on one PC to try. Or that v13 you have a disk for.

You did put the model in a chor to see it change over time?

fortunately, the dose of reality thing is part of his goal

So where do i find it?

A:M is designed to store its last configuration in the registry so a user can easily pickup where he left off. As a general rule I'd have each student do a "Reset settings" at the start of each exercise and get them used to closing that Library window and other startup rituals. I like Rodney's idea of running a script that copies clean copies of everything you need to the various satellite computers before your class. Absent a script, if you can see the satellite HDs from your station it would be a matter of preparing a master folder you can copy the contents from to the matching folder on the satellite. One drop and drag per machine. The imagery for the presets is actually contained in the .pre file. A preset doesn't appear and yet is present in that station's A:M folder? Being a methodical person I'd compare files between a station that displayed them and a station that didn't. I see six presets in my preset folder If the fault isn't obvious I'd just reinstall A:M on that machine. (I never use the presets. I check the "advanced" button that enables setting individual render parameters.) "Final" Option settings "Final" Output settings and "Save Options" settings (Compression) You just gotta present the change the right way: "Treasured students... that video showed one way... but I'm going to show you the way the real hard-drinkin' CG artists do it..." Dragging also works from the windows interface. You can drag a .mdl or .prj or .cho file from an open folder into A:M and it will be loaded into the PWS then you can drag a model into a chor, or >edit it.

I'll give it a try!

Welcome back! Looks very cool. Don't miss the very fast "FakeAO" plugin elsewhere here that forum member jenpy has created. That ought to be a boon to people doing interior like yourself.

I think you can also key the "frame" prop of an image sequence to be controlled by the pose.

on the pose's name in the Pose slider window while you are editing it>Settings You can then set min and max values for the pose. Set 0 and 8 and the slider will have 9 steps although you can still enter decimal values in the numeric field.

Got it. Thanks!

Wow! that was fast turnaround! I like that. Congratulations on the gig! I bet they'll want more spots in the future.