robcat2075

If you need audio, do a quick shaded render Quicktime movie of your segment also. That will include synched sound which I can match up with your image sequence in post.

"knee pops" are a persistent problem in CG walks. Basically... - the knee goes forward as the leg moves forward into the next step, -then is drawn back as the leg is pulled straighter to put the foot down, -then is pushed forward again as the leg bends into the squash pose. And when these reversals happen in a few frames it's an un natural "pop". This much is probably obvious to you already. In this case, most of the problem is that the knee is going too far forward in the first motion because... the foot is being lifted too high when it is brought forward. The higher the foot is lifted, the farther forward the knee has to go just because of the geometry of the bones. Watch my videos on posing out a basic walk and pay attention to how the lifted foot is only barely skimming the ground as it is brought forward. For almost the entire travel either the toe or heel is clearing the ground just enough to not drag. We *think* we have lifted the foot high because, initially, the heel is peeled quite a bit off the ground (to get the toe off at all) and perhaps because of the work involved in moving the entire leg. I think I also plotted out the forward motion of a knee in that vid. In a normal walk it never goes backwards in real space. It may move slower than the rest of the body but it's always moving forward. So it is geometrically possible to walk without popping the knee, but hard to manuever in CG. Last ditch resort... If your legs are rigged to be scalable you can adjust that at moments to hide the pops. Sometimes just a few % of scaling is enough to pull the knee back to where you want it. Pixar animators do that. But do that after you have done everything else to fix the proper motion of the walk. Fix knee pops last in walks. Get all the other motion working right first. Another note, not specifically knee related... he is lifting his rear foot off the ground at the same instant the front foot is landing. That's too soon unless he's almost into a jog. The rear foot and toe have the task of pushing the body forward onto the newly planted leg so they wont' leave the ground so soon. Look at my vid and count frames to see there is that span of time where both feet are on the ground. Also... i think the landing foot is taking too long to settle flat on the ground. that usually gets slapped down in a frame or two or three because of the weight of the body on the leg. You can recompress to a smaller codec in A:M or in QT Pro.

Feel free to polish madness... breeze... ratio? Easier for me to download frames

Yes, painstakingly warbled in Audacity.

Did anyone ever determine an inexpensive path to making a 24p DVD?

If you sent a link, I haven't downloaded anything yet. The only person that I know of who sent me an actual file is JohnL3D and I downloaded that but haven't' looked at it yet.

I'm trying my damndest to get it done! I'll hold the train for you, since I'm holding it for me too.

That will work and is probably faster than what I was doing which was dragging and sliding on the translate values while watching a progressive render. When you paste your values it's better to paste them into the instance of the material in the group rather than in the original material. As far as I know, there's no way to apply a material to a group while in an Action (or a Pose) like you can a decal. That would very powerful if we could distort a model in a pose and apply a material. I don't think placement is important for matcap since it doesn't have 3D details like combiner materials do. Let me know if I'm wrong.

There isn't a rig "from" V13 that's not in any other. Short answers aren't going to do it. You need to tell us A LOT more about what you have. Show a screen capture of the bone hierarchy in the PWS.

where did you get the rig from?

groups have priority depending depending on what order they are in the list. I think lower is higher. try moving the window group below the body group which is probably overriding the window attributes. (that's still a lot of splines there. Did you really need them all?)

I can't make that happen. Delete that channel in the PWS.

A persistent blip in A:M is that reflective surfaces don't correctly reflect the camera background color which serves as the "sky" color in most scenes. To get a blue sky reflecting in your chrome you'll need to put a blue sky dome over your scene.

If this were re-rendered with AO , a way would need to be found to make the sidewalk match the background as with Nancy's lighting.

I'm not going have my own segment finished by the 20th so if anyone is panicking about their own piece it's ok to go over a few days. Let us know if you're on the way.

The decal takes its vertical placement from however you place it on the screen. The object doesn't have to be centered vertically on Y=0 I've never tried the others.

It looks more "there" with the AO. Would it be OK to have someone render it, Nancy?

Do a commentary track too.

Can you show the bad result? A spherical map wraps around an object rather like a Mercator map would fit onto a globe. Your target shape needs to be centered on 0 on the X and Z axi when you do the apply. If it's a body part that normally isn't, make an action that moves it there and apply in the action.

The most important part will be to have things around the chrome that reflect in it.

That importer started life as the Font importer. Then someone got the idea that if you had a font creator program you could make outlines for just about anything in it and send them to A:M via the Font importer. then someone thought "why need a font program to make just outlines?" and a new version was made that accepted outlines in .AI format since that was about the only universal format out there. If there were another single format that every program could output it would probably be a simple change. Does every program do eps now? I dont' know. New thought... it seems adobe's early .AI formats were very close to .eps. Is there some simple text editor change one could make to .eps files to make them appear as proper .ai files?

Bird Beak, step by step. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=38810

Ya know what would be useful... if you could take any flat outline you've drawn with a spline in A:M and do with it what the AI importer does with AI outlines.

I guess .ai is a proprietary format so the open source apps can't do it?

Good idea. I've already cashed the check, though.