robcat2075

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.

One tactic for the tip is to bring all four splines forward in stead of just two and join them in a conventional x crossing. That will put four three pointers on the tip of the beak which is ok. Or bring a whole spline ring forward and scale it very samll so you can't see the opening. But how about something a bit more beakish like this: Beak.mdl It's always tempting to try to bend a basic primitive into shape but i think modeling the contours from scratch gives more satisfying results.

William Kevin Detwiler (aka detbear on the forum) hired me to adapt my rocket animation as a logo treatment. And here it is: The string looks a bit steppy in this low res version, the final version was 720HD. The music is just a temporary placeholder I made.

Well... The camera is an object IN the Chor. You can constrain it (both Translate and Rotate constraints) to make it behave as if it were a child of the null. Or, as you surmise, you can make a new model and add a camera to it which will be like a bone that you can make a child of another bone or Null.

It was the most inexpensive car you could buy here. About $1700 in the 60's. I think i recall a promotion once that put it at $999. Even a very, very cheap Detroit car was $1900+, most were in the $2500-4000 range. And the whole hippie/Love Bug thing made it attractive.

You could use the dupe wizard to spin a small shape around ins spiral and then copy one resulting spline to use as your path. Or... you could make the camera a child of a Null that would be at the center of your spiral. Then rotate and move the Null, the camera will spin aroudn it.

The range of the chor is independent of the play range of the timeline. The chor range tells A:M how long to do things like baking cloth or particles. But play range is whatever time span you decide to play. It's just a few clicks to set it.

Good looking character! Is he making an appearance in Bus Stop?

There's only 256 shades of gray in 24 bit color. Anything in between 134,134,134 and 135,135,135 for example, has to be simulated with something like 135,134,134 which will not be pure gray but red tinted. That's the first problem. In a long stretched out gradient like you have it may be visible. Then when you compress to DVD or any digital TV format precision gets even worse. The DVD codec will compress areas of similar color to the same color making banding more obvious. I see professional DVDs with obvious banding and some where it's not apparent. It may be that CG images are worse because they don't have film grain noise to break things up.

Some lens flare settings will create actual visible circles or bands because real lens do that sort of thing as artifacts of the lenses. That banding looks quite slight, it may just be the limitation of 8 bit color. OpenEXR format has more precision but it can't change the fact that your display is almost certainly 8 bits per color also. I have an LCD display and a CRT and i find the LCD is much worse when it comes to banding. This is true with your sample image when i compare it on both. I think most LCDs are doing tricks to approximate 24bit color but dont' really do it like CRTs can. Lens flare and other post effects aren't included in alpha buffers. If you absolutely have to composit a flare from A:M into something else, do a pass with everything else black and use a compositing mode to add it to your final image in whatever app you are using to composite with.