robcat2075

i won't be able to jump into this on Oct 6 so new deadline October 20 This means if you thought you didn't have enough time to do a segment, you now have 6 weeks to give it a try! Of course you can still turn in your segment on October 6 if you feel you're done.

How about if some particle "blobbies" hit a transparent plane in front of the camera?

Is he originally a gumball machine?

Flash has that power that can align/distribute all the right edges, for example, of several objects simultaneously. But A:M tracks groups by their geometrical center which doesn't lend itself to aligning the edges of dissimilar objects. In any event there is no quick Align/Distribute tool in A:M. I think you're going to have to eyeball it in an orthogonal view.

nice shot. Is the landscape imported from a polygon mesh? I see triangles in it, which are causing creases. Are you using materials for the textures on the landscape? If you "baked" those to decals that would probably speed up the render times.

It sounds like you've moved onto a different problem, this isn't a use of the duplicator wizard. If you want to snap CPs to the grid exactly, select them, >Snap to grid. That snaps in all grid dimensions however. If you need to align a group to just one coordinate, select the CPs, set its pivot (found in properties window) to the place you wish to move to (say, x=10), then scale on X to 0%

Do you mean in other versions it works fine? I'm not sure what you mean by "it only works on the horizontal grid lines" Shoe us what you have after the first row of bricks and what your next dup wiz settings are.

I don't know if the How-to-webcomic series has a thread in the tutorials section, but if not, that would be another place to plug it.

hmmm... is the spline in front, behind or exactly on "zero" I dimly recall having this happen occasionally, but not consistently.

Maybe it could get a small button on the "Choose a Story" page?

Sorry to hear of the data crash, I'm glad you've recovered some of it.

That would be fair. Explain it as a problem with the duplicator wizard. It appears to be working in cm no matter what units A:M is set to. I don't know if that behavior can be altered, but report it anyway.

I recommend you set your options/units to centimeters rather than feet/inches. I don't believe the duplicator wizard recognizes feet/inches. I recommend always working in metric in A:M as that is how all units are stored.

model one brick, make it longest on the X dimension, select it, choose the Duplicator wizard set the X translate to however long your brick is plus some small space set all other parameters to 0, except leave scale at 100% set Method to duplicate set repeat # to something>1 hit oK and you get a row of bricks. then you can select all that and use the Duplicator wiz again to repeat it upward on the vertical axis

Generally a change to a model will show up right away if the same model is being used in a chor. Spacebar will refresh any view. I've noticed a few things, like changing a constraint, that don't always bubble thru. Then i close the chor window and re-open it. In rare cases, I've had to Save the chor to force an update. (If your chor is embedded in the PRJ, save your PRJ instead)

units are the same in both environments. If you put a very large object in the chor, move the camera back or set it to a shorter "focal length" to see it all, just as one does in real life.

The camera view (number pad 1) in the Choreography is always perspective the other numberpad views (front, side...) are usually defaulted to non-perspective. you can switch them with the \ key

It's not hard to rig a spring shape that deforms properly. I used the duplicator wizard to extrude this spiral shape and used "Bone Falloff" to quickly fade the weighting of the CPs from one bone to the other. If I left it at that the cross section of the springs would have flattened as the spring was squished. So... I selected each spline ring individually and used "balance Selected" in the CP weight editor to make the CPs all identical in weight. Now the spring maintains its volume as it is compressed. springH264.mov

I'm watching an MST3K right now and looking at this tom servo character and thought of this thread. But where are the springs? Is it his elbows? He doesn't seem to do much with his arms. It's not like they have to extend much. A displacement texture solution like this might suffice. http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com/2010/03/robot-elbow.html

That's a very elaborate prop! Me, i would have just put a doorknob on it.

Cloth gets angry when it gets caught between deflectors such as in an armpit or inside an elbow. I've had success by deleting geometry on those interior areas. I'd also suggest increasing the "damping" values on your cloth to reduce the constant fluttering.

if it's generally short hair you can use "styling" to give it the direction that fur would have and turn off dynamics so it isn't trying to react to gravity. I think the Yeti mascot character is in one of the sample data collections; that had polar bear-like fur that might be studied.

Since you have a 64bit OS try the v16 beta

My old PC had a weaker AMD cpu than yours and the render time for the set was about 5 mins per frame. What sort of models have you got in there?

There's no connection I'm aware of. This character was called "Sail" (no, I don't know why) and there wasn't any "science" aspect to the story.