robcat2075

Happy accidents are how the concepts of good composition developed.

And you can also turn on the scale tool with the S key. TSM2 hint... get the spine bones scaled and in place before you do the arms or legs TSM2 hint... always use the Rotate, Scale and traNslate tools to maneuver your bones. That makes the children of a bone move along with it and stay aligned. Don't just click and drag on a bone. TSM2 hint... keep the two bones straight that make the upper arm. Likewise keep the two bones straight that make the lower arm. And this rule applies to the parts of the leg too.

Last year we got together and did as an everyone-can-join-in A:M forum project and much fun was had. Is there interest in doing another one this year? JohnL3D came up with a great linking premise which I'll call "Next Room": A character enters from door on the left of the screen, does something, then exits thru a door on the right. No other specifics yet, feedback and input below. Interest? EDIT: Proposed plan: 1) Premise: "Next Room" 2) Any character you want. Your own or any stock A:M character 3) I will provide a base CHOR that incorporates the doors and the intro and outro camera motion, between which you can put anything you want. 4) Length: Any length you want as long as it includes the minimal time of the base CHOR. 20 seconds would probably be very, very long! 6) Audio optional 5) you submit your rendered 16:9 footage. Res to be decided. 6) Deadline: end of September 2010 If there aren't immediate objections to this plan I will move forward with it. Proposed plan:[/b] 1) Premise: "Bus Stop" 2) Any character you want. Your own or any stock A:M character 3) Each segment begins with a bus pulling away to reveal a bus stop. Your character does something and the segment ends with another bus pulling up in fron of the bus stop hiding the character. 4) Length: Any length you want. 20 seconds would probably be very, very long! 6) Audio optional 5) you submit your rendered 16:9 footage. Res to be decided. 6) Deadline: end of September 2010 See official project roll out in new thread.

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That looks exciting!

Making the left dragon mostly silhouette is a nice compositional device.

Another fine Spleen production! I like your directing, the choice of shots usually works well. The animation is very basic of course. Upgrading that will take determined study. The single best book in that regard (not that it is a total solution) is Richard Williams' "The Animator's Survival Kit". CG animators tend to dismiss it, but once you get that it is about how to pose your character, not how to draw it, you'll see that it has much good advice for what we do. Probably the surest upgrade for these productions would be the lighting. You're making really nice looking models and lighting them in a more interesting fashion would improve the appearance of them overall.

I should also note that after the cloth was simmed in that test I moved Thom down a bit overall to close the gap between his feet and the mattress that "Collision Tolerance" creates between any cloth and deflector. It might be possible to set that to 0. I've never tried.

Here's a test of the cloth idea. It's not quite the deformation I'd expect from a mattress. matressJump_mp4.mov PRJ. Note the settings on the cloth. High stiffness. matress04simmed.zip Cloth sims need to start out NOT in contact with any deflectors, so the mattress starts out above the ground and Thom is lowered into place after the start so he doesn't start with his feet on the cloth mattress. If you need something more characteristic of a stuffed mattress rigging it or animating the shape may be the way to go.

I like that!

double post

Interesting problem! I would have said you'd have to manually animate the shape of the mattress but I did a test on some cloth parameters a while back... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=331059 If you look at the result in the lower right corner that has a bit of the spring-back-into-shape quality of a mattress. Try making a simple rounded box shape for the mattress, set those parameters, you may need to experiment with the "stiffness" too. Put a cloth "deflector" material on the feet of the character. Expect this to not work perfectly the first time you try it. YOu might make the mattress like this, but with about twice the spline density. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...ost&p=53091

As far as your current graphic trails, that's likely a video driver thing. Try updating them. Or maybe back dating them will fix it. Or sometime control panel setting is all. I new laptop? What you've spec'd is better than what I have in my desktop. I presume it can drive a second monitor for more desktop space if you plug one in. I like to put the PWS on a second screen by itself. Alienware is certainly a higher priced way to go.

Yeah, that's better. What's the bright orange strip above the left dragon?

I've been wondering about this ever since I saw "Lotso Huggin Bear" untested possibilities: -fairly short, wide, tapered hair with some kinkiness and and a direction map to make it look like different areas have been smushed in different directions -as above but with an image map on the emitter that resembles a tiny tuft of threads One problem you'll have with hair is getting it to grow on both sides of your towel. A cleverly contrived bump or normal map might serve the purpose. Someone showed a living room shot with a shag carpet that was just a bump map and it looked great.

That looks real sharp! I think your paint solution works fine. If I had to do it in A:M I'd model the swoopy things and use an animated bitmap to move a non-transparent region along them to create the movement.

I defaced this one... That probably isn't an HDRI image you've got for the sky so the bright spot in the clouds isn't contributing as much as it should and reducing the overall contribution of everything else as it should. A really hazy kleig light from the direction of that bright spot might fix the balance.

Good scene. I think the ground is picking up too much light. I don't know why. The other objects seem to be responding appropriately. There isn't ambience on the ground is there?

It's like the problem I have with anime. In a Disney movie the backgrounds are a few splotches of color but in anime they're hyper-detailed. I'll be watching one and wonder "is the inspection sticker on that breaker box in the upper left corner a plot point I should be paying attention to?"

I shall be curious about the story that involves such detail!

more great looking stuff!

is your object on a ground plane? The light may appear to come from above because that is the least occluded direction for the all-over light to come from. The ground plane blocks all ambient light from below. Show a picture if you're doubtful, but that's generally the way AO looks. If you want a hazy light source that really comes from a direction, create an "area light" by putting a light on a a path constraint that zig-zags across some shape that you want light to come from. Render with multi pass, set your motion blur to 20% and set the ease on the path constraint to go from 0% at 0:00 to 20% at 0:00.2 (that's 1/5th of a frame)

If you post the project with everything embedded someone might have an answer. A different someone than I since I'm not up on lipsynch.

I've never done much with dopesheet lip synch, so i'm not sure about a cause. But why not go back to a previous saved version of your project from before something went wrong and retrace your steps? I hope you haven't been resaving over the same project all along...

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