robcat2075

Generally scale doesn't matter. Physical simulations like cloth or Newton may may like 1:1 scale. Some people have had trouble with VERY large objects (aircraft carrier sized) when the absolute distance of parts from 0.0.0 starts to use up the decimal places of precision needed to keep small details in order. I dont' know it that's a bug or a reality binary math. Hollywood does that. Bot for a model seen both close and far, easier to just make the close version. But you could use the same model with different textures not sure what you mean. In general I think the camera has an infinitely perfect lens so issues of distance and size are all relative. Occasionally there's a clipping problem from a camera getting too close to an object in absolute distance. A patch might disappear as the camera approaches VERY closely. But I can't cite a test case to show this happening. Any multipass technique like mo blur or Depth of Field tends to be render time expensive. Some compositing apps can do DOF well and quickly if given a depth map you've rendered in A:M Complex combiner materials may take longer to render than a similar appearing bit mapped texture. Reflection and refraction and Ambient Occlusion are other time increasers. Hair can can be ghastly with ray-traced lights, but not bad with z-buffered lights. -More lights render slower than fewer -Shadow-casting lights render slower than non-shadow -Ray-traced shadows render slower than z-buffered shadows A fairly good intro to CG lighting is Jeremy Birn's "Digital Lighting and Rendering" (2nd edition) which i've made some notes and translation comments on for A:M users Here's a thread where I demonstrated a few variations on lighting and the time cost result.

Make that tree drop a lot faster when he lets go of it. Your animation is getting better!

can you show a test?

Looks good! Isn't he supposed to be naked though? And the Thark's eyes are on the side of their head! I actually read the first book a few months ago when I heard Disney was shooting it. Holy S#it! It's like a constant slash-fest, mowing down people whether they're innocent or not! I'll be curious to see how they deal with that.

I'm not into that one. The problem is... where does the imaginary jetpack force turn off and how do we know it? Your original ski jump layout has more potential there.

Hmmm, that's different than I thought. I guess I can't use that for attaching a button to cloth.

This will probably be unsatisfactory for what you are trying to do. Cloth doesn't like spheres because of the way the splines converge at the poles and it would take supercomputing power to do all the balls needed with a dense enough mesh to really carry the concept thru. But here is the ball drop. I envisioned somehow slicing thru the clump of balls to see the cellular structure, but that's another battle. Myriad_of_Balls.mov Myriad_of_Balls04_Simmed.zip

It's hard to do! I struggled with what i got and it's still not quite what i wanted. But that's a real "animation" task... trying to make something that can't be appear as if happened.

"Group" I've never tried it. It attaches a bone to a group of CPs.

An all cloth solution might be to make the lines to the parachute out of cloth. Long, thin cylinders. I'd been thinking of trying such a thing. Possibly after you had that simulated you could use the new attaching constraint to attach chains to the mesh of the lines and then hide the lines. If you have to have chains.

The front angle is the weakest since we can't see the bend in his legs. I liked the lay out you had in "Shot4" the best of all so far. Here's another rule about falling and jumping objects: when they are falling down, like he does after he swooped up a bit, they can't slow down before they touch the ground. Gravity accelerates them until some other force can counter act it like the pressure of the leg on the ground. But until that toe or heel touches he can't slow down. Of course he's a superhero with flight powers, but I see it like he turned off his invisible jet pack at the top of that last hump and falls to his feet from there. I sort of imagine the motion like he came down a ski jump shoot and the plopped down right in front of it.

That took me a few hours too. I always think it's going to be fast and it never is. I do like your concept of the shot. I like that small dot in the sky that grows into a whole guy.

The first thing I notice about that is that when he settles down for that landing his butt is moving pretty much straight down and then does an L turn and starts moving forward the moment his heels touch. That would not be a normal path. Here's sort to what i imagine you're going for, if we just watched it from the side. I didn't animate the arms at all for this quickie. LandingToe.mov

you can land on your toes too and then have the heel contact next. That's probably what we do more often in real life. But I've never jumped over a 10 story building. I'd say landing on heels is more graphic, toes is more real. Although I may have seen some Superman drawings where he leads with a toe. Hmmm... Someone jumping and skipping rope maybe never touches with their heel at all.

I actually liked the shot 4 version better. One rule of jumping and landing is to always re-contact the ground with (nearly) fully extended legs, maybe even tippy toes, so the legs can have their full travel to cushion the mass of the body as it falls. The more they can bend the more they can seem to be opposing large mass. I had some notes on jumping and landing here

Welcome to the forum! It's easy. onthe chor in the PWS or in a blank spot inthe chor window and do "save as"

When they do a take, i imagine their eye popping up off that stalk and plopping back down on it again.

Simplest solution is to start the second action with the pose that ends the first action. And I agree with Xtaz that he oughta crouch down way more before he leaps.

Charming. Is the yellow rain coat called a Macintosh or am i imagining that?

render as lines and turn on "Glow"

Spring systems were part of the old cloth system. A "Cloth Wizard" would run thru a selected mesh and set up a spring system unit between each pair of CPs. Unless you can find more info about it that tells of exotic uses, I 'd say SimCloth, Dynamic constraints and Newton Physics have super-ceded anything it did and made it more easy to do.

Much improved!

That judgment is a bit harsh. Not even close to being a "Worst Movie". Is that channel dedicated to pirating Sparkplug Films? Getting any animated feature done is pretty much a miracle i think. I only saw four animators listed. I guess you did a big chunk of that, Holmes? That's an accomplishment in itself.

Much better splining on the bottle! Simpler is usually better. On something like this it's good to get one thing going at a time. Like first, the glass bottle with nothing else. I changed the bottle outline just a little bit. and made a new glass material, using an "edge gradient". It makes the edges of an object look different than the middle. Glass is like that... more reflective and less transparent at the edge than the middle. Look a t that and see how it works then try adding the cola. CokeBottleRevised01.prj

Of course windows 7 didn't exist when v12 was made, but in general I don't know that old windows programs are NOT compatible. Anyone? (I'm still on W2K) this help? http://lifehacker.com/5466628/learn-to-use...with-older-apps or this? http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows...p/compatibility