robcat2075

Welcome to the forum! Possibly the character wasn't selected in the chor window when you looked for the poses. Since characters have their own poses, one character has to be selected for the pose window to know what to display.

Looks superb! It should have A:M running on it.

Yup, that's a lotta CPs. For now I'll presume you need them. "Bone weights" are for you. In the props for each bone you can turn on "Has FallOff" which makes 2 capsule shapes around the bone visible. These show the area the bone will try to weight to itself when you in the model window>Compute All CP weights. CPS inside the inner capsule will get 100% CPs inside the outer capsule fade from 100% to 0% depending on the CP location If the capsules from two bones intersect, A:M averages between the two. These inner and outer capsules can be scaled and squashed in their properties to vary how much space around the bone they affect. If you dont' like the result after you do "Compute All CP weights" (remember you have to test this in a separate action) you can >Remove all CP weights and try again. Also note that "Compute All CP weights" acts only upon visible CPs so you can hide CPs you may have successfully weighted already and don't want to change. Save your work frequently so if you mess things up or get confused you can go back to a version prior to that.

What didn't work? Is that in a TAoA:M exercise?

Hey dbl, the CD arrived today. Thank you very much for that! I shall enjoy it immensely.

The essential tread shape is a pattern made with the extended grid combiner, set to a cylindrical mode rather than a cubic one. Blur creates the gray slope between the highs and lows Yes, if you are going to do large displacement. the 256 levels of 8-bit maps will show stair-stepping at large displacement % Of course you have to find a way to create your map in more than 8 bits to begin with. That's why i got on this displacement with materials thing. They are basically infinite in resolution and gradation.

If scaling the spring as a unit thins it out too much, the next level would be to assign a bone to each spline ring, and path constrain each bone to a spline that runs from the shoe to the heel. Then scale the spline in or out and the bones will follow proportionally with it.

An actual... boing-boing-boing... spring? Can you show an sketch of what you are trying to do? Do you mean modeling it or rigging it?

Yup, your right, it's actually putting black in the RGB channels so no amount of alpha erasing will solve that. I'm gonna need to paint myself some skies for my EXR renders now.

That's because an alpha channel is rendered. If turning alpha OFF in the render settings doesn't stop EXR from rendering an alpha channel, it could be blanked in Photoshop.

AO is an "expensive" procedure because every point on the screen has to figure out how much light is hitting it from every possible direction. That's why there's so much frenzy about ways to fake the AO look without all that calculating.

The background isn't your problem. It's the AO.

If it's just the model in a completely white environment like that I would absolutely make a decal that looks like AO shading for the interior (the only place AO will be evident) and slap it on there. It's good enough for big Hollywood studios. It will work for you.

ya know.... if you just need that look on the back surface.... you could air brush a decal in Photoshop to look like that. Or you could do an orthogonal (non perspective) render of that view you got there and apply that to the back patches. And not have to render with AO after that.

Happy Birthday and may all your splines be continuous!

Already sounds like a funny concept.

Welcome back. Blast away!

Looks like you got the model put together well! An Ambient occlusion render? In the chor props turn "Global Ambience Type" to GLobal Color Set the color to white and turn ambient occlusion up to 100% Turn off all other lights in your scene. In the render settings turn Ambient occlusion ON and set the percentage to whatever you can stand. Use small percentages for quick tests. High for less grain.

The railroad equivalent of a pushme-pullyou.

can you post the rotoscope to experiment with?

I like the cantilevered steps. Are they clear or just reflective? Probably a code violation, though.

The only other "limit" I'd note that the one-year version isn't something you can freely move from computer to computer like you can the CD version. Install it on the computer you intend to use A:M on. However, you never have to wait for the CD to spin up each time you start A:M with the one-year version.

Without seeing your set up, which woudl tell me more, I'll note the number one cause of failure is starting the cloth too close to the model. The next one is creating a situation where cloth gets pinched between two surfaces. The string 128 was probably just a short version of the explanation in the window.

Wonderful work! I'm glad you showed us.

You could render with a wider camera angle and crop it out in post.