robcat2075

It's the Tree Cavalry!

I think you nailed it because I thought "Queen Ama-whoever-she-was" as soon as I saw it.

I wonder who's back hurts more, his or hers?

The java applet looks a lot like the cellular noise combiner in A:M but I dont' know of any way to manipulate the combiner to get the disturbance in animation. I notice that it's not just moving cells around but adds additional cells in the area of the disturbance. I'm not sure how to automate that in A:M. If it were just squishing them around you could use a distortion box.

I imagine him saying "where did I leave may car keys?"

That SparkPlug studio has actually done several such features. The titles seem to be an odd situation but... they're movies! Actual animated features with stories and characters and all that.

Yes it does. In general 64-bit Windows can run all the old 32-bit apps. They have the same memory limits, but they do run. Maybe slightly slower, maybe not.

If you have Quicktime Pro, you can copy and paste clips from one player window to another to string them together.

He's got two feet sliding simultaneously. Try standing and sliding both feet simultaneously. It's impossible unless you're on some sort of frictionless floor and that would have to be established somehow in the visual narrative. Here are . Watch that whole routine. They actually CAN slide both feet at once, but it's a lot of work. They've got the strength of 10 men in each leg. In normal circumstances one foot or the other has got to stay put. You can move them alternately, but you can can't move both at once even for a frame.

Here are two biggies I notice... -The hop from the window sill to the bench is too slow. He's just floating down. -When he stands at the end, the foot he's got his weight on can't slide. He starts out putting his weight on the left foot so he should have his mass over that foot and drag his right foot forward if he need sot adjust his stance.

That was way better!

You've got a Mac? If it's an intel Mac you're cheapest solution would be to set it up to boot into Windows or whatever it is that Macs do now to do that. The intel Macs seem to have pretty good specs and people seem to be pleased how A:M works on them in Windows. You can get OEM Windows 7 for about $100 That would be the easiest way to get your feet wet in A:M. But in general... I think you want 64 bit windows since A:M is going 64 bit in the next version. I think you want at least 2 gigs of RAM to run A:M in, and if have a multi-core you can run A:M several times to render more frames but that may need more RAM. You do want the a fast CPU. Right now it seems dual cores can have faster speeds than quad cores. When doing character animation I find being able to see things at full frame rate in on-screen shaded mode without having to render to a quicktime is a HUGE advantage and the faster your CPU the more likely you'll be able to do that. On the other hand, If I did lots of "Final" rendering I might opt for a slightly slower quad core so i could run more instances of A:M simultaneously to get more total throughput on frame rendering. On the third hand, if you do lots of preview renders of lighting and materials your single core speed is indicative of how fast your preview gets done. (No matter what you get, you're always going to wish rendering were faster.) You don't need a screaming graphics card, something in the $100 range that isn't a HomeTheater card would do fine. I get by on a single core Athlon XP 2600 with 2 gigs RAM and a 128 MB ATI video card which could be built now for way less than $500. But I'm not trying to get anything done on a deadline.

no, "air drag" slows the parachute. I tried a force from the side to make it drift but I didn't get that to work.

two rules of dropping things. -they will always look weird if they just move to the ground at a constant speed no matter how fast they go. Falling things always speed up as the fall, unless they have high air drag like a piece of cloth. - Don't just stop at the ground, most things will bounce a little. That tree will shudder or shake or something after it hits. Just slightly. It won't bounce like a rubber ball.

My Dharma donut keeps falling out of the parachute but this is the general concept of what I was thinking of. DonutDropH.mov ParachuteTest_03b_simmed.zip Everything is cloth. Even the donut.

Good Looking Fairies!

when you first create a new Material in the PWS it has just one "attribute" under it and you can set basic surface properties. However, you can on that attribute and do "Change Type to" to change it to a "Combiner" That Combiner will have two attributes under it. And guess what you can do to each of those attributes? Combiner materials aren't very intuitive to work with, you really have to know where you're going with them. But they have cool powers. Look at my This is only a Test blog, almost everything there uses combiner materials for something. Combiner materials are also known as "procedural" materials and sometimes "Perlin" materials.

The cloth material isn't part of the model so I can't really test it out. But have you tried an all cloth model as a test? All cloth, no Newton. Not chains, cloth ropes.

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