robcat2075

Rendering with an alpha channel will make the background transparent in applications that can use an alpha channel. I believe flash can do that. You have to render to a format that can support alpha channels. Targa sequence or Quicktime with "Animation" codec. Turn Alpha ON in the Buffers section of your render settings.

When you say "install a font" that's not something A:M does, that's something your OS does. You install a font on your computer and then all your apps (including A:M) can use it . I'm not sure what the Mac font process is.

Sorry, I didn't read the fine print! Well, that's why they don't look like my streaks... they're not streaks.

It takes a lot of them to blend together, so it's not fast. Your streaks might be over large, but hard to know without lots of trial and error.

Here's another attempt. The self jittering lights seem to have too many clumps in their jitters so i went back to a spiral path rig that spins from the top of a hemisphere to the ground. that isn't really random either but gets me a fairly even distribution of lights. This has somewhat better occlusion on the small details than the above version. I level adjusted this to deepen the AO look.

Splines always need to connect and cross with an "X" intersection, like in the top sequence. If they meet and turn away from each other, like in the bottom half, you get a crease. If they aren't crossing like an "X", break them apart and reattach them to make them like that. Here's another markup I did a while ago when some one had a similar question.

I got that by the end of the sequence. I like the way that seemingly cliche detail at the beginning turns out to be something else by the end.

That's a great opening scene! -Tar's shield is awfully small for such a large body. Maybe the shield could have some spring loaded extensions that pop out to make it bigger? -I don't think the ninja leader needs to say "Kill him!", that intention will be obvious in the action. If he does need to give a command, how about doing it in some language that is not english?

This is just experimental but you can try it. It's several very wide Kleig lights arranged in a dome over a central point. They are very wide so they overlap. When you use multipass they randomly jitter themselves in their width. With enough passes they start to approximate a continuous dome of light emitting light from every direction. Because they are all Z-buffered each pass is fairly short. It's like a spinning light rig but there's no spinning and and you don't need to mess with motion blur. If you adjust the properties of "Light1" in the model (Objects>OneLight>Bone1>Light1) you adjust all the lights in the array simultaneously. Generally, the smoother the surface of an object, the more passes needed to hide the stepping of the lights. The vine needs not many, the ground plane needs very many. The greater the "softness" setting of the light, the fewer passes needed for smooth shadows, but the less that small details will get good occlusion shadowing. This technique doesn't seem to work well with creating occlusion shadows around very small details, which is what the scene in the chor was testing. Dome_8_lights05_vine_small_details.prj

I changed the decal to white so we could see the AO effect on the leaves better. that was 121 passes in 7 min 42 sec

Here it is under one of my fake AO domes. 49 passes in 3 min 01 sec that's not perfect AO but it's plausible AO in a very fairly brief time. Perhaps one might use fake AO for the vines and perfect AO for the more architectural elements and combine the two.

Here's an AO only render. It does look different than straight lights. This took 9 minutes at 10% AO so that's 60x longer. I think that's the culprit. How do these vines need to animate?

I got this in 9 seconds in the default lighting. Alpha channel doesn't add significantly. Does AO even do anything with image hair? Does image hair really shadow itself?

hmmm... 9:09 at 30 fps would be 279 rather than 273 so 30fps isn't quite it either. that's almost 29.97 (NTSC) are you sure 25 is set in the properties of the project? This is separate from the Options window.

I'm not sure I understand the question... I think you want a rotoscope? Select the modeling window you want (front , back, whatever...) Drag an image from your images folder to the modeling window. Choose "rotoscope" in the dialog that comes up. It will also appear in the PWS under your model. Set the glove icon to off so you can't select it while you are drawing splines over it later.

It does seem long. I haven't done much with decaled hair, but Nancy has and I don't recall her mentioning 7 hour frames. How big is the decal for the leaf shape?

Why do you need multi pass for this hair?

I'm not sure I detect a difference. Is there a previous post where you went into that?

It was 16 hours before? Yes, that's better. You may have to actually show us what this looks like.

I recall that one! Not bad!

No, this is actually still the original animation but with the updated material substituted. I was thinking of doing that with two treads, but then I thought I should add some wheels inside first , and then I thought I should add a body and then... well, thinking about it was as far as I got.

If it's for a logo, is it just one still frame? You could paint something that looks like a reflective surface on top of it. If it has to be animated that will be harder.

for flames , I've had success with streaks. LOTS of VERY transparent streaks http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=308692 I'm not sure I have the PRJ file anymore but some explanatory details are in the last post. If your flame needs to be silver and reflective, that's very much not like a flame. Do you have a picture of what that looks like?

nice noggin.

Sun shadows are ray traced, that's all they can be. Only Kleig lights can be z-buffered, and if you put a Kleig light far enough away it's like a sun light. With light lists it's possible to have different lights for different models.