robcat2075

For now they will just stretch as the skin stretches. Down the road, I might experiment with scaling their intensity as the knee bends/unbends.

back o' the knee wrinkles

Whoops... I made a mistake on the hand part... constrain the hand controllers to the box not a hand geometry bone (because the hand controller is what tells the hand geometry bone where to be.) This will be the IK hand controller and your arms will need to be set to IK of course. You'll need a "translate to" and an "orient like" constraint for each hand. The box does get constrained to a geometry chest bone. And this will be a "translate to" and an "orient like" constraint. What these bones are called depends on your rig. In some rigs the IK arm target only positions the wrist but doesn't aim the hand bone, so you'd translate constrain the IK arm target and orient constrain the hand bone

For that specific scenario... While picking up the box I'd constrain the hands to the box and then animate the box as if the hands were moving it. (Of course, you may need to unconstrain and reposition the hands a few times before they get to their final gripping position on the box) While carrying the box, leave the hands constrained to the box, and constrain the box to some bone in the chest, like a spine or torso bone. This eliminates having to animate the box moving through space ahead of the body. You can still vary the box's position relative to the body to make it seem not rigidly glued to the chest. In all cases make sure you are constraining with actual geometry bones and not merely the controller that influences those geometry bones. (correction below)

Good looking models. I like the way the penguin design is carried over into the plane. What does a penguin do with cruise missles?

Make a simple PRJ with a very simple model embedded in a chor that does this and post it. I can't imagine.

Saving a file to a drive does not erase other files. Something else is wrong. Rendering to targas is the way 90% of rendering is done.

I didn't really save them so i just ran them thru again. Mine aren't perfect either, you'll probably still have to do some repair. And your stuck with whatever I chose to for the parameters. But here they are. ToyotaLogos.mdl

render to targas not Quicktime Load the sequence into your Images folder, >Save Animation As The "compression" button lets you choose a codec. For more on Quicktime Compression see my Chapter 8 notes here

Can the ears be a different group with different SSS settings?

That's just the progressive render. Final doesn't do that.

did you try the lowest res setting? you won't need much. That's unnecessarily large for what you are doing. I'm impressed it renders at all.

OK, but you're gonna be disappointed, it's completely un amazing... Syrup.mat

They both look interesting. You can get faster rendering by not using ray traced shadow lights. Use z-buffered Kleig lights. If those are materials on your landscape you can probably bake them to textures for faster rendering. (remember to take your material off after you bake)

Here's something someone should try... Make a simple PRJ that has one simple external model that it loads. save that PRJ to your central storage place. Then go to your other computer and load that PRJ from that central storage place and if you have to refind that one model, do that and then save the PRJ under a new name. Then get out a text editor and compare the file path to that one model that is in the PRJ.

Procedural neck wrinkles! update. more wrinkling...

Cutplane works on visible mesh only, so you can hide anything you don't want cut. Extrude will extend a mesh.

If your background will be blank like that then IOR may not be a factor. Your gradient combiner approach may get you more.

Aha! I was able to import them into Flash and export to AI5 from there and they do load into A:M. No guarantees here... Toyota_Flash.zip These are so much smaller than your original files that I have to think there is some export option selected wrong or an inappropriate default in your version of AI. There's no way these simple logos should be taking up 100K. But I don't have CS4 and probably never will so I can't guess beyond that

I don't have Illustrator but I couldn't even open those in Macromedia Freehand which reads AI files. Is your shape just lines, continuous closed shapes with no fills or shading or intersections? Try saving in AI5 or AI7 format. AI5 is what I've been using from Freehand.

glass is easy. model your beaker so the walls have thickness. make it slightly less than 100% transparent. give it some very slight color like green or blue give it Index of refraction more than 1.0 give it very slight reflectivity. You test the object in its setting and vary all of those to suit the look you want.

There is probably a light with shadows OFF. Or possibly you have a light aimed straight into the mouth. The eye lights should just be specular only if that's all they need to do. Or the mouth is textured with ambiance not set to zero. Less likely... the model is set to not receive shadows.

I embed when I'm doing experimental stuff with things that depend on other things, like a material that depends on how it is positioned on a model. Or if I've animated or lit something in a chor with a model, then decide I want to change the model some, but want to preserve this complete situation that was working before I lept off into the unknown and make it not work. I could save the chor and model separately and match them up later, but if they are embedded in a PRJ I won't have to figure it out. It's easier to repeat experiments or backtrack from failures if all the assets are in one file for each try. If I'm animating with assets that wont' change I only save chors. They load everything they need anyway. It might be illuminating to get a text editor and compare the path to an asset that loads on the original system with the path you have to lead it to on the other system. There's gotta be a difference. Different drive names? Different folder names? Different folder heirarchy Things like that. You might consider an SVN system like we use for the A:M movies. I just downloaded the SO archive today, loaded the one scene I'm working on and it loaded every asset with no trouble.

There used to be an "apply before" (apply after?) switch in constraints that let you animate offsets on a bone directly by manipulating it. Is that what "Lock offsets" is now?

Well, that's what my book was going to be about. Basically, it's just normal reflection. A car is a big reflective shape so you have to put things around it to reflect in it just like you do for gold or chrome objects.