robcat2075

This is a Perlin Noise combiner used as a bump material. I tried it as a displacement material but in this case bump looked nicer and rendered faster. MoonlightG000h264_1500.mov

Don't do a 5 minute short. Not your first time out. That is way too long. Even Pixar doesn't do five minute shorts. Do a 1 minute or less subject. It's very possible you could get the animation polished and up to spec in a 1 minute project but the amount of work in a five minute project will defy getting it done well.

Lovely stuff!

I'm surprised at the winner, but I'm usually surprised at the winner. I regard dialog shots as very... very... VERY... HARD... to do well. Dialog tends to be a lot of subtle movements and subtle movements are the hardest thing to get going right on a CG character. That's a problem with our OZ movies. They're all dialog shots and yet we're lacking dialog ready animators. An 11 second shot is a whole universe of things ready to go wrong. Every month I listen to the new clip and think of something that might be cool to do, but then I realize how much work it will be to do it well. The problem with the 11 second club is that it's promoted as a way to learn animation and yet one can not learn animation by doing dialog shots. Not to start anyway. Body mechanics needs to be mastered before venturing into dialog. There's really only three rules to body mechanics, but they are so general that very few people can see through them to their specific situation. Critting dialog shots is an exasperating task because it's very hard to put motion and rhythm into words. And if the person doesn't "get" body mechanics already no amount of description is going to make them get it. When I crit things on the forum now I try to pick one representative item rather than try to solve everything. If a light goes off, great, if not, hopefully one thing got fixed. How long is the short going to be?

Submit a sample PRJ that shows the problem to AMReports. Bump maps are a fundamental that ought to work in regular renders.

in A:M. Tools>Options...Global I think

Try switching Direct3D Presuming the installer really was the 15h installer, go to the folder that you installed 15h in and double click on "master.exe"

a model can have a list of lights that affect it, to the exclusion of any other lights. You can read more on pg. 178 of the free TECHREF

The will need to be mapped on something. If you have a proper alpha channel created that will work.

A targa sequence is more reliable for those things. I'd also avoid rapidly scrubbing the timeline, forcing A:M to quickly drop and find new files.

A bulb light will work in place of a sun light if you set its Falloff Distance to a large enough value to extend past everything visible to the camera,

Yes. pair a light with shadows ON with an identical light set to negative intensity with shadows OFF. That pair will cast a shadow from an object but not light anything. Next add one more copy of the first light, with shadows off, and light list it to only light your object. Of course all three lights are placed and aimed identically. I presume there's some other light in the scene, otherwise the shadow cast by the object will not be seen amidst the darkness.

Welcome to A:M! like this? Use one Sun light and set its "width" to zero, set its intensity to 100% Zero width creates a solid shadow rather than a receding one. Set the Diffuse Falloff of the Ground to 0. (also set "Cast Shadows" ON for the ground, this makes sure that single thickness patches cause shadows on it) Falloff determines how much an object shades when it is lit at an angle. In this case you want it to fall off not at all. I also turned the Camera Background color to white so there would not be a blue sky. WhiteGroundBlackShadow01.prj

I used to work with that guy.

That is better. I did some quick resplining to show how you can carry the loops idea farther and use hooks and 5 point patches to simplify the splines. These are the things Jeff Lew didn't have when he wrote the Skylark tut. Skier_v6c.mdl I just did one side so you can compare and see what isn't there anymore. When a spline start running between two other splines and isn't changing the surface that would be between then without the spline, it probably isn't needed and can be ended in a hook, or turned and routed into another spline that isn't going anywhere either. This isn't necessarily the best lay out, it's just an example of how these things can be simplified. One hard thing for face modelers to get past is the idea that the face is flat on front. Look in a mirror, tilt your head down and look at your face from the top and see how it immediately begins receding backwards from the center. The lips turn back, the cheeks turn back. The face is really pretty streamlined.

It's all looking very cool. I like the set details.

Actually you make them by clicking in the ruler area. It was probably an A:M bug but a crafty one that is still hiding.

There might be something in that. The problem with "clouds" is that they are like a solid in that they are rather opaque, they have a sunny side and a dark side and they cast shadows. And yet, they are not solid, they are really a gas or close enough to it to be blown around and not maintain their shape. At normal distances they may appear to have a very sharp surface on one end and be misty on the other.

Are all your dependent files in folders that are children of the location your PRJ is in?

only often enough to recognize symptoms. Not sure what does it. For all i know , your cat could have had his foot on the make marker button for five minutes while you were out making a sandwich. If you retitle a A:M file to .xml you can drop it in Internet Explorer and it will expand it as if it were. But opening it in a text editor made it obvious anyway. And you can edit in a text editor.

Yup, first clue... a 3MB file! The file had entries for two "markers" repeated about 50,000. I can't guess what caused that. I deleted them in a text editor. But of course, you never save over your previous version of a model. You always saved with new version number. So, once the file started saving huge like that you could stop, and go back to a previous version before it got huge. Well, if you werent' saving versions before, you will now. This model would normally only take up about 25K fighterplaneNoMarkers.prj When you see a file size suddenly jump about 1000x that's a warning flag that something is not right. It happens.

All of that can be done in A:M. It's a matter of knowing the tools and using them in the right place. Get to it.

Simple cumulus clouds from a sprite emitter Clouds05MP4.mov Haven't quite gotten the emitter itself to stay transparent so you don'tsee it in transit. PRJ Clouds06.zip edit: dark sky variant sprite... CloudSprite4_dark.tga They're actually faster onscreen in real-time than they are to render to a movie.

I'm going to guess it's one of those weird 10,000 empty folders in the PRJ things. do Project>Embed All and then Save under a new name and post that here

It's button at the top. looks like a face with a line thru it. You can hover over any button and a text line will appear near it and a description will appear in the lower left corner of A:M