robcat2075

I think you're trying too hard to make every spline go sideways. Face models usually have concentric loops that radiate out from the mouth and concentric loops that radiate from each eye and when teh start ot intersect, then you start breaking them and attaching the ends. You've get a whole bunch of models that cam with your A:M and on this forum, look at some of the better faces and see how those loops are arranged. If you keep trying to make the whole face out of that nose profile you're going to get a face madeof slabs. Take a look at Jeff Lew's Skylark tutorial. It's a classic. http://www.hash.com/users/jsherwood/tutes/SkyLark.pdf It's slightly obsolete because they didn't have hooks and 5-point patches then, but you can see him starting with the eyes and mouth and pulling a face out from those circles.

Great looking style. the teeth on the sun bother me. Maybe if there were upppers and lowers they wouldn't look like fangs.

The example I show at the top of the thread doesn't use multi-pass. My goal was to see what's the fastest I could get "that look" to render so i wanted to get it all in one pass. There is an array of about 9 lights around the character. That's enough to get an AO-ish appearance on him. They are light-listed to only illuminate the character however; they don't create the shadow on the ground. If they did, you'd see the typical multi-shadow on the ground plane that light arrays produce. You don't see the multi-shadow on the character so much because he's a complex shape. The ground shadow is one VERY hazy shadow-only light from above and a few negative lights positioned around his toes and ankles to add extra darkness to the ground where his feet would be occluding the ground more. The negative lights are light listed to only affect the ground plane. A couple more negative lights are aimed UP from the ground to darken the undersides of his feet where the ground would be occluding them in return, particularly the foot on the ground which needed that to look like it really was on the ground. Those are light listed to only "shine" on the character and falloff quickly so they don't go project farther onto the main body. So far, there is no actual light falling on the ground plane. One sun light with shadows OFF is added and light-listed to shine only on the ground. A wide Kleig light would have worked just as well. It lights the whole plane evenly and doesn't even matter which way it is pointing. The shadows that appear on the ground are the result of the shadow only lights and the negative lights subtracting brightness out of the ground plane. Because the shadows are all simple depth mapped shadows they render VERY fast. If you move the character his foot shadows won't follow him, but that could be fixed for animation by constraining the negative lights to him. Yes it is a trick, but it got the shot rendered in record time, good enough to look like what it was supposed to look like. That's the big take-away I get from the Birn book; there's whole bunch of tools in CG lighting that dont' exist in nature but you can use them to get your natural looking result faster, and faster is better because it gives you more time to tweak. The down side is you have to know what you want before hand. I sort of knew what AO should look like in this set up. In a more complex scene I'd be less certain. Here's the PRJ, secret stuff and all! Biobot08i_turnaround_new_Ring.zip There's currently a bug in v15i that causes models to lose their light lists if you swap a proxy in or out. That will be fixed in the next version.

Even that didn't work for me I tried opening it in QT too, but no go there either. Who knew making cube would be so complicated?

Well that would be giving the secret trick away!

Welcome to A:M! You've read the new user page, of course. You definitely want to do the tutorials in "The Art of A:M".Those will show you the fundamentals of modeling and how that fits in to A:M. Since you're a draftsman, once you see how the tools work, I think you'll have a good time with this. Making a box? Draw out a square spline and extrude it and you'll get four sides. Spline? Extrude? That's what those tuts are about. I fyou get stumped on a step ask inthe forum. There's even a subforum for all the TA0A:M exercises.

Sorry, I shouldn't have been so negative. I was just worried that someone might expect me to explain it all, and I don't know much about it really. It looks like powerful stuff, but I haven't explored it much.

I like that. I have one suggestion... model the mouth in a more neutral position rather than with the corners stretched all the way back. If you rig the face it will be easier to rig a neutral mouth to stretch back than to rig a mouth with the corners stretched to go into a neutral position. Now, what is a neutral mouth position on a rat?... I'm not sure.

Take the cellular out and get the shape going with the FBm alone. The cellular may not wont' add much to the fBM peaks.

Hey that looks good! It can be done.

Here's a quick version using A:M's fBm turbulence combiner the peaks are rockier which I like, but I can't get the snow capped peak effect as much because fBm doesn' t seem to produce as severe a separation between the two attribute colors. Or maybe I just don't know how to do it. Here's the PRJ if you want to try it. DisplacementRenderTest06b_FBM_substitute.prj btw, Displacement currently needs to be rendered with multipass for the shading to work correctly. Do your tests with 1 or 2 passes.

But you shrunk the kilt too. If you shrink kilt AND body then they are still in contact with each other. Remember what I said was the first rule of cloth? You absolutely cannot start cloth touching anything. Watch the vid at the link i posted. The body is shrunken away from the cloth. I do that so they are not touching each other at all when the simulation starts rolling. Shrink pose? Watch that video. See how the body is shrunken down to paper thin at the very start. That's my shrink pose in use. I made a Pose, with a slider, to make it do that. in the model window>new>pose>percentage Cloth is complicated, I agree. It's OK to choose anther solution for the kilt. But starting it out wrong guarantees it will not work. Corrupted file? There is some egregious gaffe happening if a file that is saved and not loaded into A:M and sitting all by itself on your HD is somehow getting corrupted because another file was loaded in to A:M. I can't imagine it. Something is being done wrong. And the only other saved version of the model is from long ago? Don't do that to yourself. When i do a model I get a couple hundred saved versions. I save everytime I try something new. If it turns out to be a bad idea it's easy to go back to before I went down the wrong path. Don't save over your models. Save new versions.

First, I'll warn everyone again... these are not magical plugins, they are every bit as complicated to use and hard to see a use for as the combiners you've already got in A:M. And they're not fast either. I think there's a lot of potential in combiners, including A:M's regular ones, but it's real guru stuff to become proficient at them. And I'm certainly not. So no long faces, OK? http://www.shaders.org/enhance:am/index.htm It says they are for v13 but I got mine around v10 and they still work in V15. The ones I've tried. I've never done much with them. They are complicated.

Yup. CellTurb I didn't change the first node to cellturb until i was getting something about right with just black and white on the first turbulence combiner. Start simple.

yes the description: However I find my mountian tops are still not very craggy. Try experimenting with the fBM noise combiner. It's almost the same. But Ill warn you, if you thought rigging was tedious and opaque, you wont' like noise combiners.

In your Options>units panel ( I think) there is a setting for extrude distance and direction. CTRL-click on the extrude button and it will come up. However, you are free to move that extruded group anywhere you want after an extrude if you don't like where it ended up.

Here's a refinement of the terrain appearance I'm using the AM_HeteroTerrain which is part of the Enhance AM pack, a third party set of material things sold separately, but you can get very similar results with the fBM noise combiner. The second node is set to black, the first one is the cellular noise combiner set to Webbed with white and near white as its color nodes. The Hetero combiner makes most of the shape but the cellular adds a bit of ridging on the mountain tops I put the material on a grid with displacement amount set to 1500% and monkeyed with parameters until I got a mountain like appearance. Then I made another material with same settings on the Hetero combiner but with white and brown as the colors. This gets put on the grid as a regular material and is what makes the actual snow and rock colors you see. They are still not terribly convincing mountains. They have that lumpy shape that CG mountains always seem to have.

What does the test look like after you did the shrink pose?

yeah, not sure what triggers that. If you watch closely you'll see some of the smaller peaks pop up or disappear at random times. Displacement is still a bit unpredictable. Even simpler, it's camera "fog" turned on.

Welcome to the forum!

This uses a noise combiner for a displacement material to create terrain for a flyover. Flyover000MP4.mov It's got a few odd pops and gaps but interesting none-the-less.

Welcome to A:M! Have you done the tutorials in "The Art of Animation Master"? That's what the New User page says to do first. Those will show you the fundamentals of modeling in A:M. Those will answer many questions you have. After that, ask specific questions here.

If your AM2006 is V13 that cloth is essentially the cloth we have today First rule of cloth is that it musn't touch anything at the beginning of the simulation. Make a pose that shrinks the body (which of course has a cloth "deflector" material on it) inside the kilt down to a pencil width and expand it back over the first second, then get on with your animation. You can see an example of doing that on my Punch Doll here If your kilt is built with pleats that may be an extra complication to be R&D'd.

Do a search for the file and folder names Nancy showed you on the drive that you installed to. They gotta be somewhere. then just manually move them to the locations Nancy showed you

You might want to tilt the arm on the right a bit more so it isn't making such an awkward wrist angle.