robcat2075

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

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.