robcat2075

Ear

Here's a completely filled in view. Much adjusting will be done but I think this will work. Doh! Forgot the ear! Edit: revised to move 5 pointer farther off jowl bulge

Most of that original profile spline has been replaced now by modeled parts, so I'll delete all of it except the back of the head. There are some obvious splines we can add to connect the chin to the top of the head. As you add splines some patches become obvious that can be completed and filled in. But after this it gets more mysterious. You have to experiment with making connections from one part to another and always aim to use the fewest possible CPs to describe your shape.

If someone could come up with a series of steps that actually cause this to happen it would probably get fixed real quick. If you're on Windows you can do a search for all files that contain a text string. That would be a quick way to find them.

The eye will be rather like the mouth, not anatomically correct, more of an indentation on the surface. I start with the eye opening: Closing the eye is like the mouth corner... I extrude the eye ring in a couple times and delete the last ring to give me a bunch of free splines: The horizontal splines are extended toward the center to meet at a new CP (blue arrows). The vertical splines will be matched and attached to it. (Yellow arrows) I'll do a little bit of shape fixing now but not much because when I attach other face splines to it it will probably need to change some more. Next... Trying to stitch it all together! Added Note: I would not normally model a face with an extreme smile like you see here. If it were a mouth that needed to be rigged and animated I would model it in the most neutral, flat, unsmiling pose possible. It's very difficult to rig a face with a smile built into it to do the small mouth poses like "oo"

Mouth Copy/Flip/Attached This mouth is somewhat more complex than on the paper maché model previously shown above as reference (basically painted on), but much less complex than a mouth that would need to be rigged and animated.

The next major landmark is the mouth. I copied the part of the profile that makes the lips and teeth and extruded that sideways a few times: I scale and rotate the cross section into place and close off the corner. Closing the corner is a bit tricky. I deleted the cross section from the end of the extrusion and left the hanging spline ends... ... then matched the splines from the top and bottom and attached the new loops to new CPs I added (y key) to the center spline.

http://www.brilliantisland.com/am/amtutorials.htm

They are constrained to a spline that goes around the sock rather than along the length. Less stretching I guess. Back to Punch now... I import my roto drawings into A:M and align them in front and side views. I grayed the white background of my rotos in Photoshop so I'd be able to see the white spline lines on them. This is the profile spline down the center of the head. I'm just trying to hit the major peaks and valleys. I might need to stitch more CPs in for detail later, but for now I try to do as few as possible. Some of the shapes, like the top of the head, the nose and the peculiar chin could be made quickly with lathe shapes so what I'll do is copy a portion of the profile spline, lathe it, and move those into place. Here the nose and chin have been lathed, moved into place and bent into shape:

Do you have models or any other assets in the PRJ that are saved external to the PRJ? They may be the location of the odd rotos.

If you can post a sample PRJ that does the problem for you you'll get more testers. I'd have to get out the manual again to make sure I was setting it up right to start with. That's working pretty well! Some drag on those locks of hair would make them look even better. Don't know about the simulating order. Let us know what you find out!

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like some very interesting detective work on your part!

looks good! AO shouldn't be a problem with hooks or AO would be a problem with almost every A:M model. Check your normals and check for weird spline continuity.

back to the sock for a moment, here's my best success so far with tighter cloth. The cloth is riding pretty tight on the hand form without blowing up the simulation. No pass thrus either. sockTighter3DH.mov I was also able to close the mouth a bit more here. When cloth gets caught between two deflectors with no room to spare beyond the collision tolerance, that's when things start flying all over the place But this cloth is working so well it's tempting to think you could make a few rough forms for the body of your character, throw a shirt and pants on him and ... no more CP weighting!

Ding Ding Ding! He played "Citizen Kane" and was the voice of "The Shadow" No, it's not a great caricature, I admit.

that's closer!

Very clever mechanism! I have increased respect for dragon flys after seeing that. We used to have huge dragon flies in Minnesota where I grew up but I don't see many here in Texas.

Nope, nope. Here's a clue: "He was a famous citizen. I thought his identity would be beyond the shadow of a doubt!" moving along... since Nancy blew my cover on the Punch Puppet I guess I'll start making him. Here's my research... (The last guy just about has it modeled for me.) So... next I try to distill those down to side and front rotoscope views:

Show us your screencam movie of it acting differently than the functionality I described.

BTW, Dllb,welcome to the A:M forum! A:M has powers far beyond what its price would suggest; if you find anything else that doesn't seem to make sense, this forum is the place to ask! With enough info someone will have an answer.

Fun Fact: A:M was the very first 3D program to run on Windows. Notice that every button (except the file buttons) will be greyed out when you close the Customize window (because there's nothing to do with them) and that when you open a Chor window the Modeling tools and most other non-pertinent tools will rehide themselves.

Aha! This is quite different than not being able to add a menu at all as originally stated. A:M menus are "context aware", meaning they only appear when they are usable. The Modeling Tools can only be visible when actual model editing can be done: When a model window is the currently selected window (most common) OR when you have selected a model in a chor window and have turned on Modeling Mode (rarer). This reduces visual clutter in the interface and prevents trying to invoke, say, the Lathe Tool while animating character bones in the chor. Similar circumstances for other toolsets such as Bones which are only available when editing a model in Bones Mode. Some Toolbars such as "Views" make sense in almost any context and can be visible in almost any context. Also A toolbar may be visible but certain buttons grayed out if they are not usable inteh current circumstances. Bottom line, not a bug. This is standard Windows interface functionality.

That looks wonderful. I hope everyone you send it to appreciates that they got a new work made just for them!

That's actually the concept! Mr.Caricature would be the puppeteer in the middle. I've been looking into modeling a "Punch" puppet with the two arms Bzzzt! No, not Art Carney. I'll add that to the list

If you haven't already, make sure you set the "Balance" and "Balance Rigid" pose sliders to 0 before you start keyframing any AM2001 rig character (like Thom). And leave them off. Nice looking character. The side to side swaying looks odd. I think if you posed out the walk better you'd be way ahead. And I just happen to have made some videos on that. Look in the tuts link in my sig and there are 3 vids that talk about posing out a walk. It's about a generic walk the mechanics and workflow are similar And if you're not sure about setting Keyframes right, there's also the Keyframing Opti0ons video that introduces that.