robcat2075

Slight improvement in non-bagginess. sock2.mov This one constrains the buttons to a spline that runs around the sock rather than lengthwise. This looks more stable. However now I can't get the path constraints to obey "Translate Only OFF". I f you look closely you can see they are not following the orientation of the sock. I'm beginning to think I may just model and rig the sock puppet in a conventional manner. Cloth sim probably wont let me get the closed mouth poses I need. Cloth doesn't like being crowded.

Actually I did constrain the buttons after the cloth was simulated. It's possible that the spline serving as the path is stretching unevenly so that say, the 40% ease point is moving quite a bit, but that doesn't account for all the wandering motion the button is doing.

hmmm...that's a genius idea. My number one challenge is to get the cloth tighter on the arm, so it looks like a sock puppet and not a pillow case puppet.

Here's a recent discussion. I haven't read it from top to bottom to see what problems were solved. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=288644 http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=264175

I should point out that Mr. Caricature has no known history of performing with sock puppets. This would be a new low in his career. That drawing also depicts him (I tell myself) at a much younger age than most of us who remember him at all would generally picture him. Here's an overhead view of the set-up for the sock puppet cloth. The buttons are attached to splines on the cloth with path constraints but notice that they still don't track it very closely. That's a problem. sockwire000H.mov I'm impressed that this works at all, however.

I guess my caricature is pretty lousy. I'll have to think that thru some more. Here's a cloth test that goes with the buttons. Promising but not quite there yet. sock000H.mov

Was the PWS closed on both? That made a big difference on mine.

that beats me!

that's getting warmer Another part of this concept will depend on a recognizable caricature (3d modeled of course) of a famous person. This is a study to try to distill out what it is that person IS. Trouble is, I'm not much of a caricaturist. Does this look like anyone to anyone??? (it is not Ted Kennedy ) update: not right guesses so far... Armstrong, Lance Bergen, Candace Bergen, Edgar Boyle, Susan Bunny, Bugs (check those glasses, Nancy) Carney, Art Chaplin, Charlie Chop, Lamb Coraline Gleason, Jackie Grant, Cary H., Martin Hitchcock, Alfred Lewis, Jerry Lewis, Sherry Martin, Dean McCarthy, Charlie Wilde, Oscar Wilder, Gene

Not that complex. The "no copyrighted characters" rule would probably not permit it anyway.

What could it be?

Welcome to the Forum, Kimberly! Which way is he facing when you look at your action from the side (4) view?

There are about 8 or so entries that placed above me that I look at and think "I got beat... by THAT??" I think that "BazookaJoey" commenter is mostly a troll since he's never entered anything. But I can't complain since I submitted something that wasn't really done. It shouldn't be allowed!

Sorry. spritetest.zip

I got the problem the first time I tried it, but can't repeat it. try this sample project set your render tab to "Use camera settings" (corrected PRJ below) "Additive color" is there under Sprite emitter, although it's not a factor in this case. refraction is not an issue either.

interesting. Just to try ... there's an "additive" transparency property or something like that for sprites. Try changing that. Also try Streak particles instead of sprites.

That's working well. my one suggestion... probably too late... is too model with straight eyebrows and then it's easier to do good looking / \ poses.

That looks real sharp!

Short story... the renderer was rewritten in V14 to do MP but it only got faster results in certain situations and slower results in many others. Steffen is reintroducing MP in v15 for certain things that can benefit but it's not in the renderer yet. You CAN use your MP computer with A:M and get great results by running a separate instance of A:M for each core and setting each to render a separate section of the frames you want. This will get you almost 100 percent scaling with each new core, whereas multithreaded apps typicallyy do far worse.

The wider you make that Kleig light the farther you are stretching the bitmap that is drawing the shadow. Very wide angle Kleigs cast shadows in directions that don't look like the infinitely far away sun light. The array of Kleig lights is promising. If you do a shadows only render of Kleig lights the image will include the dark shadow cast by an object but NOT the darkness outside the cone of the light. So if you had a narrow, distant Kleig on every model, rendered shadows and composited that with a non-shadowed Sun light render you might get something like a shadow-mapped Sun light. Probably not worth the trouble for one frame but for many animation frames it might pay off.

That's a great result. Of course your 8 seconds would be like 20 on mine. My main beef with kleig lights is it's hard to do daytime outdoor scenes with them. Another software has z-buffered Sun lights. I have no idea how that can work. How do you map the shadows from a light that is infinitely wide? But it would be handy. I wish we could bake lighting onto objects, that would be really handy.

great looking character designs, even the pyramid!

True... but consider that the original wasn't a look that I was trying to get, I just threw threw the models and lights on the stage and pretty much accepted whatever I got since I was interested in render time rather than appearance. That first result isn't necessarily the ideal. It's completely unlike many lighting situations that you might need in a movie. If we were lighting a nightclub, the shadow mapped Kleig lights might be the best solution and not just the cheapest.

Hey, you made it into the top half! Onward and upward!

Whittling away further... If I turn off even the quick Z-buffered shadows I get 14 seconds The black checkerboard floor helps hide the lack of shadows. If I set the refraction on the glass teapot to 1.0 we get down to 10 seconds Of course that diminishes the glass effect which depended on the bending of the light rays to show the form of the glass. But for infinitely thin transparent surfaces like soap bubbles it might be just fine. More? Baking textures has great potential, but not for this scene. The only combiner textures in this scene are the sky dome and ground. The sky dome was already eliminated when I created an environment map to simulate reflection. The default Ground object doesn't bake well because it is just one huge single patch; if I had subdivided it in to more patches the baked texture woudl be clearer. But here is the Grand Prize Shortest Final Rendering Time winner... at 6 seconds... Anything left? Shaded render is just fine for most animation preview purposes. I handed in a lot of AnimationMentor assignments in just Shaded mode and no one ever complained. 0.25 seconds!