robcat2075

Looking at those screen shots, it occurs to me now that after Dave snuck back into the ship via that air-lock that HAL could have finally opened the pod bay door and sucked him back out again. But I suppose HAL had a lot on his mind.

Your method is probably the most accurate, but you can use distortion boxes to bend things. Because of the way fonts get splined some may work better than others. Another possibility is to create the letters in a a vector program like AI, use the better tools in that program to bend them, and import the result via the AI wizard.

The Simbiont plugin is already included in A:M, but you do need to get the shaders.

here's the brief mention I could find in the A:M docs. i don't fully understand the difference between the two except the interpolation of the splines between CPs appears a bit different.

There are two custom buttons available in the Tools>Customize>Commands>Tools tab... One for "biased normals" and one for "Perpendicular normals" you can drag those to a tool bar and use those to set the style for a selected group. I THINK this is what rodger is referring to, the "perpendicular" is the old style, and "biased " is the new default.

Looks great Rodger! I wonder why they call it a gear when it looks like a lever?

Stitching in all those little button holes on cameras is a bitch! But don't be afraid to post the wireframe WIPs, people find those instructive to see.

Thanks. Yes, everything is better when Orson Welles is doing the talking. I have the first edition which included some coverage of A:M in it although he seemed to be on an ancient version.

I presume you have done the lipsynch tut in TAoA:M and are doing that procedure correctly. If not give it a try. However, animators have been getting away from preset mouth poses for lipsynch because of the same problems you have encountered and tend now to directly keyframe the mouth shape for speech. At a minimum this will use a control for wide-narrow on the mouth and another for jaw up-down and maybe a third for puckering-curling the lips. More elaborate schemes are used but just that will get you decent results. Jason Osipa's book "Stop Staring" deals with this approach. But it's not less tedious. It's a bit more work for better results. Actually you can do a lot with just jaw up-down is your body language is doing its part. Here's one I did for an assignment where we were only allowed to use jaw up-down.

Could I suggest loosening her up a bit by tucking one leg under the other. Or leaning her against the armrest of the couch.

There's actually two window colors to set but mine were almost the same. There are other parameters I didn't fool with to vary the effect. But there's nothing to put people in the windows.

Robert.....do you know if that window material renders quickly? If it does, I may consider getting that pack. It's good value. This test took about 13 seconds per frame citytest_MAT_11min_14secH.mov that same chor with the mat removed was about 1.5 seconds per frame. A hit, but not a bad one. I didn't try it with a decal. One hiccup... the windows texture doesn't have an ambience parameter so i had to set that on the object to get the windows to light. This particular one is not like a typical combiner that exposes all attributes.

If you dont' want the decal you can turn off "Show decals" but There isn't a hi-res real-time option. I'm amazed it works at all. A shift-Q>>drag-a-bounding-box render is semi-real time and very handy in texture testing situations. I'm not sure how you on a mac.

fabulous work. Do we know what sort of engines powered that thing? The fins in the exhaust nozzles are mysterious. I remember reading in a book on the making of 2001 that they considered having Discovery propelled by nuclear bombs exploding behind it, but gave up on trying to depict that.

Not sure what that is Robert, I don't know if he's still selling them but they are a set of additional shaders and combiners for A:M. I have them and they still seem to work in v15. And there is a skyscaper-window texture among them. Edit: this looks like a more recent edition and a lower price

Plugins don't appear in my Tools tab and I don't recall that they ever did for me, so I'm not sure why they are appearing for you. The fact that they are appearing with "File:" sounds like something is wrong, they are never accessed by the file menu.

looks cool! Is the "Window" material you refer to the one in Enhance A:M? I think the tops of the buildings look too simple compared to the sides. And maybe too bright.

Here's a bit of stereoscopic silliness. This is in cross-eye format. Unicycle10dStereoH.mov That's good feedback. I'll see if I can do a take that incorporates that. It's a genuine spinnin' wheel, that's gotta go 'round.

set toon render settings in a group or material on the model. Then just turn toon on in the render settings with no other options set

One of my most-remembered movies from childhood had a sequence with such a prehistoric dragon fly, although it wasn't attacking anyone. Now that I think about it it looks like he's got those wings flapping over a much larger angle than a real dragon fly would , but maybe it made for better animation. Or maybe that's the secret of how they flew!

I wonder what the premise is that they couldn't fly in today's atmosphere? There are things that fly today with less wing area to body weight than that dragonfly would have. No one will be suspicious of a giant prehistoric dragonfly following them.

Easy way... render regular with white glowing balls render again with balls set to black with no glow and all other objects deleted and WITH alpha buffer on) (nothing to see here, the render will look solid black) put those both as camera rotoscopes into a new chor with nothing in it except the camera Set "On Top" ON for the black one. BlackGlow.zip (I tried putting the black roto over the original chor and rendering there but the glow from the white balls was still getting painted over the black images. Apparently "Glow" is drawn into the render after the rotoscopes are drawn)

I render the scene with white balls with "glow" then render the scene again with just black balls with no glow and composite that on top of the regular render.

Sounds great, I'm eager to see it!

New version with quasi-cartoon motion posted at top!