robcat2075

I'm wondering about the idea of the sign over their heads. Wouldn't an icon on their face or chest do better?

It seems to depend on if a part of a patch is not within the rectangular bounds of the decal. Just my guess. Try separate color and transparancy decals and make sure they completely cover the patches they contact (meaning hide any patches that dont' have the decal image on them)

OK I thought using AO was a goal for the final render. But why the worry about hair then?

TSM2 can do isolated body parts in the "parts" tab. There's video in my screencam tuts on how to use the parts tab although it's not specifically about hands.

Are you refering to one of those complex spinning light rigs that Yves has spoken about in the past? Yes, but they aren't hard to set up. There are several ready-to-use out there for the taking. It is a multi-pass thing. Here's my point: How long will it take to render real hair with AO? If the two don't work together the answer is infinity, which is a lousy render time. With a multipass light rig you can have the hair, you can have the AO look, and all the other things you can have with multipass like jittered lights for accurate shadows, accurate motion blur, softer jittered hair, real DoF.... I know you can make helmet hair look great, but real hair could be very impressive.

A light rig will get you the AO look without the limitations. render time probably not dramatically different, either.

Very impressive! I can't wait to see the hair.

No, they don't, but when you need a hole in a shape and they just wont' spline together booleans are there. wireframe showing boolean

Sharp lookin' model! Extra points if you can get the top to go up and down.

After seeing your suggestion Rob, I thought I would give it a try. In a normal render, the transparency map worked. However, in an AO render, the 'hole' rendered as black. damn. Would a boolean hole cutter work with AO?

If you had used a transparency map for the hole would AO render correctly?

could you copy flip attach in the poly program you are going to?

looks good! His crotch is so small he'll never be able to grab it. Probably a good thing.

If you haven't already, watch the "Animation:Master Demonstration" and the vids for Exercise 9 and 10 on this page... http://www.hash.com/2007web/vm.htm ...to get a look at modeling workflow in A:M you can also download the pdf "The Art of ANimation:Master" there to follow along or peruse.

Here's an all-zero bias version where I did some resplining and then some of Largento's technique (character's right side only) patch_apple_RightSmoothed.mdl Briefly I picked a CP on a crease, held down the 4 key (to slide the CP tangent to the surface) and slid the CP back or forth until the crease seemed to go away, then I did that to the next CP on that crease. And so on... Mostly i did this on the cheeks and forehead and a bit on the nose. It's not finished but it's better. But I don't' think I could do that to solve the creases around the corners of the mouth without moving the CPs so much that the intended shape was gone. I think you'd have to use bias there.

I selected the whole mesh, set them to a number not zero, then set them to 0. They all seem to be zero. patch_apple_AllZero.mdl

Yeah, Rodney, that's a great A:M commercial. We should find a way to wrap that up into a youtube. Who's "Malcom"? I hadn't caught that one before!

I don't think there is but you said there was. I asked if you could show how to smooth Maddle's'model and you said it couldn't be done because... What's to stop anyone from just setting them back to zero.? You group the whole mesh, type in 0 for the bias. What am i missing?

but that's not a spline set back to 0. Can you show a case where a spline set to 0 is any different than a spline with the default 0?

Really? A spline set to the default 0 is different than a spline with the default 0? Can you show a case of that?

Putting aside the obvious splining errors, can you go thru his mesh and show how to smooth it without bias editing?

I'll admit there are people like Jim Talbot and Will Sutton who seem to be able to make faces that are smooth without much bias adjustment at all. But I don't know how they do it.

drag "denoise" from the post effects folder onto the camera you are rendering from. in your render settings, under Buffers, you must also turn on "apply camera post effects"

=Right Mouse Button I should stop using acronyms to save time. I always have to come back and type them out full.

That looks good. I think the graphic shape of the character helps us not be bothered by the usual mo-cap flaws.