robcat2075

yup, we can see them! that looks like you're doing well! (not sure what the second one is) I see some creases on the face but you will learn to avoid those as you do more splining.

place a large flat patch or grid where the background sky would show. Color it to whatever your sky was. That should result in a completely blank alpha channel.

Most polygon model (like lightwave's) are not made carefully enough to translate into splines well. The best models for A:M are models made in A:M.

long standing practice.... convert your video to a targa series and use as an image sequence. Most video codecs aren't good for the scrubbing you need to do. You may need to have serious Hard drive performance to reliably scrub 1080 footage. the i is interesting. Is your footage really interlaced? are there interlacing artifacts on single frames when you pan? And 1440 x 1080? that's a 4:3 ratio. really? post one. maybe someone can try it to see if it's weird. It's POSSIBLE this is a video card limitation/issue. Diagnosing computer problems by text is hard. Hash "supports" current versions. Right now it's V15. But you can still ask questions here. What do you have V13? 12? 11? anything before that is scary. Generally A:M has been more solid on PC. Video card/driver things are probably #1 reason for odd results with A:M and graphics apps in general. I have another app that wont' work with the "right" drivers for my video card. I had to go back to old drivers. But I don't know your situation.

you can in the chor and "Export as Model", which would be one way of consolidating several models in the chor out as one model.

I tried giving it another vote, but it must remember me and not count it.

a picture is worth a thousand words. (my first guess, having seen *nothing*, is spline non-continuity)

looks good but I think you're using more spline rings than you need. You could think quite a bit out of there and not lose any shape.

I tried to make it less straight, but all my attempts failed. I could make them less streaked looking, which would make them look less in a straight-line. they are too long, but I was thinking more of how they look like they are shooting all parallel to each other rather than falling in a parabola kind of path. I'd try animating that whale in an arc out of the water into his final position, emitting drops from his skin all along the way. the animation doesn't have to be great because you're just going to render the last frame. But that would be the way to get the drops to take their right place.

I've discovered that Interrupt Drawing works a bit in Direct3D but not like it used to. It doesn't maintain the selected frame rate.

that's promising. The spray off his dorsal fin is too straight-line.

John , if you could post the PRJ where you dropped the cloth that would probably be helpful.

Lookin' sharp! Nope. At best it takes a couple of seconds to redraw the view in wireframe mode, that makes it hard because you easily overshoot when using the mouse to orient. There is a feature on the Options>Global tab.... Interrupt Drawing>Limit Max Drawing Time for this situation. If you set it to "5 fps" A:M would draw as much as it could at that rate, but keep move on to the next frame anyway if it couldn't. This partial display would give you enough clue for most positioning and turning. However, this feature hasn't worked for several versions. It just makes the display go blank for me. I put in an AMReport on that a lonnnnngggg time ago but I don't think it ever got picked up. Back in the days of 25MHz PCs it was quite a handy thing.

For the 2D? I've been using something called "Toonboom Studio" and "Plastic Animation Paper" (just the free version). Neither is ideal and either has things I wish the other had.

You may be right. I may have been thinking of hair.

move the CPS around. dropping some simcloth into a pile sounds more interesting.

Crumple a grid, since that's what a sheet of paper would be. Or drop some Sim Cloth into a round cup and export as model

My screencam movies tend to be about 6fps and I resize the A:M window to about 800x600 and just capture that or less. for codecs H264 has the better quality but is terribly slow to compress. If I need something fast I do MPG4 set a low bit rate and high key frame value the AAC audio codec is very good. The only satisfactory one, really. You will spend time experimenting with compression to find the tradeoffs that suit you.

Start asking questions about the features you need help on and someone will chime in and fill in the details.

how about a particle density map?

I think the big rock need more variation in the detail. Right now they are all about the same scale.

While you have the Tools>Customize Window open, not only can you drag individual buttons from the window to toolbars, but you can move the existing buttons around too (or remove them). Tool bars are also undockable (>Allow Docking). When they are free floating you can re-size them to shapes other than a single row. It's a bit like doing one of those sliding tile puzzles, but I made this "Views" tool panel that mimics the arrangement of the keyboard number pad. I added the subdivision up and down buttons and the Turn button to fill out extra spaces. One note... in V15f the "Views" buttons are missing from the Customize window, but if you turn them on in View>Toolbars before opening the Customize window you can still edit them. Another customization I did was to add a copy of the "Use Offsets" button down by my keyframe buttons, since I frequently use that with "Force Keyframe" to reset bones to defaults. So... If the A:M buttons aren't in convenient places for you, or if you're used to another app that had them in another place, or if you're accidentally hitting a button because it's too close to your favorite one... you can fix that! After you get things the way you want, make sure you save a PRJ to force A:M to remember the settings.

yup. CG = Computer Graphic

Well, I saw a AM little movie clip of a car going down the road and a T-rex chasing him, I would like to do something similar. In that case, they put a CG object on top of live video. That's probably easiest. They shot the car footage first. (notice that the camera never moves during the shot) They converted it to a Quicktime movie or (better) a targa sequence. they put that in an A:M chor as a rotoscope onthe camera . They adjusted the camera to match the perspective of the rotoscope. They animated the Dinosaur to look like it was reacting to the car. Render. That's a bare bones explanation. There's tut around here somewhere that explains how to get CG shadows to show up on the live footage.

There's a boatload of useful tuts in the tutorials subforum. But you gotta look. You may need to explain your plans more for mixing CG and real. That can work in different ways and there are solutions that work for one way that don't work for another.