robcat2075

He looks good! render him at 12fps for a Flashy look to the animation.

Pretty spiffy! I'm surprised the displacement worked so well.

I only dimly recall that but you could let us know how it works! His PRJ is up there.

Welcome to A:M!

There was a key you could hold down to make A:M do something "safe" while loading. Anyone recall that? It was either writing a log file or not loading any plugins?

It was embedded. I just tried saving it out, but it got the same incorrect result after reload.

My suggestion was going to be to not use Toon Shading at all, but to use the Diffuse Shader "Gradient" plugin setting, which does toon shading but without the lines. Note that in your render settings you have to have "Plugin Shaders" ON for a Material with that to take effect. However in testing that, it worked but I also found the "Gradient" choice would not survive a save and reload, so I've made an AMReport on that: GradientSettinsLostH.mov

I'm seeing a killer whale and a dragon fighting over a penguin.

There's no hair in that. You didn't embed the material with the hair. Project>Embed All

post a small sample project that does this. make sure everything needed is embedded in the PRJ

I am sort of wondering how the legs attach. I don't see an upper leg ("femur bone"). Is it hidden because he's squatting?

It will take me a while to torture test this. Could post the arms-only import model again?

and in Tools>Customize>Commands>Draw you can drag the button for that to any panel you want.

It seems important at the beginning to force keyframes on the bones before you do anything else by moving the IK-FK from 0 to 100 and back. Right?

In my first 30 second test it appeared to work right while I was doing the keyframing but when i went to play it back there was a jump at one of the transition points. But I couldn't duplicate that error on my second try. I'll need to spend some more time testing it. Looks very promising though! Thanks! Edit: i notice the IK-FK slider is drifting between keys. Shouldn't it really be on "Hold" interpolation?

Great! It doesn't have to work with a single switch. If the IK-FK transition took flipping two switches in succession, that would be fine. That was something I was thinking might be necessary when I noticed that the elbow pointer in IK is also the FK upper arm. But I never got around to testing any theories.

I'm interested in it but I haven't had time to sit down and test it.

These and the smoke tests are plain old particle "streaks". The secret is to use so many that they all blend together and to make them nearly transparent so when they're all ovelapped they dont' blow it all out to pure white. for the fire the emitter rate is set to 250,000 and the transparency varies from 100% to 99.7% a force with weak turbulence makes the flickering motion. downside... takes up to 8 minutes per frame to render. But I'm impressed it works at all. A:M is successfully managing a million particles at once. There's probably lots of room for further dev on this.

Aw... she looks great! syndrome?

you mean the grid of red LED things?

Here's a PRJ in a zip with lighting image. I've deleted all the lights so only the GI is lighting the model. It seems to give different lighting on different sides of the model. GITest.zip The image is a free one from the web. Let me know if this isn't doing what you wanted because I don't know what I'm doing really.

dont' dead end a spline with a CP... continue it to a hook...

Welcome to A:M! v12 is pretty good. There have been quite a few bug fixes and some interesting rendering features added, but the program still looks very much the same in operation. The biggest change since V12 is that the file formats have changed so that anything saved from V13 or later will not load in V12 or earlier. So you may run into situations where a model or PRJ you find on this forum wont' load in your A:M. But you can still do all of TAoA:M and see how it's done in the video versions and you can still show your work on the forum too. And anything you make in V12 will still be loadable when you upgrade to a newer version.

If you can make a pose that works with already-rigged TSM2 charcters that woudl be great!

smaller variation added to first post