robcat2075

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.

There's probably a registry edit needed to completely eradicate the old number. I'm not sure how to do that. But, the new version still runs, right? Typically serial numbers live on thru upgrades. I'd say not to worry about it. Don't lose the new serial number, just in case. Welcome to A:M!

That's quite impressive.

Here are some more classically styled angel wings for reference

I hardly make any spray at all when I come out of the water so it still looks like a lot to me. I think you should search out some footage of whales breaching like that and see what really happens. You're making such a realistic image you oughta do that extra research step and find out. Here's a clip that actually caught some killer whales breaching, but none of them real close. Here's a humpback whale. I notice there's quite a bit of water that's falling off of the whole length of his body while he's in the air which is different than spray that was caused just by him breaking the surface.

Smaller is better. However, I'm not sure the whale coming out of the water will make so much spray so high. Do you have some reference pics that show it like that? A whale falling back into the water would make a big splash, of course.

There are different answers for different mixing. Explain more about what you are trying to do.

I think the water droplets in the air are too big and too fuzzy compared to the razor sharp detail of everything else including the flying whale. are those sprites? you might just try making them smaller and sharper. Or how about a sprite image that was painted to look like a little round water droplet with specular highlight and everything. You might have to paint a few variations.