robcat2075

Just a little test for a bit I'm doing for someone else's project. Making book pages that don't turn like slabs of concrete: pageturntestMP4.mov the second shot shows the 4 bones the page mesh is attached to and the third shot shows the two bones that control the four bones. the first bone is animated directly the second Aims At the target bone the third and fourth bone are not pointed at the target, but are Oriented Like it 50% and 100% between the first bone and the target bone almost any page curve can be made. Only the middle page is rigged to turn like that. The others are just CP weighted around one bone to bend whichever way the page is directed. I used "render as lines" on the front edge of the pages so they wouldn't look like infinitely thin patches. In the first shot you can see how those edges stand out better than the edges on the sides.

Yes, W is a fourth component of the Quaternion rotation values. I have never read an explanation of them that matched up with what I was seeing. you may sometimes read that Quaternions are bad because they are hard to edit, but the truth is most CG animators only have a fuzzy idea of what even X, Y and Z are about. Quaternions do give vastly better interpolation for most character animation situations. Don't worry too much about the exact values, the real worth of the curve editor is seeing the slopes that go thru the keyframes. Many times you can adjust an x y or z rotation and not bother with the W. If you do get an unexpected result, undo, then use the rotate manipulator to rotate the object on screen in the direction you wanted and observe the result in the graph. I have no idea where Quaternia is.

here are 3 more conventional renders without radiosity that use specular lights to highlight the edges acryl_block_specs.zip

Your radiosity may be complicated by the fact that there are holes inthe set surrounding the object. Big ones on the sides. Aside from everything else, it's too many shadows. Use some specular only lights to highlight the bevels if you need to. Maybe what you really want is the "caustics" effect of the block of lucite.

What were you not able to get with non-radiosity rendering? Maybe there's some other solution.

Also... V15 has some editing capacity so you can take renderings from two different chors and edit them together to make a longer movie.

No, you can't render negative times, but you can select and drag all your keyframes to later times so they are all in positive territory.

that looks good. One detail I noticed is that the armpit area of the shirt actually is going up when he lowers his arm. I don't have a suggestion for solving that.

I couldn't examine your PRJ long enough to figure out what you're doing, I'm not really sure. I think the problem is that when you have multiple poses active those poses' R G and B values are getting totaled to more than 255 each which would be white. most of your poses have a bright color at 0%. Just a few of those at once will send the color over the top.

yeah, that carpet stole the show! But the whole looks real good. a semi transparent decal on a plane behind the window could mimic the reflection and shifting perspective if the camera moved.

what do you have covering the ground on that shot?

I've decided fart jokes are to CG what getting hit with a piano is to 2D. They're like classics of the genre. how did you rig the parts? fan bones? CP weighting?

Sorry I missed your earlier question. Post a short clip showing the part not working and it will be easier to sugest a fix. great looking monsters!

Can you get that hair to respond with dynamics when she turns?

my signature, at the bottom of this post. the thing that says my screencam tuts

My goal is to roll it all up into one video, rather than the feature length ordeal it is now. Based on several people's comments I'm beginning to think you could watch them in any order and it wouldnt' be until the third that you got to that "Aha!" moment.

I like the flatter elbow joints. a search on your C drive would find it.

She promised to love me forever... but now she's gone.