robcat2075

You're going to have one animation with sprites emitted from the left-side object and fading out as they pass the middle You're going to have another animation of sprites emitted from the right-side object and fading out as they pass the center the second one is the one you will need to run backwards so it looks like sprites are going TO the right-side object SOMEHOW (not hard but godawful to try to explain in one sentence) you composite both animations to show simultaneously so sprites appear to be emitting from left and landing on right. And you hope the fade-in/fade-out in the middle fools people. You will not get this right on your first try. It would take me about a day of experimenting to discover small details and get it all working together.

Yes, any sufficiently bright point of light can cause a lens flare. They will all radiate around the axis of the lens.

Worst case... renumber the frames. image sequences on layers and as decals have a "frame" property that lets you show any frame on any frame. You'll need to enable Show More THen Drivers to key it in a chor. Seems to me you could key the end at teh beginning and the beginning at the end to make a sequence play backward.

That looks wonderful! One thing about the lens flare... the various flares should have a common point of convergence (usually the center of the photo). Unless there's a reason they don't?

the only way i can think of to get particles to look like they are landing in a certain formation would be to render them being emitted from that formation and then reversing the footage.

that window doesn't work in my version. Post a message telling everyone to come to the A:M forum (www.hash.com/forums) to ask their questions.

BTW, this is slightly OT but with OpenEXR rendering you can actually get each light separated out and adjust lighting after you've rendered. Yes, I've read that they might render a background once and just slap it on an A:M style "Layer" behind a character in the foreground. Also some of their backgrounds are plain 2D paintings.

A:M doesn't have a way to permanently tag a model as being part of a certain group (AKA "Layer") for rendering purposes, but you can manually turn models off (Properties>Active ON/OFF )as needed if you want to render items separately. And there is a way to get just a rendering of shadows. I did this while testing some lighting for a TWO scene that had many characters and much scenery All of this presumes you are somewhat knowledgeable about compositing issues and techniques.

Great lookin bug! Not sure about the high hips but I guess that is anatomically accurate. The roto problem seemed to be related to a mistaken file location. Maybe the same with your BVH file?

One of the mentors at AnimationMentor said that when he ran out of ways to make a walk look weightier he would increase the time that both feet are on the ground. I notice that you have the trailing foot lifting off right when the leading foot contacts the ground. That's a bit unlikely. If it stayed behind for a few more frames, pushing the body forward, I think that would help.

and make sure you have exporters in your hxt folder http://www.innovateenterprises.com/AM/

Smooth camera moves, with motion in different axa at once like we see in Matt's animation, are pretty difficult to get "for real".

Hi Mark, well it's about time you were getting around to animating! If I were to pick out one crucial missing element it would be the compression pose right after the heel contacts the ground. Basically the body falls into each new step and doesn't immediately rebound up at the moment the heel touches the ground. It takes a *few* frames for the leg force to undo the downward momentum of the body and get it going back up again. Richard Williams talks about this in his book on p. 103 (and I show it in my vid on posing walks. In the tut link in my sig.) I think that is the hardest part of walks to get working right.

regrettably , it's easier to do than to describe.

mmm... juice... me thirsty... Looks great!

Technically "step" isn't about the frame rate setting in your PRJ. It's just a way of rendering fewer frames than normal. step = 2 would render every other frame in your chor image000.tga image002.tga image004.tga image006.tga... step = 3 would render every third frame in your chor image000.tga image003.tga image006.tga image009.tga... I made my PRJ 48 fps instead of 24 fps because i wanted the particle emitter to emit particles more than once every 1/24th second. But I dont' really want all those frames rendered. I just wanted 24 frames per second. So I set step = 2 However, when rendering to Quicktime, the quicktime file seems to take its fps information from the project frame rate so when i render a 48 fps project with step = 2, I will get 24 frames from the 1st second of my chor but quicktime will give each one only 1/48th of a second when it plays them. this makes the action look like it's going 2x too fast. i had to render to targas, and import the sequence to QT Pro and tell it to think they were intended as 24fps.

technical answer to your question: you would need to animate the arm/hand in IK so all you have to do is set the hand position once and the arm in between the hand and shoulder figures itself out on its own. Somewhere in your rig there's a FK/IK switch But: It's a VERY odd look to have the hand remain MOTIONLESS while the body moves around it. It never happens in real life. It's something only a mime (beloved by all) might do. Better to animate the body to do the move in that you want then keyframe the arm and hand to look like they are compensating. The little bit of error will look more natural. Edit: (read your description again) Unless the movement only happens during that second point of view... where we never see the movement between the body and hand. In that situation I'd constrain the camera to the ball. then the ball would appear motionless even though you were actually moving the hand closer to his face. you could do that in either FK or IK

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=241122 if you dont' have photoshop you'll need some paint program that can make and show the alpha channel in an image. Bascially, the alpha channel controls how much of the decal shows. Where it's white, it all shows, where it's gray the decal gets mixed with whatever the original patch color is. Where it's black, none of the decal shows.

I dont' know much about hair, but I'd speed up the experimenting stage by just putting the hair material on one patch and testing with that. It kind of looks like "ambiance" is set to something other than 0. that would cause a flat dull look.

sequence of events 1 downloaded file 2 oped file 3 looked over how it was setup 4 tryed to change the color of the jets to red So you haven't tried just rendering the Project unaltered. That should have been step #1. notice that my animation is only 3 seconds long and the particles stop at about 2.5 seconds. the emitter is keyed to 0 then. I f you 're rendering something at 5 seconds out you're not going to get anything. A:M is not broken. I believe V15 turns off particles after every render so projects with lots of hair don't' take forever to reappear after a render.

you mean "particles" ON? Nothing renders even if you just load the PRJ and render it without changes?

Great looking splines!

One way would be to make an animated map applied to a cylinder where the jet exhaust would be. But then you're going to ask for a tut on making the animated map. Streaks are a likely solution make a ring for an emitter. A ring because you want teh edges of the exhaust to look denser than the middle. have it emit lots of nearly 100 % transparent streaks. High velocity. have them die off to 100% transparent in a few frames. make them 100% ambient so they look like they glow. you can vary the spray of the jet by varying the shape of the emitter. one problem with particles is that they tend to clump around exact frame times rather than be emitted randomly over the life of the effect. short streaks tend to look like pancakes are being fired out. One work around is to up the PRJ to a higher fps and then render fewer frames to compensate. you'll need to render to TGAs because quicktime will be fooled into thinking you want the higher frame rate. this was a 48fps PRJ rendered with "step" at 2 to get just 24 fps jetblastD.mov JetBlast02_48fps.zip MANY more particles, shorter and more transparent would get closer to the gassy effect in the example you showed. (thanks for showing an example!) Render time will go up, of course.

Welcome to A:M! A:M is a great 3D animation program and much fine animation has been done with it. If you know 2D animation principles you will find them useful in making good animation. However, You will find that some of the nuts and bolts and how-tos of 3D animation will take some adapting to. I think it takes most people more than 1 month. The best place to start is "The Art of Animation:Master" (TAoA:M) the Booklet (or pdf file if you bought the download version of A:M) that has about 12 introductory exercises on how to use different parts of A:M. Do them to get to know the program, and do them so you know the basic vocabulary so you can ask questions here on the forum and people will know what you are asking about. There's more to know than what is in TAoA:M but that is a good starting place. After that we can point you to other resources.

Happy Birthday Paul, and may all your WIPs be fruitful!