robcat2075

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!

Yes, turn off compensate. In versions before V15 that button was off by default, but there weren't many circumstances in which you'd want to make a constraint without it, so in V15 it was changed to ON by default. You found the one situation in which you don't want it on.

Welcome to A:M! That looks like a very successful first outing. My main crit would be that some of the camera angles were confusing and/or moving too much. But again, a very respectable first effort. May you have many more!

What sort of a foot are you going to put this on? The Hand Gizmo is about quickly making poses that you need long fingers and a thumb to make. It wouldn't' be much of an advantage for a typical foot.

that looks real fine. So German planes were being built in the Netherlands?

That looks sharp. Keep on flying!

How does the front-projected toad generate toon lines if he's not there? All wonderful looking!

That's looking real good. I agree you might need more splineage to support eyebrow movement, but you'll find out either way when you get to that.

"Polygon Modifier" is obsolete and doesn't exist under A:M's Simcloth anymore. I'm not even sure what it did. Pass thrus... first tactic... increase collision distance. There may be a "normal" direction issue I've had success with scaling models larger so that large collision distances appeared small. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=279088 Simcloth in 12w... not sure about that.

that's fabulous! We're all proud of you!

Not normally. Something more is wrong. You may have to tell us more about what you're doing.

One thing that worries me is you say you've "uploaded" the sound again. There is no "upload" in A:M. You can "import" a sound but since you're not describing that right, I wonder if there's some other detail you're not describing right that's stopping us from seeing what's wrong. Logic would tell us that since the program is the same one you installed and it worked before... it's not the program that stopped working. You've changed something. -Do a Help>reset all settings. restart A:M and reload your PRJ. -Here's another test... can you start a brand new fresh project, import a sound file, put it in a blank chor and hear it play there? -last resort... Do Project>Embed all, save it, and post it AND the sound file here and someone might be nice enough to look at it.

As far as I know a Hash employee, Steve Sappington, did the TAoA:M videos. There are plugins available for A:M, for example these, but they are mostly free and you won't need them for TAoA:M. They are convenient, but not necessities for getting something done. The only major accessory you need with A:M is a paint program if you want to make decals.

The problem with this topic is that there are about five things you need to know, but no single one of them appears useful or makes sense unless you already understand the other four. None of them are particularly difficult but no matter which order you cover them in, you have to slog thru four before you get to that AHA! moment where you see that they all really do have some relation and they are all useful. - more likely a "bone" not a "control point" - the middle option, "branch" will key all children of a selected bone, not necessarily all connected bones. I never use it because in modern rigs bones that appear to be parent and child may not actually be so. Bones I might expect branch to key might not. So when need to key a whole arm or hand I explicitly multiple-select the bones I want and use the single bone filter.

Tell me more about what doesn't work. Here is the link. We discussed this but I never got a solution. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...mp;#entry292993 As I recall that one was a a somewhat different issue of trying to force keyframes (with the Offset button ON) when switching from an action to keyframed action. An Issue, but I don't have V15 to do testing with. Go do the keyframe test I just posted and let me know what happens.

While you have a pose window open, a phantom action also appears in the Actions folder. go down to it and turn on "Show more than drivers". this will expose the bones of the model and you can turn their "eye" icon on and off to key their visibility for various settings of your pose's slider (or ON/OFF switch). This phantom action will disappear when you close your pose window.