robcat2075

Nice eyelashes! That does look odd. It's like you've caught A:M subdividing its patches. Is there any chance there are duplicate or internal patches at those black spots? I'm just wild guessing here. Does this happen from any camera angle at any distance and any lighting? Or just this case? If you remove the decals or turn off hair does that change anything? Is there a material on that skin? if you remove that what happens. I'm just thinking that some small change might give someone a clue. What was your previous version? Can you reinstall it? If you can load this into two different versions of A:M and get different results that would be something to report to AMReports with renders from each.

!!! I did not know that!

I tried it, I could just barely open it. There is a certain wall you hit with large splineage. I think you've hit it. But multiple copies will be a better solution for you. I forget the exact work flow for assembling sets as action objects that Gerry mentioned, but it's somewhere in the TWO forums. If you were to put one chair as multiple models in a chor you'd have the flexibility of turning any of them temporarily to seen/unseen so A"M only had to display the particular ones you needed to animate around at any moment (faster screen), then turn them all back on for rendering. You could organize them by row in folders for easy finding. You can shift or CTRL select multiple objects in the chor and flick them all to a different state at once, instead of having to set each one individually. S Gross made a plugin for quickly adding many copies of a model to a chor: Multiply plugin

If you enable "show more than drivers" in the chor you can set keyframes on the "Frames" property for the image sequence. You can make the sequence go slow or fast or hold or backwards even by setting keys for particular image frames

That's valid reasoning. It just seemed to be dropping to the ground awfully short. Maybe the arc is mishapen in some way that the descent is too precipitous. Or maybe it's just fine.. That item wasn't fatal. The thing that really got my attention at first was the flat glide into the first bounce.

here's some notes on #4. Haven't gotten to #5 yet. danfBB4.mov

You know there's a Project Workspace window, right? You know there's an "Actions" folder in it , right? And I hope to God you can right-click on it to load a file. If not, it's going to be a long day.

If your object doesn't move, the easiest way is to fake it by painting the floor to glow in any shape and color you want. I did that for this video. idl_150kbps.wmv At about 0:20 there's a "spaceship" with a ring of rectangular glowing lights on the floor. I just painted a blurry ambience map around the rectangles to make those parts appear to glow brightly. It was an animated map to make the flash on and off. Alternatively you could attach a kleig light with a mask to shine down from your object onto the floor. the mask will make the light any shape you want.

the mov is only 91 bytes and won't play. Try uploading again. however, are you using a different version of A:M than before?

Welcome to A:M! you can drag it from the Objects folder in the Project Workspace window into your chor window (or onto your chor in the Project Workspace, either way.) Have you done the exercises in The Art of Animation:Master? Those will answer a lot of questions like that.

Just to try... put it in a text editor and do a search for "error". let us know if it's there. But how is you've been saving new versions of your work over the last version? That's a bad habit. Save versions. It makes it easier to recover a damaged file because you can compare it to the last one to see what changed. And fix it.

if you "spherical" apply the map at http://flickr.com/photos/87849770@N00/2572996930 you can get the new 2008 ball but I haven't found an equivalent classic soccer ball map. There ought to be one out there. EDIT: here is the actual Creative Commons License image in case the above link goes dead:

good-lookin model! I'll be interested to see how the hair performs.

You can right-click in the Chor window>Plugins>Simcloth Simulate

No, but you can (T)urn the model to other angles. use CTRL for for rotation around the screen z axis. then apply the decal. You can also create a pose for the model, turn the model and apply the decal in the pose.

How to preserve Photoshop transparency when making decals... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=241122

One quick point I'd make is ... maintain overall volume. When a ball stretches it gets a little narrower. When it squashes it gets a bit fatter. Yes, the falling motion looks out of whack, like it's not accelerating. Tracking dots would be needed to really evaluate it and pinpoint it. A good start, but that one will need specific diagnosis, that i won't get to immediately. For now, go out and play in the sun again.

Something has gone wrong here. Remember you can make special case keyframes anywhere you want and adjust the curves leading into and out of them anyway you want, so there is no need to lose the natural acceleration of the ball's falling motion.

try making the ball jump itself into the air from a standstill (and fall back down to land). Unlike a frog or rabbit the ball has no legs to push itself off with, so squash and stretch is involved. extra points if you can make it leap with sideways motion, as a frog or rabbit would do.

I sense a mistake right there. You rotate arm bones, you dont' grab them and move them to new locations. Always use the rotate manipulators for bones, don't drag the tip around. Jeff Lew uses an old technique for adding constraints to a character. Remember to import the action that came with the character and drop that on the character in the chor. When I do that, that character works fine.

It's alive! much easier than calculating X and Y. There is a bit of tradition and formula about the frames around the bounce, but that's a lesson for another day. If you have "The Animator's Survival Kit" it's on pg 93-94 But I'll tell you, for the very first bouncing ball assignment at AnimationMentor they wanted people to explicitly key the ball on every frame, much like you had done as they hadn't intruduced the curve editor yet. MOst of them looked absolutely awful since most of them didn't know what you knew about the math of the motion. (Me, I figured the mentor was never going to see my channels anyway so I just edited my curves and my bouncing ball bounced just fine.)

That's impressive. What do we have to do to keep the ball from penetrating the track edges sometimes?

You do have the "Show Bias Handles" button on? It doesn't have a default keyboard shortcut but you can assign one in Tools>Customize>Keyboard On rare occasions I have encountered invisble bias handles. I think it was a graphics card problem. But I could hover my cursor over where the bias handle was supposed to be and move it. I dont 'reccommend it.

Wait, Hold it! Here's a better intro to channel editing... channelbiasmp4.mov

This isn't exactly an introduction to the curve editor (which is accessed by pressing the button with the RGB lines on it) but it shows manipulating the shape of the curves with the bias handles. CPs can be peaked or smooth, just like in models. http://www.hash.com/two/RCHolmen/biasmagnitudeMP4Low.mov Someday I'll do a bouncing ball tut that covers all this but I haven't done that yet.