robcat2075

And I'll note there is an explanation of that (and the rest of the rig) in the manual that is copied into your AM/hxt/TSM2 folder when you install TSM2. Read it. It's good for you.

it's pinned at the top

You're trying to download it? I just tried the link and it still works. The manual is in the TSM2 folder that gets placed in your AM/hxt folder after you run the installer. That's on PC. did you get that far? (btw, this is mentioned in the post with the download link) And Caroline has a thread that steps thru every detail of the rigging process

Ya just know that if the Obamas owned a bunch of houses that were "hers" on paper and not quite "theirs" the news channels would be all over that with things like -is it a tax dodge? An unfair tax shelter the average citizen doesn't have access to? -Why dont' they have a real Christian marrriage where they share everything? Do loving couples keep things from each other? -Does the separate property mean she's a secret lesbian? -Why can't he be trusted to have the property in his name also? -Doesn't the muslim faith forbid such things?!? -What are the secret clauses in their pre-nup agreement? Why haven't those been made public? -Are those houses wasting energy while they aren't occupied? -Will we have to pay for Secret Service protection for all those houses if he gets elected? But all the McCains get is a few days as a late-night joke.

I think the fact that you are an artist with an eye for what looks right will help you quite a bit once you get over the initial hump of making shapes.

yes, both of those are closer. The idea is to not have a whole bunch of stuff moving exactly together which looks mechanical. If this was a shot that would linger on the screen for some time, you'd have to break the grass into even more controllable subsections to reduce what the eye might discover was moving too much together. But for a shot of only a few seconds wou wouldn't have to do as much of that.

Damn, that's a lot of grass. That looks good though. It's hard to tell from the mov, but it looks like that large area of grass is moving in unison. If you could find a way to stagger the effect that might more cloesly approximate the real life effect of the eddies in the air as the move across the body of the field, making a wave-like appearance.

I kind of liked the the camera pull back revealing the house being larger and larger and larger. I was hoping it would be even larger. Find a recording of "Hail to the chief" by one of the military service bands. That ought to be semi PD. The tune itself is. you can get the shaded render antialiased with multi-pass

PWS timeline shows everything all the time "Timeline" shows only what is selected OR things that were selected when you hit the tack button their functionality for copy/paste operations seems to be the same

How did "Kevin Detwiler is successfully exchanging camera data between Vue and A:M" equate to "nothing workable yet." Kevin's forum name is detbear. try contacting him. He is modeling, animating and rendering characters in A:M and compositing that with scenery rendered in Vue. Or more likely, try contacting Stephen Gross (yoda64). he wrote the plugin.

Not cringingly and vomitously awful. Youtube it. And that's a pretty good McCain.

BTW, I should say that it is very promising that you recognize that your animation doesn't look right. That really is the first step to getting better. There are a lot of people grinding out bad animation who have no clue that it is bad. They don't get better.

turn off the brown light in that default chor. Change it to white.

Can you at least import the .mov into your Images folder?

Kevin Detwiler is successfully exchanging camera data between Vue and A:M using a plugin that Stephen Gross wrote. Hopefully he'll pop in here with some details.

presuming that just one light by itself renders correctly, then do a pass for each light and composite the two passes. If you have after Effects i think the "lighten" composite mode would preserve the brightness better than a 50% blend. Lighten uses whatever is brightest from two sources.

zero slope zero slope the keys on the channel for that pose slider. Under user props. in the chor. in the PWS.

That's a long story. That's what every animator strives for. Richard Williams wrote a book on that called "The Animator's Survival Kit". He talks about arcs and timing and posing and 100 other things. It's 342 pages and that's short. The briefest thing I can say is start small. Learn to make a great bouncing ball with good weight and timing and build up from there. And learn to make strong poses with your character and build up from there.

Great looking shots. I'll look forward to seeing the whole movie someday.

I think that is appropriate for the blocking stage in that it tells us what your essential acting ideas are going to be. Since only his upper half is being used you might move the camera in closer. I agree with the above comments about too much symmetry. I would keep that tablet in his left hand, if only to force yourself to not treat both arms identically and end up with twinned poses. I heard an animator call that "coffee cup animation"; give the character a prop in one hand (like a cup of coffee) that makes it impossible to do twinned poses (presuming he doesn't want to spill his coffee). His torso stays almost exactly straight up for most of the clip. That's making him look stiff. I think there are more expressive ways to do the ideas you are doing. For example, when he points to the tablet (I do like that you bent his finger backwards to show weight) you could lean him into the direction he talking to and hold that tablet up to his side to make it more clear and emphatic. anything to get him off that neutral center-line.

That's a challenging motion to do. One thing I think would give more weight to it is to make sure his body mass is centered over his hands while he's pushing himself up. If he had rolled into that handstand quickly his momentum might plausibly be carrying him forward, but he's gone into it so carefully that that doesn't look the case. I also think there's opportunity to bend his spine when he leans forward and when he is pushing his legs up. That woudl loosen him up and help show more effort in what he is doing. good start though.

That looks quite successful, Caroline!

The particles are so small... wouldn't sprites or streaks work just as well?

The only issue with the plugin was that I did find that the bones called "right" copied and weighted correctly, but the bones called "Right" copied, but did not weight (I had unticked case-sensitive). I fixed that by renaming the "Right" ones "right". Is now solved , also the rmweight problem . Stephen, I got the latest version of MirrorBone off your plugins page, but I still find that it is making "left[bonename]"copies for bones that didn't have "right" in their name. This happens on bones that are not centered on X=0. These are off-center bones that appear as if they might warrant a mirrored copy, but that I have intentionally not named "right" so a mirroring program such as the plugin would not make a copy. Sorry to detour Caroline's thread here... I tried emailing, but they keep getting bounced back.

I'm always impressed by people like Will Sutton who can make a smooth face and not seem to need to tweak any biases to do it.