robcat2075

Looks promising, I think the lighting is damping your efforts. It need some careful lighting to bring out the important shapes and lead our eye to the important part of the scene. Lighiting is a whole field in itself but there's probably a good book out there on classic movie lighting.

I didn't know there were female sphinxes, but i guess there would have to be or they would have died out a long time ago.

a cube doesn't have to have a hole on all six sides. In fact cubes don't normally have holes at all.

I don't know that Direct X will solve your problem but "SDK" stands for "Software Developer Kit" which is not something you want to update your PC. That is only for people who are writing new apps that use Direct X Thei current version of Direct X is 9.0c and you want the "End User Runtime" from this page If you're getting a white rectangle that typically means your video card hasn't enough memory to hold the rotoscope image. Try a very, very small one just to test. What sort of video card do you have? Also you might try turning off all video acceleration in the control panel for your video card. Or try altering other available settings.

Interesting find! thanks!

Yes, thanks for doing this, Caroline. A few notes... -remember to place the IK foot controls under the feet and not to the side. -I like to put the origin of the body bone and the spine bone and the leg bones at the same level so they have a common axis of rotation. Viewed from the side, at least. This is very helpful when posing. - I'm a little doubtful of bending the two bones in the calf (or any other limb segment). It may have an adverse effect on stretching and twisting. I'd keep those two-bone groups straight.

That looks sharp. What sort of a creature is on the top center? The animal paws are what make me wonder.

These look real good. I'd take issue with something in the spline continuity page. The good CP is really more like a cube with 4 holes, not 6. The situation illustrated at the top with two splines crossing and another one dead-ending into that would be a classic crease-maker to be avoided.

you mean you couldn't save the file to your hard drive? Have you been able to save other 4 MB files from the internet, but not this particular one? What sort of connection are you on? What Windows are you on? You did save it but couldnt' play it? What version of Quicktime does your Quicktime player say you have? Your going to want to have quicktime working because that really works better with A:M than any other format.

So it's something about the model, not a constant behavior of A:M... right-click in the model window>info how many patches does it say you have? and show us a wireframe of 8 and 9 i'm wondering why the sudden jump between 8 and 9

You say it "started" doing this, so it wasn't doing this before. If you restart A:M does it do this with all models or just this one? Does it do this with versions of the model you saved before the slowdown started?

See all the spots where you have 5 lines going into 1 CP? That's always bad. It's never good. YOu almost always want just 2 splines to criss cross at a CP (like at the two green arrows. looks like 4 lines going in) Purple is where I'd get rid of splines and green is where I'd put them instead. ( i just did the front as an example)

you've got an extra "http://" in your link. Good luck. I think that's a do-able scope for a first project.

give it time. Really, i made that so I wouldn't have to explain it from scratch every time it came up. And I don't remember exactly what I said.

Assuming your model is a typical biped, my Simplest IK Leg Tutorial (DL it to your hard drive) will introduce you to some of the why's and how's of IK legs. QT7 needed to view. But if you just want to get animating, TSM2 is the fastest way to install a rig. There's a link to it in the Rigging forum.

Great shot Rodger! You must tell us more about the grass.

An update of Direct X for the end user probably doesn't have "SDK" in it. Does OpenGL not work? That works best for most people.

look into your monitor gamma setting. You want some setting that makes what you see look like what we see. Most of the world's monitors aren't gamma calibrated, so if you work on a monitor that is, most of the world will see your pictures way darker than you made them.

except for the lights these pics look almost entirely black.

Do a simple test first. You'er trying to extract a model from a game? Extract something really, really small first. See if that works. And if it comes in with all triangles, you'll know not to bother with anything bigger because that will have all triangles too, and models made of all triangels are not salvageable. If it's quads, then maybe, but you'll have to do a lot of thinning.

OBJ is a common format. There are free open source apps that use it. But you'd have to learn how to model in that other app to edit a model. If the OBJ is made of triangles it will be a bad candidate for use in AM.

it may be just taking a lonnnnggggg time. I've had OBJ imports that looked frozen but eventually finished. like an hour. Try one over night to give it a chance. A very dense OBJ may be hopeless.

I'd think so too, but there is an offset value in the roll like constraint properties and I have a set of bones now that I had to go and poke in numbers for that offset to get the bones back to where they were before the contraint was turned on.

Apparently when TSM2 was written it was not possible via the SDK to directly create an offset constraint. So, TSM2 does a clever trick when it needs to make one. If it needs to offset constrain Bone A to Bone B, TSM2 creates an exact duplicate of Bone A that is a child of Bone B. It then can exactly constrain original Bone A to duplicate Bone A and the effect is the same as an offset constraint to Bone B. However, I've found that it doesn't do this when I try to script a "compensated roll like" constraint. I just get a "roll like" constraint with no offset. It makes sense considering the unique nature of "roll like" but I'm wondering if there's way script around this. hmmm....

I will say that you have certainly jumped in the deep end here. This dialog stuff is the most complicated thing to try to do well in animation. Dialog is quite an awkward starting point for learning to animate because the subtle body motions that people do when they are talking are really an advanced topic. There are too many issues to handle at once. And then trying to come up with something new that hasn't been done to death already... well, it's a daunting task. But... you've started this so let's presume you're going do this one the best you can... There's still too much going on without much meaning being conveyed. You want to thin this down to about two or three key poses that the audience can grab onto and that show real change in appearance. Right now almost everything is happening in his hands and chin and the body is contributing very little. His posture is very straight and rigid thru the whole clip. That's working against you. It's almost unnatural to see the hands doing so much with no participation by the torso. Less hand, more definite body pose. I'd rewind and just come up with 3 poses that convey this guy's key emotions. Starting pose --> first emotion --> finishing emotion. If he's standing absolutely straight upright in each one, he's not doing his job. When I was supervising animators for TWO movie i made some videos about how to block out the first pass of an animation. I think these might help you organize your work and distill it down to the essentials. http://www.hash.com/two/RCHolmen/PoseToPoseH.mov http://www.hash.com/two/RCHolmen/BreakdownMP4.mov When you finish this 11 second club entry you'll really want to go and get your animation fundamentals working because that's what is tripping you up here. LEarn to do a great bouncing ball, learn to do a great jump, learn to do a great side step... those are the sort of building blocks of good timing and weight and body mechanics you'll want to have mastered to make complex shots like this do-able.