robcat2075

If you do a search on "The advantages of patches" in your A:M "Help" there is a page that explains the issues.

v15 has a new particle "fluid" you might try. Expect to do much trial and error as you experiment with settings. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=244207

Microsoft is not selling old versions of Windows for $10. Show me a link on their site where they do that? They don't even support anything before W2000. On ebay you can buy old versions of windows for $10 but you can buy old versions of A:M on ebay for $10 too. But I wouldn't buy a $10 A:M because the features in new A:M are far better and the stability is way better too. You're just won't get much mileage out of complaining you can't get V8 around here because 1) nobody here is shocked that you need the CD to run A:M. It's been that way forever. and 2) nobody here is shocked that Hash doesn't have a stockpile of seven-year-old CDs.

First, I'm still not convinced the person picking the clips for 11 sec club is doing it right. The character doesn't reveal any "change" which is what to look for in audio clips with potential. But you're stuck with it. Maybe you can extract some change from it. ok... Too many hand/arm poses. It's almost like he's "signing" every word. On a clip like this you try to look for maybe two main ideas that are going thru the character's mind. I see them as -"My son is great" -"You too dumb to see it" maybe that's the change! He starts out awed (by his son) and ends up dismissive (of the other guy). It's not much but it's something. Conveying that in pose will be tough without resorting to melodrama. Use his posture to help convey his emotion. He sounds impatient to me. Leaning forward might help. or walking away. Choose that camera angle early. Your poses depend on the camera angle. Eliminating the view of the 2nd character will simplify things

You didn't make a back-up copy of your V8 CD? Doh! Back then you could make a personal backup with a regular CD burner. Legal, but I imagine many people were not just making backup copies for themselves; the non-copyable CD came in soon after that. I can't imagine any consumer situation where if you buy something and it's stolen 7 years later, the company will send you another one. $50 is really pretty good to get into 3D. Get the new version, it's fabulous.

ok... i'm going to say the barrels of the cannons are too long. The cannons can't roll back any further so the crew would have to hang over the edge to reload.

if you want easy to install... TSM2

That's a fine looking ship. I look forward to seeing more of it.

I just clicked on the link for TAoA:M #14 (Materials) and it played fine. It doesn't need fixing. It works already. If it isn't playing, there's a problem on your end.

Hey, that's a cool symphony for the eyes. I like that you wrote all the music yourself. There's too much animation out there borrowing someone else's music. I'd recommend people click on the "watch in high quality" link for each segment as the regular Youtube compression takes out too many details.

Good looking character. I suppose the overall stubbiness of him will make him challenging to bone and weight, but that's probably why you are making him that way, to show that it can be done successfully.

in your pic it looks like it is on. The alpha channel is making the blue sky transparent so all we see is black. Turn the "Alpha Buffer" OFF , like in caroline's pic and no alpha buffer will be created, so the camera background color (the "sky") will show up. An alpha channel in A:M will make transparent any part of the image that is not a model . The camera background color (set inthe camera properties) is not a model, it's just automatic filler. The ground plane, the plate and the cookies are all models and the alpha channel leaves them opaque.

Welcome to A:M! I sense you have not completed TAoA:M yet. You definitely want to do that. Digital pictures have "channels", usually 3. One each for the brightness of Red Green and Blue. They mix to make all the colors you can see. An alpha channel is a fourth channel that governs the possible transparency of the picture the RGB channels make. "Possible" because "transparency " suggests you'd actually want to see thru parts of a picture. SUppose you wanted to put the "S" logo on Superman. You could paint that in a paint program but the file you save is going to be rectangular and you just want the "S" to show up. The Alpha channel is used to indicate that everything but the "S" is transparent. An alpha channel is a gray scale image but it doesn't add gray to an image. White would indicate solid and black woudl indicate transparent and gray anything inbetween. Photoshop can show you any channel individually and I presume other paint programs can do so too. Thew manual of any of those will explain alpha channels and how they handle them. "Layer" turns out to be a rather inexact term. A layer in Photoshop is not like a layer in A:M. An A:M layer is like an image plane that floats in front of the camera. Decals are images applied to a model, like a tatoo or the Supeman S mentioned above. TAoAM #10 introduces decals This is a catch all term for any kind of detail that shows up onthe surface of a model these are little programs that create details on a model surface, like the color of gold or the rings in a piece of wood. You do have to render to see them. THey are not created in a paint program. TAoAM #14 introduces materials These could be any flat or hemispherical model with an image of the sky decaled to it.

I recall the last time someone mentioned this problem, it was related to some sort of CD copying/caching/virtualizing software they had running. They didn't know they had it but they did. They swore up and down they didnt' have such a thing but it turned out they did. It may have been related to some game they installed.

Maybe it should be called AM2008 since the old actions aren't be compatible and people will be trying to use old actions when they start out. Some people will ask why it doesn't work and get an answer on the forum, but a lot of people will just stop when things stop working and be disappointed with A:M. Alternatively, perhaps the fixes could be limited to those that won't create incompatibility. The change of the spine from FK to IK is probably the biggie. Hey... if you wanted to be really clever... a spine that could switch from IK to FK like the Squetch arms and legs do... that would be huge.

Shaggy's mouth is about as simple as it gets. Is' say do the body language first, then worry about the lipsynch.

I realize it's not a pure splining solution , but I think this is a job for a boolean. and you can animate the size of the boolean to make mouthshapes for speech and never mess up the smoothness of your cylinder shape.

just to try... reboot your computer with the CD in the drive. Occasionally my PC will forget it has the CD in it, and no matter how many times I eject it and insert it again it won't recognize it until i restart the PC.

"1 right foot IK control" bone and "1 left foot IK control" bone should be set to visible in your rmodel. you'll find them at the highest level of your bone heirarchy. TSM only turns them off if you have switched a leg to FK mode

a "String" is a piece of text. save your character. restart A:M and reload the character and the strings errors will be gone. one will remain that says "Error Loading String: 5002" plus one more digit. That would just say "relationship" plus a number for the relationship but the rig still works normally even with the string error. 1) of course, you attached CPs to the bones that TSM Builder made 2)after TSM Rigger, turn "TSM constraints" ON in your pose folder

btw... some tuts on basic walk animating... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=258588

This is an interesting topic. A walk is a controlled fall onto each succeeding foot, so walks of different speeds would need to be animated differently to keep that falling appear right. And also a stroll and a fast walk have different appearances in body posture and the way the weight shifts from one foot to the other. But technically, you can take a walk you have animated and reuse it at different speeds. The farther you get from the original speed the odder it will look. the path constraint has an "ease" property the you can keyframe to decide how far along the path the model is at any time. If the walk cycle is constructed properly A:M will add or remove frames to keep the feet moving at about the right pace vs. the ground. your walk action has a repeat value you can set in its properties in the chor.

You're probably right... something is messed up, but it's hard to diagnose from a pic. If you're on a PC how about rigging with TSM2? It's better than AM2001 , it's easier, and it's free. Look for the download in the Rigging forum.

"Light Lists" limit the light from a light to particular objects in a scene. You might use that to selectively light things. This is very situation specific and may or may not help in your case.

Rendering to EXR format enables separate buffers for shadows and lights and almost anything you'd want to separate. It is possible to manipulate the mix of these buffers in an A:M EXR "composition" (I can't explain it all here, I'm just sayin' it's out there) A more convenient way to use these buffers is in a compositing app such as After Effects that can read EXR files and their various buffers. This is advanced VFX stuff. It's great that A:M supports it, it just needs some more documentation to make it accessible to more A:M users.