robcat2075

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.

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.