robcat2075

Quick answer...the modeling will be rather similar to any other character. -make a front and side drawing of the character to use as rotoscopes. -start modeling the features... eyes, nose, mouth.... follow thw same procedure as the tuts on normal characters. -when you're done, "toon rendering" will do a lot to get the flat shaded anime look. HAve you finished the tuts in TAoA:M yet? those will cover a lot of ground you will want to know.

YOu can paint alpha channels by hand but for complex tranparencies like this, it won't do: The Flaming Pear plugin ("Solidify") is free on the web, ya just gotta find it. what it does is convert transparencies in photoshop layers into solid color. why do yo u want to do that? Because you can't just save a transparant layer as a targa and get an alpha in it that correctly represents the transparency. You need to load the transparency info of the visible layer and paint it into the alpha channel, then "solidify" the original image. THEN you can save a targa and it will work as a decal with the intended transparent effects. Gray fringes will result otherwise if you dont' do it that way. No fringes, even on pure white or pure black patches:

That's a photoshop process. Easy to do. Long to explain. You'll need the "Flaming Pear" plugins for PS. There's a thread around here somewhere on it...

glowingsprite.zipa sprite image created with an alpha channel that makes a hazy white fadeout surrounding the main image will look like a glow.

that's what it is there for.

I like the semi shadow puppet look! Keep going with it.

This is a big topic. A lot has to do with the codec you chose (or left on by default). You can choose a codec and settings while you are doing your other save settings. Generally you have to experiment with settings to find the right compromise between quality and size. "Animation" is largely uncompressed and will make large files. "Sorenson 3" will make smaller files. There are other choices. If you have a website you could put it on that and send them a link.

constrain (translation and rotation)the model to the camera.

"Intensity" in the properties for the light.

I don't know how the model was exported to OBJ, although there is an OBJ export plugin for maya. I just know I got the model in OBJ.

An OBJ derived from a well-made "Sub-D" model can have promise for importing to A:M. Typically, a lot of thinning out of unnecessary splines is needed and some resplining to substitute 5-pointers where 5-edge intersections were happening. I've done it once; it was a lot of work; but it was less work than merely using the imported OBJ as a reference and remodeling from scratch.

import a targa sequence, apply as rotoscope

A "swatch" woudl be some simple, mostly flat geometry with a decal on it. If you do get some long flowing hair to work well (like not pass thru the shoulders and all that) that will be good to see. I recall an article about "The Incredibles" saying that Violet having long hair was something they considered abandoning because it was so difficult to manage.

The only way I can think of transferring a pose is to extract it from one .mdl file and paste it into another .mdl with a text editor. Haven't tried it and it would probably lend itself to poses on bones only.

Basically start extrding and looping and extruding and looping. If your bow was one of those fancy bows wiht lots of curls the dup wizard would probably do it. but I dont think you need that. there's a plugin out there that will extrude anything along a spline. make one spline thatdoes the path of the ribbon, then extrude something flat along it.

There's a zillion things that make "realistic". Tell us more about what specific details disappoint you in these.

It does seem a bit bleak.

You did a search for posts by you? You've only made 250. i fyou knew about when you posted them you could narrow the search results down.

This seems to come up quite a bit in animation discussions fps magazine founder Emru Townsend made this comment about black stereotypes in cartoons I guess if you are making a cartoon about something as specific as black tribal people in Africa you'd want to have something significant to say about them rather than just use them as foils for worn out gags. Maybe you're doing a traditional African Folk tale. I remember Charles Schulz explaining why he didn't make much use of his "Franklin" character. He decided that he didn't really know enough about the experience of a black 10-year old boy to do it properly. Good looking meshes on your characters, though!

Charming character!

After you add the action to a model in your chor, its properties window will have an "ease" setting. Ease from 0% to 100% will make an action go forward. 100% to 0% will make it go backwards. That properties window also has a "repeat" setting.

Good point. Thanks for reminding me. I bought The Setup Machine [Anzovin Studios] a few years back. Time to dig it out again. You had the setup machine and weren't using it? Doh! If it's the original TSM, that only worked with up to V10.5 I think. I know it wont' work with V13+. However TSM2 will work with 13 and later.

I'm guessing all the bonename2 stuff happened when some bone heirarchy got dragged into or onto something else inadvertently. I agree with Nancy that a startover would be in order. There used to be a fine plugin for A:M called "the Setup Machine". After you put in the basic bones and weighted your CPs to them it would go thru and and add all the extra bones and do all the relationships and hide everything that you never wanted to see and give you back your character ready to animate. And it could do all sorts of multi-legged, multi-winged, multi-headed characters if you needed it to. Unfortunately it's discontinued.

That looks good, although I think you may have used more splines than you will need running from front to back.

The most likely solution is to render it once each way then do a dissolve from one to the other in an editing or compositing program.