robcat2075

I hope this housecleaning doesn't mean you're giving up on the stuff you've been working on recently here. The glimpses we've gotten look fabulous.

When bones overlap each other clicking on the tip of the bone is the best way to select it. However, if you need to rotate the bone hit R after you select it and use the XYZ rotate manipulator that appears for better control rather than dragging the tip.

looks cool. will look forward to see some footage.

More successful than I expected. Can you render a wireframe of the animation too?

The "Stereoscopic AniJam" incorporated such an idea and will be appearing in the upcoming MiniMovie Contest #5; keep your eyes peeled to see it. Watch all the entries, of course.

Just say it's a water cannon and you'll be done.

Actually, the black is what the alpha channel is allowing to appear in those areas... nothing. If you want to see the alpha channel load a frame as a targa into Photoshop and look at the channels.

The pivot point for the model (the black bone) would normally be at 0,0,0 of the modeling space. If your model is not constructed around 0,0,0 the pivot point woud appear outside it. Also if you had moved the black bone while in bones mode that would move the pivot point. you can go in to bones mode in your model andmove the black bone to any point in your model. You may have to click on the background to make it appear.

That must be one of those ergonomic tamborines they make for old gypsies suffering from tambourine elbow.

For a gusher of blood, "blobbies" particles might ideal. They actually glob together when they collide. But you have to be patient with them, they take a very long time to render.

It sounds like a live action movie (your cats) with an animated character (the alien) composited into it? I'd suggest picking out ONE shot and doing it to completion first. What you learn along the way will help you greatly in planning your other shots. I agree with Dhar's assessment, but I'd modify it like this... Great story + great animation = box office failure, Exec who greenlit it is gone and new Exec too busy to promote it (Iron Giant) Great story + bad animation = cult classic (Heavy Metal) Great animation + bad story = Almost anything by the nine old men after Walt died. Bad story + bad animation = Hoodwinked II, coming to a theater near you.

Here's a simple cycling action with repeat ON and set to 5. It doesn't speed up the action, it plays it 5 times at normal speed. No path needed. Stride length is OFF too. RepeatingAction.zip

Hey, that's a creature Ray Harryhausen would be proud of! Looks fabulous.

Basically you drag a selection box around them and slide them. By coincidence I just made a small tut that addresses moving keyframes around on the timeline PoseToPoseH.mov (you'll need to have QT7 installed to see it)

The limitation of a kleig light is it is like a spotlight... it has a cone shape. It's tough to make a kleig light big enough to convincingly cover a large landscape shot like this and not see the edge of the cone. But try it, you may find an arrangement that works for your situation.

Charming penguin! I'd vote for the toon render but they both have pluses.

roughness creates an automatic "not perfectly smooth" appearance ranging from grainy to lumpy depending on your settings. It's advantage is you don't need to make a bumpmap for it. the disadvantage is that it is uniform, while a bumpmap lets yo create bumps in any shape you can draw. Roughness also slows rendering . it used to be possible to export it in one of the poly formats and reimport the result. haven't tried it lately. However, current displacement maps do not depend on the density of the underlying mesh so an exported mesh may not resemble the rendered displacement. This is for people working on collaborative projects off of a central server. I'd have to see a specific example. My advice is to save frequently, in versions, so if you dont' like something you've done, you can go back to some point before you did it.

Charming work! I feel bad for the mouse, though.

Great looking stuff!

Key Branch will key the selected bone and bones that are children it, the keying won't go up the chain to parent bones. BTW, it is possible to CTRL-select several bones while the Key Bone filter is on. It's a way to quickly key several bones that may not be related by a branch.

What a great story! congratulations. That should be on Hash's testimonial page. Hope you're a hero at work now!

turn off the lock button on the right

No. The CD is copy protected so that is not feasible. you can get a hardware dongle to replace the CD, at extra cost. Call Hash for info. If your laptop has a "hibernate function", you may be able to start A:M while an external CD-ROM is attached, remove the drive, then hibernate, and unhibernate your laptop when you want to use A:M. Of course this means not "quitting" A:M until you have returned to your CD-ROM drive.

I suppose this is more an animatic than a storyboard. However, it's not clear to me what the story is so in that sense it's not working yet (for me). I think the advantage of a storyboard is that you can append little explanatory comments to cover what might have been ambiguous in the drawing. And... since it's static drawings no one expects you to have the timing perfected yet. If the posing is important, I'd rethink the straight-into-the-camera poses. They're not presenting a clear silhouette to the audience. one other thing... the ad for someone else's movie that shows up at the end may not be helping your pitch. edit: the second time i watched it was an ad for some web thing.

I agree that it looks more like a jumping ball than a bouncing ball. If the assignment really is "basic bouncing ball" then you'd want to have the ball fall and behave more naturally, perhpas bouncing a few times and coming to rest. But if the goal is to make it look more like a character, then having it appear to move on its own would be part of it. I notice the volume of the ball is not being consistently maintained. For example, the stretched ball on the contact frame is no longer than the unstretched ball on the frame that follows it. And the ball squashing during an anticipation is no wider than the unsquashed ball before it. It does look like an enthusiastic ball, however!