robcat2075

Targa series is better than .mov but mov should work... rightclick on Images folder>Import>Image or Animation Sequence use like any other decal or rotoscope. you can double click on it in the PWS to display it in a window.

Welcome to A:M!

too complicated to type. Hope you have broadband... shaggyanddoormp4b.mov

Post a shaded and shaded wireframe and someone will probably jump in with more specific notes.

One quick thought... I'd either alter the poses or change the camera angle so the silhouette of the hands is not overlapping the silhouette of the body. This will make for clearer poses.

tut covering the essential concepts: http://www.hash.com/users/ed/tutorials/fpm/fpm.htm

I see what went wrong. All bones in the model judge their position relative to the Root Bone and the root bone is moving backwards during your cycle. I bet that happened when you were making the walk more "treadmill-like" after having animated it in a more realistic fashion. It's only noticed onthe feet because you've successfully counter animt So the feet are being pasted into a position that is mirrored, but releative to the root bone. It is possible to convert a walk animated normally into a treadmill walk for a cycle, but very easy to make a mistake and get odd results. I'd suggest starting over and remember to not move the root bone in an action. Incidentally the arm bones aren't doing weird things because the are all FK and only repsonding to rotation information which isn't affected by the translation of the root bone. Before you do more however... go thru the bones and make sure that all te center bones (including the hips, including the head) are really at X=0 in your model and that all the left-right bones are really exactly opposite each other. For example x=9.39 and x=-9.27 aren't exact opposites. That said, while testing, I found that copy paste mirror could produce some unmirror-like results on the hips, which i can't explain. It may be necessary to tinker with mirrored poses to get them truly mirrored.

Pretty cool. I was looking at it trying to figure out which car was the CG car that was going to transform and then... they're both CG!

It sounds like you're doing all the time-saving work-arounds already. One anomaly i notice after several viewings is that it's pretty much in clear focus from front to back at the beginning but then the front goes out of focus while the back can't get any more in focus than it was. Also the details in the forground wall get more blurred than the foreground character. But those aren't shot killers.

I'm just guessing... make sure both the Translate and Rotate filters are on when you do the copy and the paste. It looks like only the Rotate filter is on. They're at the bottom of the screen

Is it the set and its lighting that takes most of the time? The characters alone ought to be rather fast rendering. Are you doing the depth of field effect in A:M or in post?

the real-time display can handle "color" decals, that's about it. Bump maps are a decals too, they just do different stuff with the image information. There are several other kinds of decals. I guess there is a way to make a material that will do bumps. I just haven't done much with it. "Materials" have the advantage of not taking up much memory, but may render slowly. Decals can be painted to precisely fit your model, but take up more ram and I suppose anti-aliasing them may take up render time too. Generally, decals are faster than complex materials, but they only look as good as you paint them.

When he's lifting that I would try to get his hips as close and "under" the weight as possible, even as he's just getting it off the ground.

First, convert your video into Quicktime or (preferably) a targa series. This is done in some other app such as a video editing program. then import that into Images and use it as a decal or rotoscope.

most Materials are "combiners" and need to be rendered for all the detail to show up. (This can be very slow, BTW) A plane like the ground may only recieve one thin slice of a material so it may not give the result you expected. Scaling, moving or tilting the origin of the material (see its properties) may be necessary.

It's pretty hard to get people to jump in on an independent project. Especially one that isn't fully planned out yet. Most people already have projects of their own they'd like to do first. Keep developing it, maybe you'll snare someone's interest.

Don't drop it, just table it and come back to it some day. Fine looking stuff!

I think that looks like a good character for learning animation. Think about making a lo-res proxy so your realtime playback is up to speed while you're doing that.

Hey, that looks good. You'll have to animate him now.

Wispy fog with moving and flowing tendrils would need some sort of particle effect. Much experimenting would be needed to perfect such an effect. However it is possible to animate the fog settings in the camera's properties panel to vary the start and stop distances. This can get a general effect of the fog increasing. Change the fog settings on different frames to set keyframes for them. You can see the channels this creates in the Project workspace.

If you got a different result, that's a very strong indicator that you skipped a step or did a step differently, or did them in a different order. Beyond that it's impossible to diagnose this just by words. There's a hundred things you could have done differently and no way for me to know which one. I would suggest removing all the bones from one arm and starting from scratch on one arm. Don't copy anything from the arms you already have. Obviously that isn't working because some important part out is getting overlooked. Without watching you there's no way to know which one is being left out. here's a very simple FK arm alternative. SimpleArmMP4.mov

The overlapping action on impact works well. Who tossed him in the air?

Rigs often have a number of hidden bones that help manuver the visible bones and then have constraints applied that make everything work together. I'm not an expert on the AM2001 rig so I couldn't tell you exactly what might have been left out when you created the second set of arms. I made short tut on simple IK legs here.. the simplest IK leg Even though it's for a "leg" you could use the same tactic on an arm.

The easiest way is a cookie-cut map. search for "cookie" in your Help>Help topics. It explains the different type of maps

I think the shapes would work better reversed. Narrow for "oh"