robcat2075

There are free 3rd party plugins for OBJ and 3DS i know. However, good looking polygonal models in such formats tend to have very dense meshes and much editing would be needed after you import them to turn them into good spline models. It is not a direct 1:1 conversion as say, OBJ to 3DS might be. Also very large polygonal models may not import at all. Modeling in A:M is not hard once you understand the strategy.

If that's the Rabbit with the AM2001 rig, part of the problem may be that it doesn't really have a way to lift the heel. One has to raise the whole foot, then tilt it down and bend the toe to get the same effect, which you appear to have done. In interpolating between flat foot pose and "raised heel" pose, the toe may move down faster than the foot raises, causing it to dip below the ground. But without seeing your project I can't be sure .

You CAN create a model in the Chor window. right-click>new>model the "Modeling mode (f5)" button will go on and you can start laying down splines. You can also edit an existing model by hitting that button. However if your model is rigged and you have animated it, it will go back to its default shape while you are in modeling mode. Remember to go back to one of the animation modes when you are done.

That's quite cool! I was just about to say it had a Nancy Gormezano air to it.

I think not. Not like you can do in the modeling window. There may be a way to simulate this with a bone in the model, but offhand... not sure.

Some textures to make her look more... insectoid? Not sure what to suggest. I recall she had lots of slime. Probably hard to do in CG. You'd probably get more feedback in the WIP forum.

That is a fabulous tiger!

Try this first.... hit "Page Up" a few times. You might be in low poly mode (looks rougher but plays faster) Hit "Page Down" to get rough again.

Thanks for your comments! Yes, I spent many hours sliding things around trying to get them to look tighter and when one thing improved it seemed like something next to it got worse. So what you see here is the point where I said "f--- it". If I ever get my enthusiasm back I think I'll blow away all those keys and redo it from scratch. Or maybe just have him fall out of the car before he says anything. No, part of the enrollment agreement was that we not redistribute any of the AnimationMentor materials. Even though it's not the original Maya model there were total hysterics when I told them I had included it in a bug report to Hash. Oh well, at least now I can say i've gotten a personal phone call from Bobby Beck. It's more of a "bowing" capability on each bone. It's a way of softening up the lines of a character, especially on something like this that's basically a stick figure. It was hairy getting that to work on the arms that have to be able to twist and stretch and bow in any arbitrary combination. Here's a frame showing bowed and unbowed. [attachmentid=20505] I overdid it in places. One theory says you're not supposed to do it so much that it is noticed. I think I read that this is something first done on "the Incredibles", but I could be wrong about that. spartan it is and spartan it will stay, I'm afraid. The assignment was just about the character so any other elements were pretty basic. I did consider shooting some background video from my car and compositing that in, but getting that to match would be a major project in itself.limbbenders.mov

Nice clip. Yeah, have it bounce off the ground, then spring into it's new shape.

My first dialog test was about tasteful and restrained acting choices. Not this one. I did this last year but I'm only now getting around to trying to light it and add a "background". Before you had to pretend it was night and that the car was moving. The dialog is Frederic March and Myrna Loy in The Best Years of our Lives. The sound effect was taken from The Palm Beach Affair. [attachmentid=20481] Pickupcafe504_h264300.mp4 I never quite got it to look like my "vision" of how it would all work, but I'm pleased with it. Update: I don't want to leave the impression that I did this in one sitting or one week or entirely on my own. For the very curious, I've compiled all the versions of this assignment that I turned in over the nine weeks that I worked on it along with some explanatory notes between each iteration. You can watch it go from the pathetic larval stage to the all-talking, all-swinging, all-falling stage I posted above. The mentor comments, positive and negative, were far more substantial than I present here and had a lot to do with this animation having a successful result, but I can't remember them all now. [attachmentid=20903] (H.264 format) As I look through these now, I see some touches that got lost in the polishing and I should try to recapture. I also see that my concept of the performance changed quite a bit and I was lucky to have the time to experiment. Pickupcafe504_h264300.mov WipCompilationSC.mov

start a project in WIP forum, post screen caps as you go, and ask for suggestions. If you're making a model from some reference picture post that too so people will know what you're going for. I know people will jump in to help.

If you just did the tut and saved a .prj then the model is probably embedded inthe project. If you actually went thru the op of saving the model as a separate file then it's not embedded. but then you'd have a .mdl file somewhere on your dirve that you could load independently of the project. if you "Windows>close all" the windows in A:M and then double click on your model under "objects", what happens?

If worse came to worse you could always save your project, which we presume to contain the model (unless it's not embedded), and then extract the model portion in a text editor and paste it into a blank model file and reload that. Not easy to explain, so I'll let someone else try

Try opening up the "project workspace" window (ALT+1) and double click on your model under "objects"

Yes. I recommended Sorensen 3 because it compresses quite a bit while retaining decent quality. This is important for files that people will be downloading off the web. It's faster to compress and it also doesn't require the large computing power to play back that H.264 does. This will be less of an issue as people migrate to faster CPUs but we still have users here who can't play H.264 file well. H.264 can make smaller files, though. "Animation" codec's compression is quite poor and makes huge files. It's best use is for footage that you don't want compressed (because you're going to compress it later with some other program), that needs an alpha channel (It's the only QT codec that supports that) and an attached sound track (if one didn't need attached sound, a numbered targa sequence would be a better output choice) and will only be used locally, not posted on the web. Rendering footage that you would later use in a video editing program to make yet another file would be an example of this. "Animation" may be the default because it's first on the codec list and quicktime just automatically goes there when it's first run.

Hi Lori, Looks like you got the motion working! The black sky is from having "Alpha channels" on in your render settings AND using the "Animation" codec in your quicktime compression settings. turn them off on this panel and also access quicktime compression settings there [attachmentid=20351] and try these settings: [attachmentid=20349] Vary the KB/sec setting to something like 100 or 200 to vary quality

When I try that it just pans the camera and doesn't stay on the selected object. but that just creates regular "birds eye" motion without changing the camera

To have the camera always point to something, you'd have to have it constrained ("Aim at") to that object. But that would be awkward to keep doing and undoing. And typically, you set the camera and leave it there for the length of a shot. I'd wonder why it is they need to keep moving the camera. There are some camera navigation shortcuts here: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11392

The best way to make a part of a decal invisible is to create it with an "alpha channel". In Photoshop this is a fourth channel in addition to the R G and B Note that this does not make part of the plane transparent, it prevents the decal form from coloring part of the plane. In A:M you can choose to make any one color in your decal transparent, but it's all or nothing (jaggy), an alpha channel can give smoother edges to your decal images.

Even if you are compositing in AE you will do better to use the alpha channels A:M can generate rather than render an object against a colored background and try to color key that out.

Save your project like this Myprojectname_01.prj then, when you "save as" later, just increment the 01 part. Maybe three seconds to do. There are utilities that will autosave every so often, but it's easy enough to do manually. On complicated projects I like to add a bit after the number so I can find major turning points in the project like... projectname_08_bonesadded.prj or projectname_46_smartskinrevised.prj or projectname_73_constraintssimplified.prj This does take longer than three seconds but it makes it makes it easier to revert to before-I-made-a-bad-mistake.

But if you're impatient or just want to see a rough result you can just group select the whole model after you import it and hit "P" to mass convert the splines. Nice model, I'll be curious to see the conversion.

It may be time to reload the model and start over. I was thinking the same thing as well, ugh... Not looking forward to it tho, it took me forever to get the characters posed in the CHoreography the way I wanted, then added the cyclic motion... Everything was looking good up to that point... Just reload the version of the project you saved before things went wrong. What? You didn't save versions of your project? Tsk, Tsk. Save your work frequently. Every five minutes. It's very easy to press a wrong button and not realize it until no amount of undoing will revert it. But you do have your last save. Copy it and try deleting keys until whatever you lost comes back. It's a cheap experiment. That's about all I can suggest without actually seeing how you did what you did. This will not simplify your workflow, and will yield motion that is very hard to tweak. Better to animate in the chor.

Hey that's me! By default it only keys things that have been keyed before For most animation situations you only need and want the ones I have bolded above You're onthe right track here... You can set the key filter to "Key Bone" (rather than "Key Model") and SHIFT-select various bones to force keys on bones that haven't been previously keyed, without forcing keys on EVERY bone inthe model. Mystery to me. POSSIBLY having that "Key Other" button selected might be in some way responsible because that includes making keys on a whole world of horrors that usually shouldn't get keyed. That's just one theory. It may be time to reload the model and start over. BTW, after you've used SHIFT-force Keyframe to access the radio buttons, remember to SHIFT-Force keyframe then next time you use it so you can set the radio button back to it's normal, safe "key only bones that are already keyed" mode. probably right here. Using it with "Key Model" was the problem I think. Not sure And that's when you should come here to ask a specific question, as you are doing now. see brief verbosity above Actually I think this is pretty sophisticated stuff. Knowing when to key something and when to key only part of something isn't always immediately obvious.