robcat2075

Make sure there is something else for it to reflect and make sure "reflections" is turned on in the render properties

Reminds me of this bit from the onion Good fire. How would we add some heat distortion to that?

If you activate "Show Manipulator Properties" you get an onscreen display that will at least track the XYZ location of the pivot point; noting those values could tell you if you have moved only on X Y or Z. [attachmentid=17336] Alas, it doesn't track the pivots rotation. Submit a feature request to AM Reports to suggest that. Named "groups" do store their pivot rotation and location: excerpt from model file: [GROUP] Name=testgroup Matrix=-4.37114e-008 1 0 0 -1 -4.37114e-008 0 -0.578563 0 0 1 0 Count=48 51 50 49 48 47 ... 9 8 7 6 5 4 Pivot=0 -0.578563 0 [ENDGROUP] although not in an easy to read form.

I also had "transition to ..." set to OFF. But I was going to guess it had something to do with red bars overlapping. They limit the influence of the chor actions to a certain stretch of time.

There's probably a dozen things you could have done to make it not work but without seeing it I couldn't tell you for sure. But here's the basic plan... How to add more animation after a cycle: [attachmentid=17289]

It's a huge world. There's no shortage of info out there on just about every topic. but since you are already animating in other media, maybe what you want to know is how it is done in CG. I'd recommend the A:M Demonstration and some of the tutorial walk-through videos to give you an idea of what is going on.

Disconnect teh hooks going into the 5-pointer first then select all five points hit the period key twice the 5-point tool will appear. use it then reattach hooks into 5-pointers if you have to. looks like bad spline continuity here: [attachmentid=17194] splines should cross each other rather than meet and turn away.

By "greenscreen" you do mean live video shot with a green backdrop, not CG images created with a green backdrop , right? A:M doesn't do greenscreen compositing on it's own. you would need to composite your A:M animations with your greenscreen footage in an app that does that.

I just get a directory. no rockslide movie plays.

Current thinking in animation circles is getting away from the idea of numerous preset mouth poses and moving toward rigging the mouth so it can easily be manipulated into various shapes with just a few controllers. The premise is that repeating the exact same shape for every "oo" or "ee" gets to look very mechanical. Jason Osipa's "Stop Staring" is the seminal book on that approach and even includes some examples in A:M. Either method has pluses and minuses.

That's a big syringe. like seven feet high?

Poor Thom! the the aliasing on his tiny legs almost made it look like he was running. But he couldn't out run that giant machine.

Be sure to show us the animation when you're done!

Alternate long answer... the whole point of A:M is to animate splines and patches; A:M animation and A:M models go together.

You can set the background color in the properties window for the camera. Make sure the "alpha buffer" is turned OFF in your render properties. However, rendering a CG character on a colored background to Chroma key it later is a last choice. Better to render your character with the alpha buffer ON and have your compositing software use the alpha channel. There's a tut out ther with a character walking on a sidewlk that shows how to do it. Maybe someone can pop in witht the link.

refraction in a transparency will lengthen render times, but I can't detect that a transparency on a plane (not using refraction anyway) invokes any more overhead than any other decal, which is negligible. ? Update: In a brief test I find that a transparency map applied to a patch in the scene does add about 2 seconds per frame. A patch with an actual hole in it added about 1 second. However, a rotoscope on the camera with a transparent hole in it seems to add no time.

Instead of modeling the hole in the plane you could use a transparency map (created in a paint program) with a soft edge and apply that to the plane.

That's a very complex shot. You could shoot your back ground at night with a camera, but getting it to appear illuminated by the tripod's light beams as they pass across the scene... hmmm... tricky. merely increasing the brightness of those parts of the scene won't reveal the detail that would be there if it were actually illuminated. I'm guessing either... -real lights were used while shooting the live landscape "plate" to which the tripods motion was matched -real lights were used while shooting a miniature of the landscape to which the tripods were matched -the landscape may be a CG element to which green screened small humans were added. Easier to combine with the tripods' light. - or something else entirely In any event, that shot is the work of numerous people.

In the properties for the model turn File Info>Embedded to ON and save your project. The model is now part of your project file. Ther are other ways... this one was easiest to explain.

BTW, remember greenscreening isn't something you do in A:M. You use A:M to render your CG elements and take that footage to a compositing program to combine with your live action stuff.

That's a good one. BTW I'll just note that there seems to be an error in the screen grabs for the bouncing balls. They are identical when they should not be. The second one looks about right; the first one probably should be a bit less broad at the top.

Much of what you are proposing are advanced compositing tasks. A good book on the topic is Digital Compositing in Depth by Doug Kelly. 19.95 on ebay

Yes. Actions have an "ease" property that you can set. (gotta look in the property panel for it; after you manually set a value it will also appear as a channel in your PWS timeline.) By default, your 03:00 action will have ease set at 0% at 00:00 and 100% at 03:00. but you could set that ease to 100% at 02:00 and then the action would go from 0 to 100% in that time. YOu can even make actions pause or run backward with ease settings.

I think this indicates that a stronger GPU will not help much. A:M really doesn't make extensive use of all the real-time powers of graphics cards since graphics cards are polygon oriented. CPU speed is the biggest factor in your real-time playback, more powerful GPUs offer diminshing returns. At least that's what I have heard the Hash people say numerous times. If that's changed, let me know, I'll go out and buy a faster card.

Is there a "pitch" put together? Something to convince people to invest in your movie? Invest their time, I mean. Volunteer labor is hard to come by. And for a movie you've got to persuade them that working on your dream would be time better spent than working on their own dream. It can be done, but you'll have to be convincing. I'd recommend you do a short first, perhaps incorporating some scene from your movie and show people that a ) you can do it, and b ) you've got a great idea.