robcat2075

I'm surprised that the constraints work. i presumed that everything was getting baked onto a set of FK bones. Or maybe that is what happens? If you had a character who was constrained to point their hand at some object that a game player could move, would that work, or is all animation something that is baked?

Getting a convincing smoke look will be 99% of this. Getting it to move in some direction...1%

first pass mean first pass

Here's a first pass...

Is that the case for everything? It also can not handle "morph targets," as they are known in the polygon world?

That monster is ready for the prom!

No, i meant some video of an actual rocket doing this so we could study the motion. We need some reference for what we are trying to emulate.

Is this not something we can just see on the web if we had a link?

Can't see either one. I think "mpeg-4" compression doesn't work well and doesn't seem to play here. .mp4 will work if it contains h.264 compression

Do you have a video clip of this action we could study?

It is asking for a file called "smoke.tga" that is not in the zip

Hooray!

I guess the Plane Train and Automobile are out of the bag, by now! I congratulate Dan (wildsided), Steve (shelton) and Charles (chazcron) on their medal-winning entries! It is very impressive work. Three more medals to make! I enjoyed interviewing them and they all had more interesting comments to hear than I could fit into my four minute budget. Perhaps i can post some extended interviews when I get caught up on things. 27 images is a great turn out! The record for an image contest, even in the busy days, was only 32, i think. I enjoyed all the entries and the commentaries that went with them. The story behind the art adds a whole new level to them. I'm very sorry i took so long to get this put together! Some days I am productive and some days I'm not and some of those days can last a month or so.

that's a great find!

Lessee... the outer circle will have a radius equal to the radius of the inner gear plus 2x the radius of the intermediate gear...

The math for two gears woudln't be bad but I'm not sure how you do it for three, especially three that are not in a straight line. There must be a way...

hmmm... https://khkgears.net/new/gear_knowledge/gear_technical_reference/calculation_gear_dimensions.html

In an art class we had assignment to illustrate a nursery rhyme and I was doing "Hickory Dickory Dock". I asked the teacher what the formula was for drawing accurate gears but he just sort of stared at me. Paul, i think the starting point is to find three circles that will fit together like that (without teeth) and that all have a circumference that is an integral multiple of some small distance. That is the hard part. Modeling the teeth will be easy if we can figure that out. Maybe there is a formula? Live Answer Time at Noon CDT, btw.

It's here and I'm clear! The Image Contest award video is now live. Prizes, surprises, the mostly true stories behind the images and... THE BIG SCRATCH OFF! Don't miss it! Call Grandma, round up the kids, circle the dogs and watch it together in glorious 720p HD. Everyone is in the show and you'll enjoy it even if you didn't win anything! But maybe you did? [SPOILER ALERT!] . . . . . . Congratulations to our three medal winners! Dan Skelton (wildsided) Steve Shelton (Shelton) Charles Cronley (chazcron)

It's uploading now...

Let us know if it changes anything

She looks great! 😀 My first gambit would be to increase the "margin" when you Bake Surface. Hold the SHIFT key when you choose Bake Surface to get the option menu "Margin" pads each tile with extra pixels so that neighboring tile are not immediately adjacent on the image map. Try 10. If that works you could experiment with smaller values to see how little margin you need.

I'm still hoping to post the awards video on Friday, but at the rate After Effects is chugging through these frames... keep your fingers crossed. Watch this space.

Is the librarian tolerating you better now?

oops, sorry, I thought today was Friday! I meant Noon on Saturday... "Live Answer Time"