robcat2075

Keep your eyes peeled for the Summer 2019 Image Contest topic announcement! It's coming...

I like the softer, rounder look! That kid has knobby knees! He had a lot of creases on him that could probably be remedied.

Hi Tom, here is how it works... I made a Pose of the body, minus the legs, so it was centered around the Y axis and I moved some CPs so there were no overlapping patches from the view of that vertical axis.. For example, i pulled out the patches that are in the mouth and flattened the horns. In Photoshop I made a checkerboard with the edges clearly marked. I wanted them clearly identifiable so i could tell where they landed when Back in the Pose window I Applied it as a decal with "Cylinder" application. In the Model window I can see the result and check that i have a reasonably even distribution of pixels with no tears. I could do fine tuning of the map placement in the UV editor, but it has trouble when you move a patch with a hook, so I prefer to just do my tweaking in the Pose and reapply the decal. When that is satisfactory, I drop a same-size plain white map into the Decal image container and turn off the checkerboard map I take the model to AMPaint which lets me draw on the 3D surface of the model. I drew the biggest scales first and drew the smaller ones around them. Why did i do Steps 1-4 when AMPaint can create a decal map for me? The decal map that AMPaint can create is basically a separate tile for each patch with a seam at every border. To paint over a seam in AMPaint you have to freeze your view, paint and then tell A:M to "accept" it before you can turn the model to see a new angle. With my cylinder wrap method I have one giant tile with only one seam on the underside of the creature to maneuver around. With my method i can freely paint and turn and paint and turn... having one big Cylinder wrap is 100x easier. After I've sketched in my scales and armor plates the map looks like #6 in Photoshop. In Photoshop I used tools like Fill and Blur and Curve adjustments to manufacture my Displacement map (#7) from that original line drawing. At this point I'm still in 8 bit color which means only 256 values of gray. It looks very stair steppy when you use that as a displacement map. In Photoshop I switched it from 8 bit mode to 16 bit mode and applied a 2 pixel blur to fake more gray values between the stair steps. Unfortunately Photoshop has almost no tools for normal painting in 16 bit mode, that's why I did the main work in 8 bit mode. I save the 16bit image out to OpenEXR format and add that to the Image container in A:M. The displacement map "Percent" is set to about 1500. I think I went back to AMPaint to do the color map #8. click to enlarge... I made a separate pose for the legs, stacked them vertically and did another big Cylinder wrap to cover them. There is actually one ring of patches at each leg that gets decaled by both the body map and the legs map so i could try to hide the join but i didn't pursue that much for this test.

i was working on this for one of the Mascot contests but never quite got it finished. This is mostly an experiment with displacement maps. DinoRoar.mp4

Do I send my AMAIndex.txt to Steffen and then somehow it would get merged?

Happy to hear you are alive!

I think we could improve this if we looked at it.

I have to believe that something is drastically mis-adjusted to be creating that very severe and unnatural lighting and shading effect. Is this look really what you are seeking?

I get a clean result either way when i render it. Rustry000.avi

It looks like a corrupted AVI file. Was that rendered straight to AVI or was it an image sequence first? If you render it again does the same problem happen?

Respect Z-Order! I'm pretty sure that's a Euro Boy Band. In the case of most menu commands and buttons that you can hover over to get an official name, you can look it up in Tools>Customize>Keyboard to get a text description of its function . That sounds handy! I don't think I've ever tried that one! I'll be using that. In the case of properties parameters you can and select "Display help for current property" and the text from the manual will be displayed. However, some properties have no entry.

What is the procedure for updating the "Display Help for current property" feature in A:M? Many basic items are still "Not documented yet" There is an "edit" button, but how does an edit I make get incorporated into the regular distribution and how do we know that it even should be?

Hi Edward, An updated manual is something that is needed. Can you point me to where you find "respect z order"?

I'm impressed that you got it to simulate at all!

hmm... I've always been able to used different materials for "cloth" and "deflector" before... I wonder what is different this time.

on the Choreography and choose plugins>SimulateSimcloth. Why does the orange cloth fall through the green deflector object? BrontoNeckTest05.prj

That was a blooper. I subdivided the cloth but forgot to add the new CPs to the "cloth" group. I would have cancelled the simulation after a few frames but I had gotten distracted by something else. The clip immediately after that has the new CPs properly grouped

It's good to see that they have bounced back from potentially being the next Cyrix.

variations of cloth setting on a simple pant leg PantLegMP41500.mov

reversed normals?

That's beautiful, John!

Something must be set wrong, I don't see any AO effect. Is this unnatural lighting what you really want? If you want to bring this to Live Answer Time today we could look at it.

Edward, this would be a good item to bring to Live Answer Time tomorrow.

This blackface look isn't really what you are trying to get, is it?

Since your TGA works correctly for me I will guess that your After Effects has "Ignore alpha" set as a default. I would check that immediately.