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Make a list (either mental or on paper) of all the models you intend to build. From your picture, it looks like room, planters, plants, tricycle, hanging light, empty fruit and vegetable displays. Model each element, but don't texture them yet. You may want to add basic colors to groups in each model. Assemble all the elements. Since this is a still image, it will be much easier to assemble it in a chor. (as opposed to an Action) If you discover you need some extra models, create them now and place them in the scene. Don't worry about the final lighting yet. Either use the default 3 point lighting or use a very basic lighting scheme, just so you can see what you are doing. When the scene looks good with no textures and only a very simple lighting setup, it is a huge milestone, and you can be fairly confident that you will actually complete it. Texture each element and check the composition. Make adjustments as necessary. Don't worry about the lighting yet. When the textured scene looks good with only very basic lighting, it is another milestone. Now add the lighting, check the composition, and make adjustment as necessary.

That looks great. Way to go

Robcat's suggestion to alter the material in the original material in the container is best in this case. But if you ever need to access the properties of a material *shortcut* (for example, to alter a property that applies only to a specific model), select the material in the PWS and adjust the properties in the Properties Palette (View > Properties). Also, you can turn on disclosure triangles so you can click on the little triangles in the PWS to access the properties right in the PWS. (Tools > Options > Global > Show Advanced Properties)

Holy Moley, would you look at that? AO now appears to render with Multipass ON *or* OFF (just did a test). I'm pretty sure that in previous versions, it only worked with Multipass ON. I still don't know why you got different renders, unless you rendered one version with MP ON, and the other version with MP OFF.

And make "Life Expectancy" shorter.

Here are a few bus stop signs. Any of these look good? http://www.bajanfuhlife.com/news/newsgfx/Bajan_Bus_stops.jpg http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/traffic-...=263&ID=559 http://www.wpclipart.com/page_frames/full_...s_stop.png.html http://quintessential.duckeggblue.com.au/a...00124110144.jpg http://www.clker.com/cliparts/3/1/d/5/1194...uses.svg.hi.png

Aesthetic preferences aside, apparently mark's sign is a real bus stop sign somewhere! http://www.bus-stops.com/

Are you rendering with Multipass ON?

I'm guessing you would probably have to show someone carrying your own preferred backdrop in at the beginning of your animation, then carrying it out at the end ... in order to preserve continuity...

Nice looking kodachrome box! I processed hundreds of rolls of kodachrome back in the 90's when I managed the darkroom in a custom photo lab. I also did quite a bit of color and B/W printing. Ahhh, the sweet smell of chemicals! I really liked that job, but I don't miss the chemicals.

Nice looking scene.

Not that I have experienced.

Hair is very cpu intensive, even if you have a new processor. You should turn hair OFF when animating. Just turn it on for rendering. Another thing you can do is hit the space bar to refresh the screen.

That's a nice start Gene. The main thing I notice is that a ball does not just stop like that. It has some *momentum* and will usually bounce a few times as it gradually comes to a rest. Also, it might be easier for you to judge the movement if you make it bounce from one side of the screen to the next, instead of past the camera, into the distance. Also, after the bounce in your animation, the ball does not follow a natural arc, it moves forward more than it should before it hits the ground the second time.

Gene, I believe you have Richard William's "The Animator's Survival Kit". There is a great section in there on the bouncing ball exercise.

Well then Spleen, let's see a Bouncing Ball animation

That looks great. I would rotate the ball more as it rolls so it doesn't look like it is sliding on ice, and I would try to give that cool flame effect some more air time somehow.

That looks fabulous Mark. I think you set that set up quite well!

Thanks guys The audio starts to drift quite a bit after around the 30 minute mark, and I was hoping it was still intelligible after that point. So I did this to test out Hypercam2, which is now free, and doesn't embed a "Made with Hypercam" image in the video. (Hypercam 3 still costs money) I captured one clip at 10fps and another at 5fps. The audio syncs better at 10fps and I did not see much, if any, increase in file size. For presentations under 30minutes in length, I think Hypercam 2 is a great choice. I also tested various video codecs, since Hypercam compresses the video in real time. (Although you can't recompress the audio in Hypercam, you can set mono/stereo, KHz and bit rate. I used mono, 16KHz, 92Kb/sec) By far, the best video quality/compression ratio came from x264, which is ever so slightly different from Apple's h264. http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html This codec gave MUCH smaller file sizes than Apple's h264 or Xvid or anything else I tried, while maintaining excellent quality. It has a dazzling array of configuration options, but I just left them all at the defaults except I set Multithreading to the number of cores in my cpu. Hypercam recognized the codec without a problem. In order to get Quicktime to play the movies however, I had to open them in SUPER and export to mov format, which took about 5min for a 95MB video.

Oh, that's cool. Any plans to have a giant gorilla rampaging through the city?

That looks like a pretty decent start to me. Most cartoon dudes seem to have funny noses. Either really big ones, or they are round, like squashed ping pong balls. You can also add to the cartoony look by making the eyes larger than normal. It may help if you give him a more prominent chin. And his head should start curving inward just below his ear. It looks like you have the skull extending much farther down.

Download this file: ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/misc/rlmhostid.zip Unzip it and run the executable that is inside. It will open a DOS box and will show your host id. Write that number down and send it to Hash.

That looks good so far!

That's a nice looking set David. What is the patch count up to?

Yes, please post pictures of the physical prototype when you get it!