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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!

Um ... well ... er .... a ... I never had that problem with the LiteRig. I used very few offsets on the constraints. I think in LiteFace there is an offset on the constraints for the mouth corner bones. In that case, I open the relationship after exporting from the Action and manually rotate the bones to the correct place.

Actions create constraints pretty well once you export the Action as a model.

http://www.sgross.com/plugins/index.html Search for "MirrorBone"

She reminds me of a young, punked out Julia Roberts.

We don't get to see you too often, but you have been a forum fixture for many years it seems. Happy Birthday

There are a couple different kinds of lighting tutorials. One kind is "How to use the lights in A:M". The second kind is "The theory and practice of digital lighting". For the first kind, go through this tut http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29732 For the second kind, I think Jeremy Birn's "Digital Lighting and Rendering" is probably still (arguably) the best. http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Lighting-Ren...n/dp/1562059548