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Here is a particle hair tutorial. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29738 It has been awhile since I wrote it, but I think I covered how to taper the hair. Another thing you may want to search for is the MUHAIR shader. It is a render shader you can apply to a model group which has a hair material on it to create a different appearance for the hair. Unfortunately, it has a ton of settings and I don't understand them all ... and I don't think anyone has written a tutorial on what all the settings do.

You can check out the rig in this lamp. It has been awhile since I did it, so I can't remember what I did, but it seemed to work OK at the time. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...408&hl=lamp

Nice one Matt! Love the camera work and the overlays, and of course the hair. The girl's hands separate from the triangle in a few highly visible places. The breasts seem a little too stretchy. They get kinda scary in a couple of places. Her butt cheeks stick waaaay out in a few places, but maybe you're into that sort of thing It looks like you put a lot of work into this.

Very nice Stian. The material looks good enough to me. Very professional looking.

Here is a tutorial that covers the basics of the Bone Falloff Weights http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29734

Happy Birthday! You don't look a day over 30 ...

The word "properly" is a relative term here. The proper Z rotation for the thumb's geometry bones differs a little from model to model, depending on how the thumb is modeled. Until you get a feel for how the thumb bones should be rotated in different models, you just have to experiment. One tip though, make sure all the thumb geometry bones in a thumb have the exact same Z rotation. That may not be your problem, but it is worth repeating.

Great workflow! One thing I remember when A:M Composite first came out is that in order to adjust light colors, the light has to be something other than pure white or pure black. Very light gray will do. Not sure if that still applies though...

Here is a quick and dirty way to do it. It probably isn't as elegant as you would like, but it gives one possible idea to try. Basically, I assigned a bone to the heel/spring geometry and created a MultiD relationship that scales the bone along the Z axis when the foot control null translates close to the ground. Here is a tutorial on MultiD relationships: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29813 Another thing you could do is make a walk cycle Action and position/scale the Spring bone manually in the Action. Then just apply the action in the chor whenever the character walks. heel_spring.mov Heel_Spring.zip

With those render times, I sure hope you are rendering with Light Buffers.

you can render with an alpha channel, but I don't think it will speed up your render any. In the camera properties (under the container in the PWS), go to Output Options > Buffers and turn Alpha to ON. Make sure you render to an image format that supports alpha channels, like TGA. Even for AO, a render time of 40 minutes for that model sounds really excessive. What resolution are you rendering to? How many passes? Usually, 5-9 passes will be plenty for this kind of animation.

Rendering with AO will always look better IMO, but for any kind of animation, it will take forever. One idea that will render faster and will look pretty good is to render a single frame with AO. Then apply that render to your model as a Decal. Change the Decal Type to "Diffuse" and adjust the percentage to suit you. Diffuse tpe decals will not show up in real time display, but they will show up in a quick preview render.

If your Global Ambiance is already at 100%, I don't think you can adjust it any higher ... actually, I've never tried to set it higher than 100%. You can add a sun light (turn shadows off on it) set to a low intensity to lighten it up. You'll need to futz with it to get the light intensity right.

Welcome back!

It looks really nice so far David.

Ahhhhh, there she is.

That's great Ken. You took a very long scene and made it fun to watch

Another biggie is if a cloth group starts off intersecting a deflector group, or if it somehow gets stuck in a deflector group during movement.

If you put a little more detail into that, it will look like a real ship! ... just kidding. You are a sick man Stian, just ... sick.

That giraffe looks awful lonely ... Or is her honey cramped up somewhere below deck?

Thanks Xtaz

LOL that was funny. You do some great charactertures.

Hey that's a rather nice article

Another way to get render-as-lines to work is to add an extra Control Point to one of the splines making up any valid patch. Or detach all the splines so nothing makes a valid patch You just need to get rid of any valid patches, then render-as-lines will work. I've never tried render-as-lines with fog ...

That's a very clever idea Mark. I like how the trees all point up even when they are on the side of a hill.