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Why don't you just import your model of George into your model of the dollar bill? Then you won't have any problem applying the actions, assuming the imported model has the same rig as the original George model.

That's gorgeous Mr. BigBootay. Very impressive.

I voted for you. Good luck!

Really nice models! it seems like the satyr needs hair on his legs. He looks ... naked! His hooves look like they are skin instead of whatever hooves are made of. Is that what you intended? It looks great so far

The answer is ... yes! The process is described in this tutorial. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...738&hl=hair

That's great Hazard. 4 months with no background ... Its impressive that you have come this far in so short a time.

For horizons, one trick is to raise the edges of the terrain up, so when the camera is down closer to the ground, it can't see that there is nothing behind that last hill. If you want the camera to be way up in the air, looking down, you have your work cut out for you. First, it helps if the terrain stretches from one side of the camera frame to the other. Then it helps to curve the whole terrain slightly. Finally, it may still be helpful to raise the back edge of the terrain up a bit.

Welcome falibu! What college did you attend that taught Animation Master?

One thing you have to keep in mind is that AM is a tool designed primarily for artistic expression and not for engineering. This philosophy has shaped the development of AM from its birth, it is at the heart of AM. It is because of this philosophy that the interface and workflow are much more simple and efficient (for artistic expression), while providing equal power or better (for artistic expression) than any other package available at any price. You have to step away from all this "exactly" business when you open AM. Instead, you must ask yourself, "Does this convey the idea I'm trying to get across?" Totally different paradigm. In light of all that, you can get a decent idea of an object's dimensions by turning on the rulers and setting markers at the object's extremities.

It depends on your visual style and how close the camera gets to the windows. In most cases, you can just slap bump and color maps on the buildings for windows. If the camera gets close to any of the buildings, you can model a few detailed "foreground buildings" with the window geometry as part of the building model. Even in the "foreground buildings", you only have to add window geometry to parts of the building the camera gets pretty close to.

The best is a TGA image sequence. PNG image sequences seem to work fine too. MOV (animation codec) works well too. Codecs other than "animation" can produce unexpected results. I've never tried an AVI file, so I don't know how well it works.

I'm think W is the forth axis for a Quaternian driver. I believe bones in AM use the Quaternian coordinate system when rotating because it prevents gimbal lock. But I don't really understand all of that.

Hey, that's a nice character!

Without seeing your mesh, I cannot know for sure, but I'm going to guess that 15k patches is overkill for your model. Unless you are doing ultra detailed modeling, like Agep (Stian Walvaag) you probably don't need that many patches. Also, 1000 5-point patches sounds suspiciously high. Can you post a shaded/wireframe image of your model?

That's a nice start. However, your AM base model is needlessly dense in many areas. You can get a lot more detail than you have with 30%-50% fewer splines (except in the head). Needless to say, the ZBrush export is way way WAY too dense (except in the head). You could probably cut the density of that mesh down by a factor of 10. ZBrush would be good for painting bump and displacement maps, but AM is much better at modeling forms that can be rigged, posed and animated.

Very nice!

That's beautiful Mark. Did you use a decal or a procedural material for the water bumps?

Nice! Thanks for testing that out for us!

Dude, that's art! The visual style is perfect for the animation. Love the trippy stream of consciousness thing. Definitely submit it to some animated short film festivals, art film theaters, late night TV programming and also any kind of modern art gallery - though galleries usually want to see a whole body of work (about 20 pieces, more or less). The only suggestion I might make is to turn UP the volume on the "voice" track. I had to turn the volume on my computer way up, but then the sound effects were way too loud then. Nice piece of work!

You have 2 quad core processors? Will you try rendering with 7 or 8 instances of AM and let us know how it goes? It sounds like you have a nice little render farm right in your computer.

If you can zip up the image, along with your model, and post it to the forum, we may be able to offer more help.

For these types of questions, you may get better answers by emailing support@hash.com. It may take a few days for them to get back to you because there are only two guys who do support and also take A:M around to various trade shows around the country. There is no built in network rendering capability. Some users with multi core processors will fire up an instance of AM for each core. (if your processor has two cores, fire up two instances of A:M) - Although people with 4-core processors have reported faster render times when they only fire up three instances of A:M at a time. Say your animation has 2000 frames and you start three instances of A:M. In the first instance, set the render range to 0-2000 and the step to "3". This will render ever third frame, starting with frame 0. In the second instance of A:M, set the render range to 1-2000 and the step to "3". This will render every third frame, starting on frame 1. In the third instance of A:M, set the render range to 2-2000 and the step to "3". This will render every third frame starting on frame 2. The first instance will render frames 0,3,6,9 etc. The second instance will render frames 1,4,7,10 etc. The third instance will render frames 2,5,8,11 etc. There is no built in capability to render multiple choreographies or projects automatically. You have to set up the render for each each choreography manually. Hash does offer a program called NetRender which can distribute rendering tasks to computers over a network (called render slaves). I believe a netrender license will allow you to use as many render slaves as you want. With NetRender, you can set up multiple projects in a cue and have the program automatically render them one after the other. NetRender requires a lot of babysitting, and you must have an expert level of knowledge about setting up, maintaining and troubleshooting networks in general. Last I heard, Hash was charging $500/year (that's $500 per year) for a NetRender license. There are no 3rd party render tools that are compatible with A:M I have only seen NetRender running on Win2K and WinXP machines. It does not run on Linux. I do not know if it will run on Macs. I don't know if Netrender even runs on Macs. You should ask Hash support about that. I believe you can use as many computers (as render slaves) as you want, but you should ask Hash support.

Wow Eric. Those models are just gorgeous.

That's a very cute molecule!

Beautiful model.