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Awesome. Now that you are on your own, you don't get sick days But since you are doing something you really love doing, you probably won't need them anyway ... once you get over the shock of it all

Nice looking mug! Can't wait to see the variations.

Here's a tutorial on sprites: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...&hl=sprites Look in the tutorials section for other types of particles too. I wrote tuts for streaks, sprites and hair.

Here is a tutorial on sprites. It even covers how to make your own rocket trail with fire and smoke. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...&hl=sprites

You can try using the porcelain material as a cheap/fast solution, but good models take tweaking. Good splinemanship takes practice.

If its just a building with image maps, you might get decent results by importing the converted (iges -> OBJ) model into AM as a PROP. You can't do much with props but move them around/rotate/scale etc in the chor, but they seem to be more responsive than the same model simply imported into AM using the OBJ Importer.

Nice! Remember to model your characters in a pose that will be easy to rig. Of course, you really don't know what poses are harder or easier to rig until you rig a few. A general rule of thumb (very general) is, model things like the back, neck, hands, arms, fingers etc as straight as possible along either the X, Y or Z axis. Then you can add any permanent deformations in a pose that you just turn on before animating. You can't really do that with things like quadruped (or dragon) back legs and stuff though, so you just model them like they're supposed to look. Also make sure the model's feet are at 0 on the Y azis and the center of weight is at 0,0 on the XZ axes.

While not a "fix", a good workaround is just to open the model or chor file in a text editor and delete them. Make a copy of your file first! Open the copy in a text editor such as Notepad, PSPad or JEdit. Search for "Rotoscope" - Can't remember the exact tag name - and delete everything between the first rotoscope opening tag and the last rotoscope ending tag, including the tags themselves. They should all be together one after the other in the file. Then save the file and try to open it in AM. Hopefully someone will chime in with the exact tag names to search for.

v15 is much different than v8.5. Both the interface and the features are different. If you plan on continuing with AM, you should definitely upgrade. You can carry some of the basics of modeling, rigging and animating over from v8.5 to a current version, but you will still need to relearn a lot of things. The least expensive place to buy AM is at a trade show. If you know of a school or comics trade show in your area, you can email support@hash.com to see if they will be attending. I don't know of any place other than the Hash website that sells the current version of AM, so I can't comment on that.

Not sure if this will solve your specific issue, but I always add all my dynamic and spring system type constraints in a separate ON/OFF pose named "Dynamics". When I'm done animating, I make sure my chor length is the proper length (it sometimes stretches beyond the number of frames I am rendering). Then I Simulate Spring Systems in the chor. Then I go back to frame 0 in the chor and set the Dynamics pose to OFF for all the models that have such a pose.

I just got a chance to watch this. Way to take the bull by the horns Gene! Nice job.

Really nice start Stian.

I'm guessing the poly model you imported probably has 20,000 patches or more. If you right click on the model and choose "info" it will tell you. My experience is that when a single model goes over 10,000 patches, everything starts to slow down. All you have to do is take about 10,000 patches out the the model. Its usually a better idea to model characters and other organic shapes in Animation Master. Trying to import those types of models from a poly program seems to bring more grief than its worth.

Very nice Eric. Wonderful scene.

Veeeery nice Ethan! Wonderful modeling.

As far as lighting, different people have different approaches. You'll have to decide which one works best for you. Here's what I do. I make sure my base landscape/set model is centered at 0,0 in the Model window. I make a new Action with my landscape/set as the base model and save it as "My_Set_Lighting.act". In this action I add all my lights for the set. If I need other lights, for example, some spot lights to follow characters around or whatever, I add those in the choreography. ---------------- If I plan to render in passes, I create a new empty model and save this empty model as "light_proxy.mdl". I add this empty model to my choreography and drag the "My_Set_Lighting.act" action onto it. This should light your set just like if you had dragged the action onto the landscape/set model in the chor. Now you can turn the set model off, if you need to for one of your passes, and you will still have your lighting intact.

Well ... that depends on a whole bunch of things. If you render in passes, you have more flexibility, but you have to be more organized. If you don't have a render farm available, and if your frames take more than a couple minutes each to render, you better do a whole bunch of test frames to make sure your final render is not only timed the way you want, but that dynamics, hair, lights etc are acting like you want them too. Those re-renders can be frustrating. A very simple way to divide your passes is to render a separate pass for the background - middle ground - and foreground. This way, if a serious problem shows up in your render, you only have to re-render part of the scene instead of the whole scene. There are many other ways to set up passes. Some of them are very elaborate. You might want to render at least one project in multiple passes just so you have an idea of what is involved and what the benefits and drawbacks are. Render the background with no alpha. Render the middle ground *with alpha*. Render the foreground *with alpha*. Make a new project in AM. Import your rendered frames (Render to TGA sequences, not Quicktime or AVI movies). Import your audio files. Delete all lights and models out of the default chor. Drag the background renders onto the choreography camera as a rotoscope. Drag the middle-ground renders onto the camera as a rotoscope. Make sure this rotoscope in below the first one in the PWS. (if it is below the first rotoscope in the PWS, it will show up on top of the first rotoscope in the render) Drag the foreground renders onto the camera as a rotoscope and set the "ON TOP" property to ON. If you plan to break up your renders this way, avoid placing any lights in the model files. The lighting in all three passes should be consistent and if you turn off a model that has a light in it, then the whole choreography lighting will be different.

Download SUPER video encoder. http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html It will handle almost any codec you can imagine. The interface is confusing at first, but it is worth it to take the time to understand it. Open your AVI file in SUPER and convert it to an image sequence (use TGA images). Do not use a lossy image format like JPG. Create a new empty project in AM. Import your TGA image sequence into AM. Import your audio files into AM. Drag the image sequence onto a choreography camera so it is a camera rotoscope. Add your audio file(s) to the chor and line up the audio with the video. Save the project. Render the choreography. (it will go much faster than the original render because you are only rendering images with audio. ------------------------------------------- In the future, as Fuchur said, render your final frames straight out of AM as TGA files. If your chor has audio in it, AM will also create a .sinfo file in the folder with your rendered frames. The .sinfo file tells AM how to sync the audio with the TGA frames. Then create a new project and name it something like "MyProject_NLE.prj" (Non Linear Editor) Import Audio and Images. Drag your TGA frames and Audio into the choregraphy - AM should automatically sync the sound files with the rendered frames in the chor. Render out to any format you want. (But don't delete the TGA frames!) You may need them again if you have to recompress your movie to a different codec/size/whatever.

oh yes. Much better! It looks great.

Really impressive work. I hope your business continues to be very successful. You obviously have a bitchin workflow worked out.

Oh, one more thing. It is a little late for this render because you are already over 9 hours into it. But a practice that will save you much grief in the future is to render a very small final image first. Just big enough so you can tell if there are going to be any major problems. There is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you wait several hours for an image to render, only to discover something didn't render like you had intended. The preview (Q and Shift-Q) renders are just quickie previews. A small "render to file" is the best test.

Also, many times you don't have to use an alpha channel with a bump map. Just make the background color neutral gray (128,128,128) and there won't be any "bumping" in those areas.

In this particular case, I think all you have to do is blur your bump map. Bump maps don't work with sharp edges. The edges must be blurred, at least a little.

[Edit] Kelly's suggestion might work too. It all depends on what kind of rig you have in your character. If you try the Kinematic Constraint, you might have to apply it to the forearm bone instead of the hand bone. Constraining the hand to the steering wheel: This depends a little on what kind of rig is installed in the character. Basically, you put a bone in the steering wheel at the place where you want the hand to stick. Make the bone a child of the bone that turns the steering wheel. Constrain the hand bone to "Translate To" and "Orient Like" the bone in the steering wheel. Move/Rotate the hand bone with the Translate and Rotate manipulators until it looks like it is grabbing the steering wheel. If your rig has IK arms, place the constraint on the IK null instead of the hand bone. Another option, if your rig doesn't have IK arms and your hand bone seperates from the arm whenever you turn the wheel: Place the hand somewhere on the wheel. Place a constraint on the main steering wheel bone to "Aim Roll At" the hand bone. Animate the hand bone manually. The steering wheel will turn whenever the hand moves because the roll handle on the steering wheel's bone will always point at the hand. For constraining the car to a path, look at the "Walk and Wave" tut in TaoAM or look at the "Basic Constraints" tut in the Tutorials forum. The steering wheel should rotate (the bone's roll handle will always point at the hand)

Make sure "Mirror Mode" is OFF. When you select a control point and hit the [/] key, all control points that are connected to the one you selected will be included in the selection ... except if you have mirror mode on.