ericsh6

Some of the mouth chatter is a bug. In the attached image you can see the chanels loop back in time and cause a sudden phonem transition. I saw this same bug back in v11 and reported it but it appears to be back. I think the dopesheet method would look at least 80% better if this bug were gone.

I used the dopesheet with the dictionary. It is so fun to use I have a hard time resisting but I read that it is better to manually lipsync with phoneme poses. Or maybe not? Actually, the cloths are a separate model with their own bones. The cloths bones match the character's bones. In a choreography I constrain the cloths bones to translate and orient like the character's bones. This way I can have one character but many different wardrobes.

I have been reconstructing my great great grandfather, John Charles Hall, while waiting for some decal fixes so I can make some cool mountains. Critiques are welcome. I rendered with V13c netrender on three slaves. Looks like there is a bit-o-jitter in the hair on the left. http://markopuff.com/animations/charles.wmv

Yes it is AO. I didn't render this in netrender because it wasn't available in v13 back then but now it is. I have rendered other animations with AO in netrender and they work great. Netrender should be available in the latest version of V13. You don't have to do anything different with your project file to render AO in netrender.

Of course you can. While in model window, click on the hair button (usually to the right of the bones button). Then you will see the hair guides. Some hair tool buttons appear on the right including a brush and others. just grab a control point on the hair and style the hair. By default there are many hairs associated with a hair guide so if you move the hair guide, you move a group of hairs. If you want more hair guides then make the mesh denser. In the hair material you can increase the number of control points on each hair guide so you can make more complex hairdoos. When done then go back into model mode.

Yes, I did render this with AO. Now it would be a piece of cake to render since netrender is now in beta 3 and above. I am reconstructing a small mountain village right now. I am finding that pixel displacement can be used with AO if done right. I will post some stills soon.

I think I understand, at least I can see that there is something wong when he realizes the rocks are upon him. Those secondary actions are still mysterious to me. By the way, I used repeatable actions with transitions to the max here. I love repeatable actions.

I fixed the link - just click on it.

I finished this a few weeks ago for a video documentary. The rockslide is all Newton - I shaped the mountainside to direct the rocks onto our slow response digger worker. Thankfully, he survived the incident. link to video

Thanks everyone for the encouragement! I made a few fixes to the model since my last post - getting ready for the final render of the 15 second animation. I can't wait till v13 netrender is available - or is it already available? Anyway, here is the scene without AO and the scene with AO as requested. In the scene without AO I have the default choreography light setup (one key light for the sun with ray traced shadows and one key filler light which I think I had too much intensity). In the image with AO, I have one kleg light with ray traced shadows and AO at 100% intensity, 100% occlusion and 15 samples.

I rendered this with multipass (4 passes) with occlusion sampling at 20%. It took 35 minutes to render. I am so grateful to the Hash team for AO. Even teh vegetation looks great. There is room for improvement and I welcome it. Now one thing, I wasn't able to render with pixel displacement and ambient occlusion - the computer memory gets completely consumed and I reported this. What you see here is bump in V13beta but bump in beta looks way better than v12 I think.

Its only 1.4Meg but I read that the forum doesn't take .wmv files. I will have to convert it to quicktime but don't have the software handy - will have to do it later.

I apologize for this being in windows media format although I believe there is a way for Apple to view this. I put this here because I couldn't post it in the Cloth forum. It needs lots of smart skinning and other tender loving care but I wanted to show the full body cloth I have done. Hmmm, for some reason my file isn't posting.

Nancy, Thankyou for the encouragement and ideas - I am a big fan of your work. I can't add transparency to the clouds with the volumetric light shining on it - A:M crashes (I reported it). But I am experimenting with clouds and will test out the transparency map. Paul, The tearing can be seen in any view. It looks like an entire group of patches removed and floating above the rest of the model. I think it happens when I stretch the mesh in an action and apply the displacement decal to the stretched mesh. It doesn't seem to happen if I apply the displacement decal in model view.

I rendered this scene with v13 r5 with pixel displacement and global ambience. I discovered that Global ambience is key to having realistic looking clouds. I don't know how I lived without pixel displacement - I used it on the canyon walls and clouds. I know v13 is beta but I must say that decals with pixel displacement sometimes cause patches to tear. You can't see it in this picture because the trees cover it up but there is a tear in the canyon wall just below the rocks. The higher the displacement value, the greater the tear. Anyone know how to fix this? These are my global ambience settings: Global ambience type = color ambience color = white ambience intensity = 60% ambience occlusion = 60% and on the camera occlusion sampling = 15%.

I think pixel displacement might be the answer to the clouds I am looking for - I can use a procedural fractal material on the surface that will displace pixels thus creating a 3D fractal on the cloud edges as opposed to the 2D I have been trying to force to work. In theory it should work.

Now I can't stand it any more - I must try V13. I already upgraded to the 2006 CD, is V13 available for general consumption yet? Where is it downloaded?

Thanks! I am having fun now improving on scenery, animation, lighting, dynamics, etc. I'm glad that Hash is making the TWO movie and I hope they will be aggressive on using every aspect of version 13. I tried to do that very thing in this movie but had some problems with hair and cloth but I believe those will be fixed and then I can re-render this movie so it looks like I want it.

Michael, I wanted just shafts of light through the clouds originally and Ganthofer said (above) to put a cloud above the camera to prevent light wash out and it worked. I have been searching the forum for cloud alternatives and have seen some cool particle clouds but I think they will cause volumetrics to scatter too much. I am focusing now on the same solid clouds I have here but with the gradient with edge threshold set.

Ok, I fixed moved the clouds so light wasn't falling on the camera (made the previous images look washed out), I moved the camera to a new spot to show sun pouring onto mountains in the distance - I think that is Great White Throne at the distant right, and I added a sun for ambient lighting. I tried to add gaseousness to the edges of the cloud with a gradient combiner with threshold set to 20 but it made the clouds semi-transparent so the volumetric light wen't everywhere and A:M crashed do to some unhandled exception during rendering.

I created a gradient material with XYZ = 0 for start and finish and set edge threshold to 90. I haven't got the edge to show transparent yet. I will have to refresh my memory on how to make the mountains from satellite DEM - its been about 9 months since I did it since I was making the "chronicles of Zion" movie. I will post when I have it figured out. For this movie I used a 40 mile X 40 mile DEM of the Salt Lake basin in Utah. Here is a link to that movie and make sure you go to the bottom of the post because there is a link to the entire 14 minute movie. I plan to re-render the movie with improved mountain textures and lighting and improved animation and then send it to A:M films when it is done: Link to my "Chronicles of Zion" thread and animated video

I did an A-Buffer render for comparision but I don't think its apples to apples since the multipass image only has 4 passes. Thankyou for the praises - and critisizm is welcome!!! How do I make the edges of the clouds translucent? with a spherical gradient material? My clouds are basically stretched spheres with a cellturb applied and displacement set to about 700. Is there a way to make just the outer edges of the cloud translucent? Please tell more. I plan to experiment with ambient light - maybe that will make the image less flat? I do have a blue sky sun light that is off in these images. I use the new normal map ability of v12.0 to put the rocks and wear patterns on the canyon walls. I used Gimp to draw wear patterns on a transparent background and the Nvidia Gimp plugin to convert it to a normal map. I used hair for the trees. Hair in V12.0 recieves fog so distant trees fade away. I used a Satellite DEM file to create my mesh of Mount Sinawava. I also use two procedural materials: one for the color and one for bump. That is why I make a transparent background normal map - so it won't obsure the procedural bump map. I have been influenced and inspired by the work of Brian Prince and hopefully it shows in the image - I am just trying to use the newest technical wizzardry of the latest versions of A:M. I

This is my A:M rendition of Mount Sinawava in Zion National Park in Southern Utah. I am using this model to try to get rays of sunlight through clouds. This scene is entirely lit with a single klieg light high above the mountain peak with Z-buffered shadows. I also rendered with multipass with 4 passes and soften on.

I think my animal animations came out better than the people. The lizard was fun to animate and I like how it looks. The Toto or Waffy dog has some built in shake into it. It shakes automatically - I guess this was done with expressions or something. Thanks for the compliments.

"Chronicles of Zion" the full movie Here is a link to the complete movie. I apologize but the free webspace only fit the wmv version only. I will make a quicktime version if there is a free webspace provider. Also, I apologize for not adding credits - some of you may recognize your modles such as Waffy by Alain Desrochers and the piano by Dylan Perry.