khickman

Thanks for all the feedback! @John: Yeah, when you are working a single frame you take a different mind set to the image. Motion adds a lot. @ Rodney: The original moutains were darker and more detailed, but didn't add much to the location. I tried to go to an ice planet feel, but I've never been happy with the result--maybe SSS would have helped. I probably violated a number of cinematic rules with the camera move: since it takes a a spiral path towards the robot and pivots at the same time, it gives the background a exaggerated sense of parallax. The lighting gives me the most fits. Every time I go back to look at it, I either want to brighten it up for detail or darken it up for atmosphere. I think I was in my dark and shadowy period when I last tweaked it. That scene (an establishing shot meant to be much shorter) has been on my hard drive for 10 years, so its value is mostly in taking stock of each new release of AM. I shudder to think how long 600 frames would have taken to render on the PC I had back in '02! EDIT: On a side note, I've been watching Brain Games on NGC, and after watching the episode on attention I went back and did a close inspection of a frame. Was shocked to realize that there was a huge, glaring error-- I was so focused on little details that a giant misplaced patch (a quick repair on a corrupted model file) had obliterated a great deal of detail and blocked several lights. Sometimes the devil is in the big picture as well as the details!

Working out the kinks in Netrender, and used an old project that had everything but the kitchen ink: reflections, transparencies, texture and bump maps, volumetrics, etc. Having some networking and software stabiity issues, which really put the "farm" into renderfarm! I submitted a still several years ago in the image contest, but it was up against very stiff competition. Works better when you see the whole dolly move IMHO. kgh Youtube video "Robot dolly test"

Open your model and select bones mode. In the workspace expand the bones and select "root". This will show you the bone that you're talking about. Now you can edit it down to a proper size for your choreography.

I'm running v13 on a dual core Athlon 64 under Vista Business 64. I can render WHILE running my other apps with no slow down. Woo!