Gerry

Hi Darthlister, you can animate the cp's in either an Action or a Chor to simulate the flicker of a candle flame. Have you tried that? EDIT: oops, I see you're trying something with particles. Your comment about it looking like a Christmas light made me think you were animating geometry rather than using an emitter.

I just checked over on his website and it looks like you can get all the animating lessons for about $23, or you can buy them one at a time for $3 - $5. You should try one to see if it works for you. http://www.barryzundel.com/home/Tutorials.html

I would recommend Barry Zundel's tuts if you have a couple of bucks to spare. He takes a character model from sketches through modeling, rigging and acting out a whole monolog. There are some missteps along the way especially in the rigging, but that's such a highly technical area, I still feel like I got my money's worth. He does a great deal with the animating, especially in tweaking keyframes to give believable weight to movement.

Hi Purplegirl, you made a real simple mistake, you've created the action with the Ground and brought the KeeKat model into the action as an Action Object, which is used usually for a prop or to add one model to another. Sooo, create a new action, and when you're asked which model to use, select KeeKat and not Ground. then everything should work fine.

My main question, or observation, is that using the stride length indicator is not so clear. Did what you show constitute the entire method of using it? I thought there was a further, er, step in making it work, like you advance to the character's next step and make a further adjustment or setting, but maybe I've been doing it wrong, or doing something extra that wasn't necessary. It does confuse me.

Okay, now you're just having fun for fun's sake.

Excellent and engaging as usual Robert!

Dude, watch out, those boxes must be filled with anti-gravity devices! Once they make it through the ceiling they'll be gone for good! What a waste.

Nice! If I *had* a recipe for chrome, now I have a new one!

Happy one, Jeff!

Just *slightly* off topic here, but have you heard the one about the neodymium magnet and the copper tube?

Great work and production values, Rusty, and nice soundtrack as well, something I'm currently struggling with on Nightcallers. Two comments off the top of my head after one viewing: The book cover doesn't bear any relation to what we've already seen, and it's not nearly as interesting. There's no reason not to do something about that. Second, all the quick shots of the robot characters seem very tentative and not very dynamic. Are they threatening? Are they bad robots or good robots? In fact, are they robots at all? Can't tell from this. But everything else really shines. It would be fabulous if everything in it were the same level of finish, currently it's not.

Tricky problem. But that's a nice start, Bobby!

Nice!

Definitely find and keep the serial number, but the best thing you can do is upgrade. Newer versions are more stable, have more features, and (the biggie!) when you have problems with v10 and come here for answers, you *know* what the refrain will be!

Turns out yesterday was Letterman's birthday too, so the aura of my fame grows!

Thanks for the wishes, folks!

Trying to help a coworker struggling with getting transparency in 3DS. He saved out a model as an .obj, I brought it into v.16 and when I dropped it into a chor, I had live surface settings to mess with. this is pretty huge, don't know if this has been in there for awhile but it's great. Oddly, they're available only on the chor shortcut, not on the model itself.

Welcome to the forum, Keizerzilla! Stick around, we're like the Magic 8-Ball of the internets!

Also, two more of my cents, I *think* you mentioned awhile ago that you were thinking of developing this into a printed comic (am I wrong about that? Can't find the post) as well. But seriously, you should just stick to animating, that's where people find the most fun. Doing a comic book version seems like a distraction from what is a great project!

Whoo! What about that wasn't working out?

Even with the explanation it hurts my head.

Well that definitely helps! They were Z-buffered, switched to Raytraced. I was in the midst of experimenting with turning off cast shadows for that light and that worked too. Don't know why I didn't think of that days ago. Now I just need to decide if I need shadows in that shot or not. Thanks robert.

I've got a shot in my Nightcallers scene, where Midge lands at the front entrance and the doors open to reveal Biff and his Enslaver Ants. There are only a couple of lignts in the shot, with main light coming from a klieg, in fact I think it's the default rim light. Up to where the doors open, it renders fine, about two minutes/frame. But as soon as the door opens, the render slows almost to a stop, it says it's rendering the rim light's shadows, and it just hangs hangs hangs until I cancel the render. Even with a Shift-Q screen render, it just won't render if the doors are open; the info line says it's trying to render the rim's shadows. As an experiment I made that one light inactive and it rendered just fine, and promptly too. The problem is I don't know how to diagnose the problem. Maybe just delete the light and try a new one made from scratch? I'm kind of stumped. the shot is way too big to upload here.