Gerry

Me not horrified.

On this topic (and Mirror Mode would have been my guess as well) I've been finding MM on by default when I open some models or actions. Things misbehave and then I notice it's on. There's no reason for it to be on by default, is there?

Great test as usual!

I've been getting more and more organized about stuff like this. Can't be too careful!

Amazing, Gene! You go, boy!

Hi Zam, welcome to the forums!

My "making of" article for the NCS newsletter has been sent off. It's not available online, strictly a printed newsletter, but I'll see about scanning and posting here when it comes out. In the meantime, here's the image I rendered for the cover. It was seriously great (I know you can do this with any app, it's just cool) to be able to set up a render to the exact resolution and image size for print, tweak (here I closed the gecko's eyes, because the still seemed to need it, and tilted his hat at a more rakish angle) and render out reproduction artwork for print.

All you need to do is keyframe the rate of emission. Before you want it to stop, keyframe the full rate of emission, then where you want it to stop key it at zero, key it again at zero right before it's to begin again, then add a keyframe to increase it to what you want. It does seem tricky at first, but they're highly controllable.

Here's a quickie just to see if I knew what I was talking about. This sheet has four cross splines, each with a bone. They're parented but as Robert says that probably isn't necessary. Look at the path constraints in the .prj, each one is 5% ahead of the next, both at the start and at the end. This is quick and dirty, I didn't mess with the roll, but see if it's what you're trying to do. sheetOnPath.mov SheetOnPath.prj

Short answer, you probably need more than one bone in the model, each constrained to the path. Can you post a screen shot maybe, showing what you're getting vs. what you want?

Not sure it's irony, prolly more like the new customized advertising strategy permeating the web. I browsed your shop, then went to another unrelated site and there was a CP ad with you TAR Mug and my Chinese Gravity Poster. Coincidence? I think not.

Damn. speechless.

Ha, I was going to pop in and say "nice beveling"! Seems mostly in good shape although the black parts, stock etc. are hard to read. Could you post a wireframe shot?

Great great great news Mark!

Yeah but if I ever have this trouble in the middle of the night, I would like to know why it happened so I can fix it before sunrise! I *thought* maybe something in your preset kicked it into gear, but that's not really likely...I quit and reopened my original chor so there was no overlap or anything like that. So all I can say is, hmmmm...

Thanks everyone. I loaded Robert's preset and the flame rendered fine, then I reloaded my original project with no changes and it's rendering fine even with just one pass, so, I don't understand what happened or changed but it looks like I'm in good shape.

Yeah David, I've checked it a few times by now as you can imagine! As I said I can see the sprite outlines in wireframe view in both modeling and chor windows, can see the sprites animate when I scrub through the timeline, but the little buggers just won't render. All I see are the grey discs that have the material on them. And, other hair in the scene renders just fine.

Yes, by all means stick around! A:M is a much more pleasant experience in combination with this forum!

I'm attaching a zip file with a sprite material, a flame targa image, a simple model and a chor. I've been working on this fire material and finally got it to look decent, when it just quit rendering! I can see the sprite outlines in wireframe mode, I can see the sprites in shaded mode, can see them in the chor in shaded mode, they spew out on cue, but they will not render. I'm stumped, I know it's a simple one. FireMaterialTest.zip

Thanks Rodney! BTW just clicked over to you blog for the first time. Very nice! I've bookmarked that link to the "Listening to Music" lecture series.

Jody (aka MMZ Timelord) has been setting up a render farm and we did a test shot for Nightcallers that came out great. I'd recommend his help just on this basis because it went so well. Not posting it because the flame effect needs some serious tweaking but once all the tech stuff is managed and we do another render I'll be posting.

It depends on whether your eyeballs are spherical as in a realistic character or oblong/odd-shaped as for a cartoony character. In general you should have the whole eyeball turn, since you may want to add a decal or material to the "whites", for veins or other color treatment you may want to add for realism. For total cartoony, black-dot-on-a-white-circle type eyes, you could even have an animated decal for the pupils. So how you animate them depends on what kind of eye you're going for. Marcos (Xtaz) did a nice tutorial awhile back on controlling a decal with Smartskin. He's still got it on his website at http://xtaz.com.br/index.php?option=com_co...0&Itemid=63

Hope Purplegirl comes back. It's too bad when beginners post a question then never come back. Not much can be done I guess.

Hugely awesome. thanks.

It's a good find, but it would be *nice* to know the ins and outs and what-have-yous. However I believe I'll be going back to the cloth material for this cape; I'd switched to a series of bones with dynamic contstraints, which works okay, but there's a lot of tweaking with the cp weighting and it was never 100% though I had planned to work with it further. I might have two models for this character and use on a case-by-case basis. Not every shot he's in needs a waving cape anyway. EDIT: I do have a cloth question though: if a character appears in a shot at say, frame 320, is there a way to start the cloth sim at that frame instead of zero? Guess I should go test.