Gerry

Well, I was frankly surprised at how sophisticated the automated part of that was. My characters have Holmes' Lite Face rig and I just wrote asking him how compatible it is with the automated functions, and his rig has a full set of phonemes. So I was prepared to do the whole thing manually in any case, and in addition there are very few closeup shots of the face for this sequence. so I'm going to get a rough start on it and I'll be back here with questions. I suspect you're right about the simple open/close option Robert.

I hadn't seen this before. Nice!

Are the phonemes dependent on using a particular rig?

Okay, scratch that. It seems to be working fine with KeeKat and doing the actual exercise. Let's see how this goes.

Trying to get the hang of doing lip synch and using the dope sheet by following the instructions in TaoAM, though I'm not doing the KeeKat exercise, just following the steps. It works up until I click "New dope sheet" and enter the text, a couple of words appear in the PWS, then it crashes. happened three or four times so far. They're all simple words, in fact I keep shortening the phrase to go easy on the app. Dictionary.dic is present where it should be. I know this is an area not a lot of folks here have experience in, but does anyone have an idea about how to proceed. I'm using v16b.

Myron rigged me a skirt with smartskin, It will do what I need. Gene, I'm glad that will work out for you, but getting the hang of the cloth settings will be more worth your while over the long haul. Also, once you figure it out, it's great fun to play with.

I really enjoyed watching this again the other day. Thanks for returning it to prominence!

Kat, aside from the first guy sitting down a little abruptly, this works really well.

Don't try to make the cloth thick. DEFINITELY do the "wave the flag" exercise in TaoA:M. Then do it a second time. Seriously, it should take you no more than 45 minutes, and doing it a second time will answer the questions you had from the first time.

I'm pretty sure I'd seen this years ago. Great to see it again. The Anzovins' run with Hash was great while it lasted.

good point Myron. Fact is the devil portrait will be much faded back on a stucco wall in this shot, so it won't be nearly so dominant.

That's not a rant! Around here that's a completely normal post. Hang in there. Everyone deals with the learning curve differently, but I was doing 3D animation for over five years before I stopped feeling like a beginner.

Here's an updated version of the gecko run. this is more how it will be seen in the video, but there's still a lot of work to do on it. GeckosWalkAcrossDevil_v2_h264.mov

Oh right, I forget about some of those keyboard shortcuts!

Also, regarding the different interpolation methods for spline (curve) keyframes vs. non-curve keyframes, select the keyframe(s) in the graph editor (the timeline view that shows the curved paths between the red dots) and hit "P" to make them flat and angled, and "O" to make them curved. By coincidence the same keyboard shortcuts when you want to make splines curved or flat when modeling! But of course if you right click on a keyframe you get a few more options for in/out interpolation.

When viewing the timeline, you can select the keyframes and nudge thrm back and forth with the arrow keys, or just drag them. either way works fine. PC, Mac, makes no difference.

Hi rusty, nice model! What everyone else said above, but also add some specularity to the eyeballs.

Hey Thumperness, I'm a Mac guy who has to use a pc at my day job, and I carry my AM files back and forth and work on them on both systems on a regular basis. So I know of issues on both sides, and though the Mac version previously came up a little short, most of the issues are fixed and all the things that work on the pc now work on the Mac as well. At the moment I'm at my Mac and looking at the library mapping thing. Let's see... Okay, I just tried the same thing on the Mac and found that my v15 library has a lot more items in it. So I tried mapping to that "Libraries" folder, but the folder is empty unfortunately. Shouldn't be, there should be a small .lbr file in there. So I next tried moving the v15 "Data" folder into the v16 app folder to see if I could trick AM into seeing that data folder, but no luck. However, I think the problem is the files I have available on each machine, not platform-related. EDIT: Just took a look at the v16 .lbr file and it's just an .xml file so I may try writing a version to access the full v15 data folder. Just for kicks.

Yes, you have to remap the path(s) to the libraries you want to have show up, and you can re-order the libraries in the options panel. I just went through the mapping process to make sure I knew what I was talking about, and my libraries were a mess! I looked in my Program Files folder and into the Hash folder and it appears that the most complete data folder I have is from v12, all the later ones have a kind of sampler of models etc, but not the full libraries. So I mapped to the v12 "Libraries" folder. Map to that, not to the "Data" folder, but only map to a libraries folder that's adjacent to the data folder you want. I also found in the Options/Libraries panel that I had about 8 or 10 duplicate paths to my v16 folder, so I deleted all those, mapped to the v12 folder, and the libraries seem fine and fully populated now.

Someone, I think Robert, linked to this on FB the other day. Nice job, and welcome to the forum!

Yeah, unfortunately, the library is a good idea in theory, but even when you have it working, it's generally not used much. You can create your own libraries of your own models, sets, etc, create icons for your own items, etc, etc, but in practice I'm not sure many people do. Keep in mind, that if you choose to use the libraries, when you take an item from it (and this applies even if you just open models, prjs, actions, what have you, from a finder window as opposed to the library pane) you have to rename/resave the item elsewhere, because if you don't, any changes you make will be to the original library item.

thanks Rich, glad you like it. I'm shooting to have the whole thing done by Christmas, and though it's not a firm deadline, I'm looking forward to being done with it!

In the default Mac setup nothing is docked, it's just a set of loose windows. As I mentioned above, I *think* that if you're rendering, and hit Cmd-H to hide the app, only the rendering window is hidden, but if not rendering, Cmd-H hides the whole app, but I'm not at the Mac at the moment, so not 100% sure.

Welllll, this is the only way it will be seen. So if it looks good from here that's good enough for me!

How does this gecko run look to you? GeckosWalkAcrossDevil_h264.mov