Gerry

You can also use Grab, an OSX system tool that should be in your Utilities folder inside the Applications folder. It's pretty self-explanatory.

Here's a simple project and a movie. I haven't really looked into all the myriad settings for toon renders so it may be there's something for this. But both the object viewed through the Boolean's hole, and the hole itself, lose the toon lines. BolleanCutterTest.prj Booleantest_h264.mov

Not having played with this at all, I wonder if the model needs to be at 0,0,0 in the chor for it to work properly. That would be in line with things like Flatten, cylindrical decals, etc.

I'll put together a test prj and test it on both platforms before I post it.

Here's some strange behavior I discovered over the weekend, although it was on the Mac and I haven't tested it on the pc side as yet. With toon render on, and a hole created with a Boolean cutter, when an object is viewed through the Boolean cutter hole the object has no toon lines. It's a minor problem that I can solve at the compositing stage but I wonder if it's worth an A:M Report? On the other hand if anyone has anything to add that would clarify this that would be nice too.

Thanks Robert. I guess I hadn't realized that there was a setting in the light too.

Doing the renders for my music video, all with toon lines, and no matter how I crank up the specularity settings I cannot seem to get any kind of specular highlights. Are they mutually exclusive?

Nice test!

Very nice, Kat! Good progress!

Welcome!

Those are some really cool tests!

I did find that after I'd posted my query. What I don't quite understand is that with my Network Solutions account, our WordPress blogs were free, included in our base web-hosting deal. But when I visited NS today, there's a fee by the WP info, like $3.95/mo., but it def used to be free. That's not even including the ComicPress plugin/template. It's still not a bad deal, but I guess a lot of "free" stuff will slowly be going away.

Hey Mark, what content management tool do you use for the website for updating strips, having that cool calendar grid, having comments etc. I want to do a website for Goo and Roo with those features.

Nice!

yeah, don't be too locked into the way "real" spacesuits move. One thing I've learned with my sax-playing gecko is the pitfalls of under-animating in a quest for realism.

Just watched this for the first time, Jesse! Great work all around, good luck with the film festival!

In case you don't know, there's a good shortcut for inserting a new cp at the exact midpoint of a spline: select just the spline segment, and hit "Y". Go around the model adding cp's, then just connect them all with a new spline.

One more, the whole sax solo in the scene. It will be cut differently (I've got 4 or 5 cameras in the shot), but this is essentially the whole scene. SaxSolo_finalqual_small.mp4

Thanks David! No, the deflector group ends at the ankles as I didn't *think* it would be an issue! But she does kick high once or twice and that caused a separate problem that I remedied just by moving her one foot a little lower on that frame, so it's working fine now. But when I saw it happen it was kind of funny. Her heel went through the cloth mesh just above the hem, and from that frame onward the skirt was completely tangled around her ankle and lower leg, exactly as if she'd torn a hole in the dress and her foot went through it. Since I could see what happened I didn't worry about it, and the fix worked fine. Her foot may still intersect the cloth geometry but I don't think that will be seen in the final animation. There are a couple of small problems with her rigging that I'm not worrying about as the problem areas won't appear on camera. My main concern is getting the dance moves more natural-looking and less "puppet-like".

That's a great start! Hard to tell from your screen movie when and how he's jumping but the in-context shot makes it clear. One thing I would suggest is when he lands between jumps, have him hold there for maybe three frames. It may help give him more of a feeling of weight.

Next test of the girl's dance for the sax solo, this time the full 16 seconds. Still smoothing out some keyframes but I'm pretty happy with it so far. SaxSoloDance_clothtest14_h264.mov

That would be nice in theory! I've found that tweaking some things for cloth don't have a direct cause/effect relationship so I'm not sure if some of the things I'm finding are based in fact or just luck. I will report anything that makes sense, though that may be too high a standard! EDIT: I wrote these comments whilst I was having a problem with the cloth that I didn't understand. At frame 385, her skirt would simply disappear, and it would disappear from the entire chor, even the frames where the cloth keyframes were created. I had worked on it all weekend at home (on the Mac) and hoped that the behavior would be different on my work pc, thereby giving me some clues. Well as it turned out, on the pc instead of the skirt disappearing, I got an onscreen error message. It was general but at least gave me something to explore. What happened was she did one kick where her upper thigh penetrated the geometry of the "attached group" waistband, completely messing up the whole simulation. I lowered her foot a couple of inches so the intersection didn't happen, and everything's fine now.

happy birthday, Mr. Angus!!

Thanks Paul! I'm playing with the keyframes now and getting it a little more lifelike. But I can't say enough about the cloth!

I've got a better dance. This test is still a little floaty but it's mainly a cloth test for the skirt, and it's coming along pretty nice. SaxSoloDance_clothtest5_h264.mov