Gerry

Gene, surely there are some tutes on YouTube or Animation Mentor or somewhere. Try a little harder with the ball bounce, and show it from a side view. Ditch the spotlights while you're at it too! Just a plain stage with a ball bouncing from left to right, four or five bounces at least. EDIT: I just went over to YouTube thinking I would post a couple of links here for you and I found about 20 videos with "bouncing ball" in the title! Check some out.

FWIW that last one looked like he was being attracted magnetically to the cube. At the very least you need more of a parabolic shape to the curve of his jump. ...unless it IS a magnet. I mean, he's in a suit of armor after all!

Great work holmes, I only watched about the first 20 minutes but will watch the rest later. Great info, very thorough and well explained.

Okay, I'm in. but I didn't participate in the first one so I'm going to refrain from making any suggestions!

In all other respects I give the cover high "Marks".

Mark, this all looks great but I have one small crit of the book cover. Because the authors' names are so far apart they appear to be referencing the adjacent artwork, like it's the names of the pictured characters. Could you center them above the title with something like "Mark Largent and Mark McCrary present"? I think it would tighten up the design somewhat. Otherwise nice work!

Wow, great look, great lighting, character design, everything! Will there be dialog, or none?

How did you do that blue dress? Is that a material?

Real purty, but it's hard to tell what they are or what they mean. Is it all in AM or is there some post work in there?

You should get bored more often!

Nice looking suit and that logo on his chest is hilarious!

Nice looking test so far! Good luck with the material.

that's coming along nicely, Kat!

Nice tweaking on the sky AND the ground Robert.

Hey Gene, it's been dog's years since I checked in on this thread and your progress is just amazing! I love all the stills of the animals, great personality and your lighting is greatly improved! Nice work.

Have a good one!

Hey don't you have a cathedral to finish? Beautiful as always and just about a perfect re-creation of Apple's trademark glossy look.

Welcome back! I expect to see some blasted robots shortly.

I think it's also worth mentioning for north's benefit that A:M's basic stability has increased in leaps and bounds over the last several versions so (in theory anyway) the learning curve is a lot less stressful these days. Not shorter, just less stressful. But that's saying something!

Hi North, welcome to the forums! First off, no animation app has an inherent stylistic "look" to the work created in it. It's pretty much up to the artist/animator to determine a style, as with any art medium. Second, if you're new to 3D animation in general, getting something like a 25-minute animation done "fast" is not possible. But in my experience A:M has the best toolset and workflow of any of the ones I've used. Don't know about C4D but for a $79 1 year subscription you can find out for yourself if A:M is a worthwhile app to learn. And the people here on the forum are a bodacious support group! Stick around, keep asking questions.

Paul, those are real helpful! Thanks!

Hey Atomike, as with anything computer-related, this is easy once you know how! It used to drive me crazy too. What you need to do is FIRST CREATE A ROTATION. Doesn't matter how much but obviously less than 180. Set a keyframe for the beginning AND the end.THEN when you right click on the rotation setting in the PWS you'll get an option to "Change driver to". Select "Euler" (pronounced "oiler"). Now you can rotate it 5000 degrees if you want. Move the ending keyframe to where you want the rotation to end and bob's your uncle! I believe you can even set intermediate keyframes if you want the rotation to start slower and get faster, but play around with it. Once you've got "Euler" selected fine-tuning it is pretty easy.

Yep, nice simple effect.

You got it pretty close! Don't know what that bicycle is about but otherwise here's the original...

Shouldn't there be a crowd of photographers off to one side?