Gerry

Happy Birthday Robcat! So do Vikings do anything special for their birthdays? Pillage? Plunder?

I think you can delete one by going into your controls>manage attachments, and delete one of them.

I used to stand over the back of the TV set just to smell 'em!

Mark, all this work is just terrific! I love Greyhawk, K-bor, the sea monster, all of it. Great style, great look and lots of fun. I hope you're finding ways to actively promote it. (in your *spare time*!)

Nice start but the hands seem small. Maybe that's what Robcat was reacting to.

Here's the final sequence. It worked out just fine for our purposes but I'm sure it will change!

this stuff is way, way out there! Nice!

dino dandruff? Nice Work Robert!

That's worth a try! I'll post something later in the day. EDIT: Actually it's working just fine without rendering a sequence. I just cranked up the revolutions and motion blur.

Here's the next version, with a little more detail. I would sure like to get some motion blur on that paddle. What I've tried so far is to rotate it, convert to Euler interpolation, give it a good spin and render at 9 passes with 50% motion blur and this is what I got. Should I just increase all these settings? In the process I'm animating the paddle is supposed to be spinning at 200rpm throughout.

I tried that, and it's way too much. I've got it at 1.02. Any more than that and it starts getting wierd.

the IOR definitely makes a difference in the way the grey shading happens around the lip. I'll keep experimenting.

Ooh, that index of refraction is the thing! I was already on my way with a gradient material with an edge gradient and added Robcat's settings to the transparent part. Works pretty well I think! And the toon line won't be necessary after all. EDIT: one other change was to treat the interior of the beaker slightly different from the exterior so there wouldn't be double specularity. I think that helped too.

I'm doing a work project creating a series of stills showing a glass lab beaker half-filled with water, then adding white powder, then the water being stirred and becoming slowly clearer. I was looking in the libraries on my Mac's A:M over the weekend and there were maybe six glass materials, but when I started work at my office pc this morning, there are only three glass materials in the library, Fake Glass MR, Liquid Glass MR and Perspex MR. the assignment is tricky because at most points in the process everything needs to be transparent. I'm going to composite a toon line for definition of the beaker but I wonder if someone can make a good recommendation for a glass material that will approximate laboratory glassware.

No, the end points of the bones fall short of the cp location. And it appears to be only the eyelid bones but I haven't examined everything. Just one of them mysteries I guess. It doesn't appear to be affecting the weighting process.

I'm seeing something in the face weighting process that seems odd. When I get to the eyelid weighting, the bones are placed properly in the model window>bones mode (i.e., the bones end right at an appropriate cp) but in the action window, they end a good 1/8" or more away. I haven't moved the mesh or any bones. I'm proceeding with the weighting; if anyone can shed light on this I'd be happy to hear it. EDIT: This doesn't seem to be affecting the weighting process.

Yeah, it's a little confusing...You still need QT v7 if you want the functionality of QTPro, but the v10 player that comes with Snow Leopard has some great screen recording functionality. However what it doesn't have is the ability to record a region of the screen, something that it really needs. Probably next iteration, I'm hoping. So for the time being you have to have both v7 and v10 if you like it and use it. Versions 8 and 9 have disappeared into the ether apparently.

Here's a quick progress report. I'm still in the midst of weighting the cp's in the face so it's not finished but I can let you know about the export. Once I deleted all my smartskins (there weren't too many which is why taking this route made more sense than Holmes' suggestion) I was able to successfully export my model. The only other caveat was when I re-imported the model and dragged the Face controls null etc. onto the head bone, I had to change the name of the head bone from "Head" to "head". Or vice versa, not sure, but the capitalization caused a crash. Once I fixed that everything *seems* to be going okay as far as weighting the face. Once that's done I'll let you know of any other issues.

Actually an easier way to test this is to just delete the smartskins and retry the export. I'll give it a try tomorrow and let you know.

I'm installing the Lite Face rig into my Midge model, which has the TSM rig installed. I followed the Lite Face instructions carefully and everything worked fine until the final model export from the Face Install action. I get an "Unhandled Exception 001" and then a crash each time I tried it. All the TSM constraints are off. Can Holmes or anyone else shed light on this? I'll be happy to redo the whole thing if I can get a handle on why this is happening. EDIT: Hey, this is the same issue I ran into back on Oct. 15! And it never was resolved in a way I could utilize. Holmes ended up rigging it for me. I would sure like to resolve this, has there been any progress on a solution?

Sure, you could add a bone to each letter, then give each one a path constraint. That's how I would do it anyway. Or give each letter an Orient Like and Translate To constraint and assign a graduating percentage of lag to each one.

Gene, this is really starting to shine! The stylization of the animals is really terrific!

That appears to have fixed it, but I have another newbie question: what does a folder icon with a question mark on it indicate? Inside the Relationship>Bones in the PWS there are folder with bone names and question marks on them.

When I go to add fan bones to the TSM rig I find that they're floating in space. But for some reason the "Attached to Parent" option isn't present for these bones. I first select the bone I want to parent it, but that doesn't help.

Okay, I did that. I think what may have precipitated this was that I had been saving successive models under new names, and may have opened an action that used an earlier model version that I then deleted. At least that's what I suspect. Everything seems to be functioning okay. I'll monitor the situation. EDIT: It appears I've had Mirror Mode turned on for the last couple of hours. that may be the culprit.