Gerry

There are several levels of ways to create animation so the answer to your question depends on what you hope to accomplish. I've been using Hash for going on 10 years, and my background is a career as an illustrator and cartoonist. Yet my 3D work has no character stuff at all and I'm only in the last two or three years getting serious about character animation. Some of the newcomers here are already outpacing me in that department. So the question is whether you want to use it to do character work, or simply animate objects. There are also some really advanced folks here who, as far as I know, only model still images and don't do animation at all. But you can certainly work in AM without drawing skills, and if you're determined to learn it's great fun and there's a supportive community right here! P.S. 3D animation is without doubt the absolutely COOLEST THING you can do with a computer!

Nice! Looks like you used the Benslens on the movie. Yes?

Wow, thanks! I always forget about the shadows. That was it exactly.

I've modeled this small RC plane for my day job and I'm getting a weird dark or shadowed patch that I can't account for, which I've circled in red on this jpeg. I'm also attaching the prj file. If anyone can look at this quickly and see what might be causing it, I can't figure it out nohow! 924290.04_Hor_airplane.zip

I've got the manual from v8 and I still use it all the time!

Dan - a terrific, basic overview of the process. Feel free to write more when you get inspired. I never get tired of having the basics reiterated back to me because it's easy to forget some of the basics no matter how advanced you get.

Great work! Nice timing and good sight gags! That's some serious progress.

If you go into your settings and look for "manage attachments" you can delete attached files.

Great!

Hi and welcome! That sounds like a great project and ambitious but doable. As far as a "grid" I assume you're asking about the appropriate scale to create your characters at. I think it's fair to say that everyone has their own approach, and you will also find that when you later create materials to texture your characters, the importance of picking a good scale will come into play. Another consideration is that like most 3D apps, the zoom capability is essentially infinite. You can model a molecule that's 1/16" wide or 600 feet. It's more important that once you pick a scale, stick with it for the whole project! Just for simplicity, I generally stick to "realistic" scale, like 5-6 ft tall for a human character and so forth. So, sorry to say, there is no "right" answer! the most important thing is consistency across all the elements of your project from the outset.

I always recommend the tablet because as an illustrator I took to it pretty naturally years ago, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. I do all my AM work with it, but use the mouse for surfing and other stuff, just to give my "drawing hand" a break. I can also alternate one with the other, tablet with my left hand, mouse with my right, and use whichever one is best for a particular bit. Robcat's comment is interesting because with the mouse I have to move my whole arm, but with the tablet it's pretty much just my wrist. On a tangentially related topic, when working at the computer you should have a chair with arm rests or you're doing some long-term damage to your back. It also makes a difference in how much work a tablet is to use.

the quick and dirty way would be to just model the fin and stick it there. The mesh doesn't need to be continuous. It's nicer when it is, but not required.

Very nice! Takes me back to my days doing slot machines. Try turning up the ambience on the glass signage and it'll look really real!

this is looking absolutely great! Nice work, nice touches nice overall "look". I just hope you've learned your lesson and next year you'll start in June!

Hey, that's fun! There's a lot of potential there, especially if you wanted to mix flat and 3D, you wouldn't need to composite, just do it all in AM.

I just wanna know what her bikini bottom is covering!

Hey I just ran across this tutorial for creating an mp3 player with vol control. Unfortunately it's in AS3.0, I don't know if it helps but look it over, maybe there's something you can use. http://blog.0tutor.com/post.aspx?id=202&am...-Actionscript-3

Really great work, Eric. And if I haven't mentioned it before, your website design and functionality are really nice.

The rule of thumb I always consider when planning resolution vs. file size is that dots (or pixels) become indistinguishable to the naked eye at 144 dpi/ppi (or so I've heard). So that's the bare minimum; above that it's a question of judgement and how much subtlety or richness an image needs.

Lookin good! Will Santa say "Yo Ho Ho" at the end?

This is a really interesting experiment and I can see where it would have its uses. Once you get the hang of doing it all in AM you'll see how flexible it can be. I've got this animation I did for a slot machine company on my website at http://www.mooneyart.com/three_d/movies/isdgames.mov where ALL the game screens and screen animations were in one humongous QuickTime mov, and for each machine I set the animation to play just those frames that that game needed. As it turned out it got a *little* complicated, and as I recall I had a good reason at the time for doing it that way (which I can't recall), but what was amazing to me was that is was possible at all!

Well, animated decals in AM are a pretty straightforward (but not simple!) process that work best with either .mov's or tga's, but I've been bitten in the butt before when I forgot a step here or there. EDIT: another thing to realize ( I think this was stated above) is that once the decal image is placed, it should run by default frame-for-frame with the animation unless you specify otherwise. Say the decal starts at frame 200 of the choreography. You can set frame 1 at frame 200, and if you want it to be a still image for one second, set a second keyframe for frame 1 at frame 230, then jump to frame 12, or skip back and forth.

Number's method isn't the most intuitive. (Sorry dude!) You should be able to follow some/all of the above advice and get results, but there are a lot of settings and stuff to be aware of. If I could suggest just uploading the QT mov and let me/us try applying it in some quicky prj. I'm game to try. QT files are extremely usable, but it can depend on how the QT file was created/compressed. I've only used TGA files in a very limited way for animated decals but they work well too. It can seem overwhelming importing hundreds of TGA's into a prj, but A:M can handle it.

REally excellent but Paul had one good comment about hitting "nitwits" and "conducted" with stronger gestures. But on the other hand I understand why he crossed it all out. This is great work, very fluid and believable!

Haven't looked at JohnL3d's tutes but yes, you can definitely animate a material. Create the .mat, apply and check the "Show More than Drivers" icon. You can set keyframes for pretty much any attribute of the material.