Gerry

Nice stylization and personality, and of course the music adds a lot of character.

As I've mentioned elsewhere I am probably one of the few who uses AM on both platforms, a PC at my day job and Mac at home. But we are also still on XP at work, not vista. It's much more stable on PC I must say, though I've been tracking down the specific areas where the instability lies on the Mac. I can still work in it just fine, but it takes a little patience. And a lot of saving!

Here's a first render of one more scene. I used Benslens for the fisheye effect and it works great! It's so easy to set up I can't believe it! Thanks guys! Scene07_test01_h264.mov

I like this, especially the purple night sky. Very theatrical! Are you planning on adding some grass or grassy texture to the ground? I think that would help a lot.

You can buy a downloadable subscription for $79 which needs to be renewed annually and only runs on one machine, or you can buy the cd for $299, which can be installed on any machine but needs the cd in the drive to launch it.

Great work all around! Good luck with getting the assignment!

Here's a series of scenes. I think some of it goes by a little fast, but it's just a first draft to check lighting and timing. Scenes02to04_h264.mov

I say daylight too. That sky looks great then the foreground looks all muddy. Maybe lit a little pink from behind to suggest sunset, then a front light to relieve all those shadows. but I'd be interested in seeing how a sky rig looked, mainly because I'm about to try it out myself.

Rodney that's a great test! Did you do it with a boolean?

For a first head that's not bad at all! The ears are always a problem so don't feel too bad about that. For a good head modeling tute I always recommend this one here... http://www.hash.com/users/jsherwood/tutes/SkyLark.pdf. How much splinage you might need to animate a face is a matter of personal preference since it will depend on how realistic you want the face to be, if you'll be using closeups, as well as other condsiderations, but other folks here are way more knowledgeable than me on this subject. One good starting place is to look at the characters in the library and especially the ones that are rigged with a full set of phoneme sliders, and see how dense the face splinage is on those. If you don't know how to check out stuff like that, just ask.

Nice, Paul!

Robcat, that option isn't available on the Mac side. You need to shift-select the whole sequence and click Import. I thought you could select the first one and the rest would follow but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Hi Danf- Once you import the first of the numbered images, check in the images folder in the PWS to make sure they've all come in. If they're numbered they should all be in there, but if not, you can shift-select the whole range of images in the import window. Now they should be in your images folder. In the modeling window apply the first image as a decal. Now bring the model into a choreography. In the timeline (or PWS depending on which you're using) you'll see a Shortcut to Model1(or name of model). There are a couple of icons to the right of the model name, the first one has a red X over it. Click that and the red X is gone. (this is the "Show more than drivers" icon that gives you access to things like, oh, decals on the model!) Now when you click the plus sign to the left of the model name, you should see an item for Decals. Click that plus sign and you should see an Images container. Click that one's plus sign, and you'll finally see your decal image! Phew! I hope you're still with me! Press zero in your top row of numbers (not the keypad) so you can see the decals in the chor. Now drag the playhead, and you should see the decal animate. Under Image, click Timing. You'll see Crop, Range, Length, Speed and Frame. The "Frame" setting will allow you to set keyframes to govern which decal frame you want to display at which frame of the chor.

Here's a slightly better animated material test. I'm holding on the various color combinations for a few frames instead of just mushing through them. giftwraptest05_h264.mov

The colors look washed out in the first one. It may just be the lighting, but the color combos that I used don't seem to be syncing up. I'm gonna fiddle with the keyframes before I post another test.

This is continued from my thread over at http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=33547. I've rendered just the animated material action and it works fine, so there's something else messing with it that I need to look into. Here's what it's supposed to look like: giftwrap_test04_h264.mov

Here's a preliminary test of one segment of the Christmas animation I'll be doing for the company where I work. This bit will come at the very end but I wanted to get it done early to make sure it would work. This is the material that's being interfered with by the model surface settings that I mentioned in the A:M v15 forum. the colors as they show here aren't the way they're supposed to look. I expect to get that fixed eventually. gifttransformtest_h264.mov

Gerry, This just for completeness sake as some may think ONLY Illustrator 8 versions will work. This is not the case from my experience. I've alway used Illustrator 7 format (as exported from Coreldraw). I think it was after version 8 that Adobe changed the AI format to be PDF compatible. Edit: A quick test of 6 format works too. The version of CorelDraw I'm using on this computer (v12) doesn't appear to support later formats. Good call Rod, of course I was meaning to say that you can't use anything later than version 8. My first attempt was to use files from CS3 and when it didn't work I went searching through the forums.

I just used the AI import wizard yesterday for the first time and discovered that the .AI file needs to be saved as Illustrator 8 format. A handy tip that I found by searching the forum.

Hey Robin, a great place to start getting back up to speed is with the Wannabe Tutorials. there's a whole thread here, read through it and grab the pages Mark has created. Save em! Collect em! Trade 'em with your friends! http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=32646

Brainmuffin did a fantastic job rigging a polar bear not long ago. Maybe you could get some pointers from him or that thread.

Thanks for the comments Rod! IBL is a complete mystery to me. I'll look into it. Domo arigato!

Eric, that's some seriously nice animation and modeling work, but it doesn't look like fun. But then I guess any animation of a medical procedure would look a little, how shall I say, gut-twisting.

If you *meant* to put "like" in there, then thanks!

Wow, very nice!