jason1025

Test

Found some pictures for reference. Also I think it might be interesting to explore less humanoid puppets like cookie monster and to the extreme mr. snufalopiguse. Like the early days I think it would be cool to hide below the waist parts of puppets who have arms up their back. Or in cases like Kermit where he sits almost motionless on a wall. That will save us a lot of time in animating.

Fantastic

Well I am sorry to hear that. But I do respect your take on it. I think you are on the right track with the parodies keep up the good work. How much would you charge to purchase some custom made puppet models? We could still pursue this and your work could be for the initial 2 simple segments. After words you could stay on as a consultent. I could hire a team from the Hash community including myself to produce future segments. I have a few contacts for some children's shows. The puppets look like muppets to me but perhaps as long as they are new characters I could pitch the idea to these other children's shows. I really feel we have gold here.

Although I was able to get an ok result, I had a lot of trouble with getting the hairs to take on the defuse color of the models decals. If you notice I had to put an image for each emitter. So thats a total of 3 identical images per decal with 2 emitters. 1 of the decals is for the model not the hair. The confusing part is why are there 4 sets of these options? in the properties drivers of the image for the hair? How do you know which is which for what part? It was luck and guess work on my part that I got this result.

EnjoyXmass_Stocking.zip

Man you really hit the target. I don't know if its AM or your skills or both but I am extremely impressed with these results. Seasamy street does some cg, not a whole lot. I watch it a lot because of my daughter. I may be mistaken but I have never seen muppets that look this photo real on the show before. I guess because they are not human to begin with they get a free pass on the uncanny Valley. Your choice of materials, lighting and modeling looks perfect. This may sound far fetched and you may not be interested but if you put together a portfolio of more muppets like this and more of a range in characters that still maintain the classic Gym Henson style. and animate 2 shorts both 30 seconds or less that represents Sesame streets values of education and child entertainment. I would be willing to bet I could get you a meeting with a producer for them so you could be contracted to make short segments for the show. Their biggest issues is turnaround time, cost and content quality. They are extremely hesitant to move away from the classic 70/80's look and feel of the show. I have another idea that would raise eyebrows over there. Make your set and story appear to take place in classic 70s/80's set along with the classic clothing and colors from that error. This idea will sell for 3 reasons 1. the 80's are so hot right now. 2.People love when something new is juxtaposed against something old. Sometimes people refer to this as a variation on a theme. This stuff is Gold. The Writer Joss Weden is really good at this. For example Buffy the vampire Slayer was taking the old theme of the attractive, classic, blond, dumb, scream, queen who runs from the monster only to trip fall and then be killed. He took the same concept and turned it upside down. Now the Attractive blond was chasing the monster and she is not so dumb and he is very scared. In our case the fact that this is CG and not live action but still looks real and set in the look and style of 80's of Gym Henson Sesame street is the perfect combo. We would definitely want to model and animate in all the flaws that they take out now a days like the thin wirey dowel like controls for the real life puppet arm and hand movements. To decrease animation time and increase realism of the original puppet tears puppetry in our cg we could rotoscope some classic spots from typical episodes of the 80's. We would want to pay close attention to the limitations in the movements of the old puppets and try and duplicate that in our animation. The result would look look extremely appealing and unique but allow us to push the envelope by injecting capabilities that they didnt have in the 80's If we held a golden rule that we approached this "as if we were of the 80's, existed in the 80's but had the budget and technology of the future dropped in our lap what would the passed create with the power of the future. Richard donner did this same thing in the recut of Superman 2 the richard donner cut, where they added a number of new special effects scenes but still maintained the old 80's look and feel but were able to push the envelope because shots like this would have cost millions in the 80's. 3. reason is we can do these segments for really cheep but while still maintaining production value. Currently a lot of work is shipped to factories in Kerea and china. They put out a lot of crap very fast. It rarely looks this good. But they are cheep. From what i have heard its something like 25 cents to 55 cents per frame of CG @24fps for a 22 minute show. Basically $8-$16k per episode. That is for very templated shows where lighting is basically ambiance on everything. and very few scenes with even a reflection. Shows like sesame street and Yo Gabba Gabba love bumpers. Little 15 to 30 second very simple, yet visually stimulating and hopefully educational shorts to pepper throughout the program. I can almost guarantee I could get us work doing 15 to 30 second spots if we kept the budject to $1000.00 per segment or below. I know that does not seem like much but after we get the initial sets and characters made the remaining work for the year would be marely putting those charactors and sets together and animating them. An episode can be as simple as a character counting or saying the alphabet. Kids love interaction. another segment could be the character conversing with the viewer talking about subjects like near and far, tying shoes, watering plants, Saying the cow goes mooo!!, explaining how water turns into snow, how to treat animals like the dog and cat gently, explaining time outs for bad behavior. If you are interested in pursuing this together I would like to move forward. This could really work. Eventually we could get the entire hash community contributing for low pay like a Chines factory. Its all about volume, the more we can do in less time while maintaining a set level of quality increases the pay for everyone. Give me a call if you would like to have a meeting on this subject. My number is on the contact page of lightdims.com I am guessing I could get us 3-6 segments per episode 15-30 seconds per segment @ about $30.00 per second. We could generate $20k-$80k per year based on 13 episodes per year.

Thanks gentlemen. I have had to re learn that 3 times now. Its not more of the more intuitive features, but I am glad it exists.

You know how we flatten models in a pose so that we can evenly distribute the decal. Well I cant remember how you actually apply the decal after you flatten the model in the pose.

Not a bad deal. at first glance it may seem slightly more expensive than the previous post I made above but with this coupon code SPRING0410 for basically the same price as before you get a 700w power supply up from 500, you get a 60GB OCZ agility 3 6GBs SSD up from a 500GB sata 6 HDD and you get 1600 ram up from 1333 I tried dropping the graphics card and downgrading the power supply but then you are not eligible for the coupon code. So you might as well take the free upgrades. I talked to a customer service rep and he told me to wait until Friday. So im guessing ill be able to shave $100 off this price. I might grab 2 of these to add them to my render Q Or I could do 2 of these which gets me 12 cores and 18gs of ram vs 8 cores and 16gs of ram.

Hi Robert. WHat do we have to do? just copy and paste? How do we proceed, who will edit it?

Fluid Is it me or is there no mention of the settings in the tech ref?

Thanks folks.

In the tools tips Curved mode by selecting an object and hitting c or shift c. I cant find out what it does. Cant find it in the tech ref.

How are you getting AM models, textures and rigs into XSi and rendering with Modo? I didnt know that was possible. I thought once you leave AM you loose a bunch of stuff.

I think you should submit that santa for AM17 Mascot.

The Show Manipulators in World Space button on the Manipulator toolbar allows you to change the orientation of the translate manipulator so you can move an object based on the axes of the window instead of the axes of the object. It can be used in both Choreography and Action windows.

Thank you my friend.

but I heard statistics don't lie? Like 2 out of 3 doctors prefer camels.

I am bad at math. How do you calculate this. What is the formula? I did the cross multiply and divide thing. Am 15 was 595 second Am 16 was 289 and Am 17 was 249. On a separate note I tested the render lock and got these results. I think its important because we often use this to see what we are getting. AM 15 57-105 second AM 16 26-34 seconds AM 17 24-28 seconds I used a stop watch but got various results. The only constant was that AM 17 was faster than the rest.

AM17Alpha2 is 14% faster on my System Than AM16b and 58% faster than AM15j+

Do any of these renders have SSS on them?

Not bad.

2:16 Yoda you now have the record for the fastest AM benchtest. But its no fair because you got to use AM 17

I tested forces with cloth in 16b its having a bunch of trouble updating. Even if I delete keys sometimes the simulation does not change. Ill change something on the 1st key delete all other the keys and re simulate but no change. Cloth and forces or even just cloth seems to have gotten very buggy in this version