arkaos

I notice in your screenshot, Walter, that there is a blue "Z" channel that is still increasing in value during your 10 frame pause (It's the blue line at the very bottom of your timeline). That would cause the floating during the 10 frame pause. Everything else looks like it is already zero-sloped. Look carefully at each channel spline during the pause. If any are still sloping, then there will be motion during that time. Good luck

Awesome robcat. Have you tried increasing the lifetime and performing the emitter animation before frame 0? Then kick on the force about a half sec before frame zero. Maybe use a long lifetime so the sprites fade more slowly like real clouds.

Ha, ha, awesome character. I would recommend rigging the eyestalks as two separate heads. That way you can get pretty zany with the animation and be able to move them separately. Maybe set up a control neck/head rig that you can constrain the movement of each separate neck/head rig to. That way you can do it both ways. Use a slider for the constraints so you can vary the constraint strength between the separate rigs and single. I did a similar character a few years back, but yours looks better

Looks awesome, New Guy! Thanks for the contribution. You Rock.

First of all, Great looking model ;-). You could also use a flat strip geometry and use a hair decal with transparency map. With a single sided strip, you could easily use cloth dynamics to add some cool realistic motion without taxing your processor too much. Either way, for a pointy beard like that, geometry of some kind is the way to go. I urge you, however, to not be too intimidated of particle hair for other uses, because it is awesome in A:M. Using actual hair can really bog down your system if you do not use it properly, but can yield spectacular results. I love hair. If you want to go this route, following this workflow usually works great for me: 1. set up hair on character and groom and color until desired look is achieved. 2. you can tweak the dynamic settings in a separate proj. file in chor or action to get the desired amount of motion during anim. Copy dynamic settings for use in main project. 3. In main project, set the dynamic settings, then turn off display for hair/particles. This way A:M will ignore the hair and not kill your system during your primary keyframing. 4. When you are ready for final render, turn on the hair and solve the dynamics. Turn hair/particles on for final render.

I run into a similar problem all the time when using porcelain material. A lot of times it's an issue with the normal direction. Also, as steve said, sometimes you just need to select the hook spline and it will snap to what it's supposed to look like. Great modeling B-)

Wow! The Super Mario world is really taking shape. I remember when you first started. You've come a very long way! Mega-Coolness

Hi I use both A:M and Lightwave . The comparison between programs completely depends on what you want to do with the program. If you want to do character animation...hands down...A:M is the way to go! If you want fast render times, easy to set up materials, and fast particle effects....I would say Lightwave3d. If you want easy to set up characters (easy being a relative term comparing the 2 applications) then you need A:M. If you want to animate things using radiosity and caustics, I'd say Lightwave. A:M supports those, but the render times are really slow. If you want to be able to do realistic hair for characters....A:M. If you want to do anything relating to character animation, while Lightwave and cinema 4d CAN do character animation, A:M was DESIGNED FOR character animation. The others were simply retrofitted. Okay, now to tech support. Lightwave tech support sucks. A:M tech support is the best of any software, of any kind, I have used. Just look at the section for 'Latest Info' and see how often new releases come out to fix problems or simply enhance the software. If you find a bug, submit it to the staff. 99.99% of the time you get a reply back within 1/2 hour. A:M has a lot fewer problems and bugs simply because Hash's developers work around the clock to maintain and improve their software, the others outsource it to India, or other places. A:M is not a Polygon based modeler, so don't expect too much industry standard software like Max or Maya to be very happy with the characters you create in A:M. But, using a variety of titles, I can say, most software, industry standard or not, do their best to make their stuff non-compliant with their competition anyway, so stuff built in Maya or Max or Lightwave will only be fully compatible with whichever software created the models. And usually animation files do not export and work in other titles, anyway. So you have to choose a software package and stick with it and use and explore it's features and capabitlities. A:M usually doesn't render as fast, but it is the ONLY software out there that has EVERY tool you need : Modeler, Animator, Texturer, Particles, Realistic Hair with Grooming, and now Fluids is in the works. No other software has all that without needing expensive 3rd party add ons. A:M does lip-sync like no other. You do not need an expensive 3rd party add-on like Mimic (the others need mimic or another) and A:M's works better. And, oh yeah...A:M DOES have a program similar to Body Paint and it's only $99 and just as good. And finally A:M = $300 + $99 per version upgrades (usually needed only every third revision) and $99 for A:M Paint. Check the prices on the others....they can't compete.

I had a dynamic constraint problem with my current character, too. I tried them out for my character's topknot. No matter what I did, the constraint didn't do anything, so I opted to manually key the bones instead. I wonder if this is a v14.0 bug? I rigged a character in v11.1 and 12 that had dynamic constraints for his antennae, and they worked flawlessly in those versions.

once again.......FRIKKIN' COOOOOL, MAN! I'd maybe just set the diffuse color for the wires at this point. Unless your final still is going to be close, I don't think anything fancy is needed. As far as the background, maybe show it so it looks like he walked through the wall (Iron Man shaped hole). Man there are so many possibilities, I don't know where to begin.

Looks like I'm going to have to do something similar to fix my character's butt, too. Great animation, Paul. Do you have a short all planned out for this dapper fellow?

A:M Pain is AWESOME. Works very well and let's you update existing decals with the greatest of ease. Enjoy

So it's just the cloth's collision radius keeping the chains from one model from colliding with the chain geom of the neighboring model? That's more what my question was about. The rest I get. I was playing with it, and using your simcloth method is definitely less expensive than using newton on the chain links. Thanks, bro.

I notice in that movie, the chains bounce off of each other. I would expect the cloth geom would bounce off of each other, but it looks like the objects constrained to the cloth also deflect off of each other. Is there a collision setting for the chain geometry as well? That is a most impressive display of enginuity, there entity! Thanks a whole bunch for showing us how it's done. Quick question: In your cloth grid rig, I see the bones pointing perpendicular to the grid. I see the large bone at top is to keep the cloth from falling to the ground. What is the smaller bone below it for?

It would help to see how the texturing looks if you show multiple renders with different degrees of lighting, but no, it doesn't need to be brighter. The modern trend seems to be using darker more sinister lighting to capture the emotion of the 'Man Behind the Mask' sorta thing. Also makes the glowing eyes look cooler. When you are done with the modeling, I think you should offer it for a price, not just give the model away. You worked way too hard to hand it out freely. Heck, I'd pay for a righteous model like that

I am SO not worthy. I DO have a crit, though (even, though I can't do it even THAT good, yet). Seeing the rendered piece, Even though the texturing is REALLY good and you've paid a LOT of attention to details, It looks like he (especially his red pieces) is made of a laquored leather instead of metal. (Don't hit me) DUUUUDE, If you don't whip up an animation with him when you are done, there might be a lynch mob storming your castle with torches and pitchforks, lol.

AWESOME! That looks like the real-deal, there. You DEFINITLY need to get an animation going No time like the present to learn

Unfortunately, I moved here to IA back in '95. I was born at what was once Pontiac General and I grew up in Clarkston. I would really like to move back some day, but my brother still lives there and he says the work economy (for our line of work, not animation, unfortunately) isn't very good right now. I still consider that area my home, not Iowa. Hail! Greetings to all Michiganders from the Heartland.

WHOA...DID IT SAY 'ART VAN' FURNITURE? I USED TO WORK AT 'ART VAN' IN PONTIAC!!!! Well...Killer job. That'll give them Maya freaks something to think about .

Thanks, Paul . That means a lot coming from you . The total patch count is 4931. I am aware of the posterior, thanks. I created a smartskin to correct most of the bad stuff, but I figure I can correct the rest in muscle-mode when I get the core animating done.

Here is another shot of the same scene with a little added. C & C welcome The going has been slow, but now that I'm not working 70 hour weeks anymore, I can get a little more done (whew) test03B.mov

Great render, Paul. You've done a very good job with the heavyset, flabbiness look of the character. I realize this is just a test of a cycled motion, but it seems the legs are always moving at a constant velocity. It would be more believable if the legs/feet sped up on the downward/landing motions. Are we going to see the hair move, later? Great job, Paul. Love the character!

That's pretty insane Great looking model. What's the patch count on that? I'd be afraid my computer would burn up trying to render an animation with that. That is one of the coolest models I've ever seen!

How's he going to be able to read the gauges with all those levers in the way?

Pretty Cool. My only crit is I think you should add some sort of texture to the floor, so it doesn't look like a solid piece of glass. Other than that, I like it. good camera angle and lighting.