detbear

To keep from over complicating your animation and Choreography, just render each frame slightly larger. Then do your camera jitter in a post program like After Effects. You can take real camera footage and key the motion of it in the post AP..... Then just key your animated frames to that footage and it will move with the match move data. This may sound complexed, but it can actually be done fairly easily in just a few steps. There are some good resources for doing that out there. Just a suggestion.

What's the latest on this potential feature. Is it working out? I hope so. If so, will it operate like the snap to surface? Wonder if there would be a way to automate the process where within a certain distance, all the cp's of one model would snap to the cp's of another model. That way, if yopu had the cp's close, they would automatically cling to the nearest one. Would be cool. Dreaming a bit here Cheers, William

Hey everyone. Is there an A:M version of the Star Wars X-Wing Fighter out there anywhere? William

Hey, Nancy-- Yeah..Bishop is pretty dated. Face rigs that work well are hard to find. That's one of the hurdles. It's too difficult for me to rig characters faces. Actually I did try a different character after the fact, but the animation didn't transfer well enough. So I would have had to do everything over again. I may still investigate that, but the options are limited. Any suggestions on that would be awesome. I thought about using Larry, but he just didn't seem to fit. Plus I'd have to take him out of the armor again and back into his original. Maybe I could put his head on the current body. But I'm not sure how that would look. Rob----Icicles might be cool. I have a bunch of options on the table. I may animate something in A:M and render the motion out to be used as an alpha channel in AE. Or match a Particle illusion beam in with so icyyy parts. Not using color will limit it some, but I think it will be O.K. if I stick with the B&W. Particle Illusion has some really neat freeze ray blasts with snow and dust particles, but the sound effects in the clip are more electronic than snow blast like. There will also be a glow under Ming's platform for the lift source. And also....Flash will be frozen at the end. So I might make an ice shell for him to be encased in.

I'm trying to decide the best way to make the ray gun blasts. Especially Mings freeze ray. My idea is to have a "circle" wave style beam. The other blasts by the robot arms will be a typical blaster beam.

Hey RC, Thanks man.... Yes!! The idea is to have a holographic earth rotating and then it "Blips" out.

OK.... so I've been experimenting with a title page and color scheme. This is a Sepia version with little color. The file was really large so I had to make the resolution really LOW to make it manageable. Ming_Movie_All_Sepia_low_res.mov Cheers, William

Hey XTAZ, I graduated with Fernanda Velosa.....I'm pretty sure she is from Brazil too. She has since gone on to animate at a few of the big studios including PIXAR. You should check her animations out. Part of her short film was featured in the 2007 Animation Mentor Reel. Here's the link: Cheers, William D.

Hey XTAZ, You are correct. I'm using the Old A:M Version of Bishop. Has the TSM2 body rig and a specialized face set up. I am an Animation Mentor Graduate with their very first graduating class back in 2006. It was a great experience. The other "Ming" character is my own character developed for my film Adventures with Boomer. That model was done by me and rigged by Rob Cat. Although not used in this case, I contracted Nancy to texture the "Duke" Version. She did an Awesome job of course. But for this Ming version I'm not using those textures. Cheers, William

Hey Big TaZ!! Yes...In A:M. It's such awesome animation software. I did edit and composite the rendered clips in After Effects Though. "You Pitiful Fool!!" is definately a Ming--Ish quote. I'm trying to decide whether to keep it true the 1980 vibrant colors or wade out into B&W. I'm leaning towards a retro 70's colorscheme. But I have to tweek the animations. The Line......"This Ming is a Psycho!!!" Makes me laugh in that context everytime. I've been playing around with the FAO plugin and the Mat Cap shader on a different project and I'm finding that those two work really well together. I hope to add those two elements into this short as well.

Hey Rob, Thanks Big Guy!!.... Yes...That's "Duke".... He was the closest character I have to fit the "Ming" look.

Hey Everyone, This is one of several personal shorts I've been working on. For this one, I edited different parts of the 1980 Flash Gordon Classic and came up with a Spoofy Screen Play. This is a WIP.....thus still rough and no back drops as of yet. Ming_Movie_All.mov

Way to go man. Such good quality and really nice artistic feel. And of course funny too. :)

Hey Everyone, Which versions of A:M can render a shaded wireframe? V17 always gives an error message.

This happens to me frequently and it is frustrating. But I normally work through it. I don't really see any pattern. It just happens now and again. Similarly the screen freezes at times when zooming in and out. In that case you have to click in the window to get the actual view to reset. Of course if you had something selected it is deselected.

Here's the intro to the Flash Gordon Saturday morning series.

There's another Filmation Classic that still stands out to me as a major influence on me both as a kid and as an artist. That is their mostly forgotten FLASH GORDON film that was converted into a saturday morning mini serial. It was incredible and a real shame that it is mostly forgotten now. I think you can still find it on you tube.

I spoke with my Autodesk representative(Reseller) and told her that freelancers just can't afford the Version upgrades, sidegrades, and downgrades. The freelance jobs often don't pay enough to justify the over priced upgrades/ downgrades. As is often the case, a company developes a game, movie, project, etc. in a particular version, and the freelance people are required to have that version. This is normally way too costly. So in my last conversation with my reseller rep, they informed me that Autodesk is going to begin offering rental/ type... short term usage of software. Hopefully that too will not be way over priced.

That Sounds amazing. Thank you for putting time in this RC. And please tell Steffen that I for one am very greatful for his work on that. I know how much he's probably having to do already. My deepest thank you(s) William

So is there any chance that a snap to cp might be possible in correlation to the S2S tool?

Will's note here concerning Z-Brushes retopology tool is that it exports quads. The exciting thing about that is that a low spline version can be exported into Hash. AND THEN a higher mesh within Z-Brush can be exported as a texture map and placed onto the A:M import seemlessly. The resulting combination is a very detailed render out of A:M. PLUS....if you export an animation out of hash, the textures and animation can be used externally also. MY point with the moving splines has to do with morph targets and importing cp positions as well in more than one position. Which is really off topic. So I should have placed that in the other more relevant thread. My Apologies.

That is a great feature for lowering spline counts in A:M. Too bad that A:M has no way of matching moving splines from other apps in that fashion.

:) :)

Will... You are correct about utilizing that. And A:M weights/ smartskins are very good. But that's not what I'm trying to get. What we are trying to accomplish more efficiently is importing models and their morph targets exactly from other apps that already have the weighting worked out. In this case models of the morphs themselves have to be matched. We're not trying to re-weight cp's to bones again inside of Hash, but rather inject the morphs already built externally. Cheers, William D.

No. Not if the cp's themselves could be relocated easily. However, I did discover in this process a really neat use for assigning a bone to a single cp group. Via the "group constraint".. If the same snap to cp process could be done in a smartskin...then you could also transfer joint morphs