phatso

Gentlemen: (trying not to laugh) When you walk into a room, you can tell at a glance what kind of people are in there and what kind of things are going on. Not so with an online forum. So, every once in a while we get newbies who sort of put their foot in it. This forum is a bunch of adults who are quite friendly, but also quite serious about mastering the complicated art of animation. When I say "adults" I am aware that some of our members are as young as twelve years old. The kids on this forum have proved they can be as mature as any of the rest of us while they're here. I'm sure they also flame each other and screw around and fight with their siblings and plot against their teachers and do all the normal kid things, and that's fine as long as they do it elsewhere. The best A:M animators in the world are on this forum, and they give advice to everyone, including newbies, for free. Kind of like having Einstein personally teach you the theory of relativity. People on that level have a right to expect a certain focus on the part of those who come to them for advice. Not that we're a bunch of humor-impaired old prudes. I write original obscene limericks for my friends. I just don't do it here.

If I were doing it, I would assemble it out of primitives from the menu. Just rescale them. Oh yeah, and you'll have to fiddle with the radius edges, or you'll get blobby ends on things. Still much easier than making things from scratch.

You could do heroic battle with the evil POLYGON!

Now that I look more closeley - the logo seems to be translucent. Is that intentional?

...and don't worry if things don't look too good at first. Every time you make some progress, save a version. That way if you get downstream and find you've painted (er, modeled) yourself into a corner you can go back and change things. One of the cool things about spline modeling is that you can keep on changing and improving a particular model as your skills improve, essentially forever, and your previous work doesn't "fight" your new work the way poly modeling often does.

Is the floor a procedural or decal? If procedural, you can dork with it ten dozen ways; if a decal, there are zillions of free bitmaps you can import. The wood does look a little bleached and/or waterlogged; something warmer would be nice. Re: the logo, try changing the surface properties some more. A low reflectivity and sparkly highlights would make it pop. In my experience, when you think you've done the best you can do, you are right at the dividing line between good work and magical work. This isn't the time to quit. The marbles are great and the rest is one step away from great. You're 98% of the way to "wow!"

Howdy Spitts! Fair warning - until you gain mastery, you will frequently be running into what seem like confusing dead-ends. Follow the tutorials mouse-click for mouse-click, pay attention to every word, and remember that whatever answers you can't find there, you can find here. It's a little like learning magic. Maybe we should call this place Hashworts. Or Hogmaster.

I've used sketchup too. You're going to run into the same problem I ran into with simpler, easier-to-learn programs: they're only made to let you do basic things, and when you want to do something more advanced, you hit a wall. Sophisticated animation is out. Photorealism is way out. If I had it to do over again, I would have started with a program where I wouldn't have to discard what I'd learned and start over later on. This discovery, more than spline modeling or reuseable action, is why I'm using A:M now.

You made the head before, and then forgot you did it? Very strange. 'Course, I do that all the time, but I've got an excuse, I'm old enough to be your grampa. What were we talking about? Where's my medications? Why are all the doors locked on the inside? Anyway... it's coming along nicely. Not just a good model technically, but loaded with personality. Too bad the torso hides so much of that nice gut sac work, the juxtaposition of biology and technology makes him more menacing.

Now if I only had time to actually watch all the tutes I'm saving...

Wikkid!

Um...not that you need me to rain on your parade, but that's a warm color. I could almost like the guy. If his personality is supposed to be what I think it is, I'd consider a color as cold as his heart.

Got names for these characters?

Maybe not so much slow as not enough followthru - a real sword would have enough momentum that she'd have to work to stop the swing. In addition to hair problem, jugs peek thru the cloth covering them...not that I'm complaining. Are you using V14? I think it has automatic preroll.

This is better than school. Ya do it whenever ya feel like, there are at least a dozen teachers who are experts, ya choose yer own projects, ya can't flunk, and it's free. So anyway, welcome to the forum. There's so much to A:M that the book barely scratches the surface, but you can get answers to any question here.

Well, I think it's smooth and close to being neat. But then, my drawing skills suck.

That's already somebody I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley. Nasty, nasty dude. If 'twere me, I'd change the name so it isn't quite the same as the word - General Grievoss perhaps. Like JK Rowling did with Delores Umbridge.

What was the name of that demon in Ghostbusters?

Gratitudenesses.

I'm having a (censored) time putting eyelashes on a model. He's supposed to be somewhere between anime and cartoon, and everything I try looks stupid. (Little brother: there's a reason everything you try looks stupid. Me: shut up, little brother.) I haven't run across any eyelash tutes, does anybody else know of some?

A stew of our gang, peanuts, fat albert etc? Sounds fun. I can write but I need a starting point. If you wake up in the middle of the night yelling, "I just dreamed the story, get me a pen and paper!" - lemme know. Useless trivia: that's how "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was written. The lady woke up in the middle of the night with the first verse fully formed.

Your version of A:M is a couple of versions old, so I assume it's used. Did you get the book with it? ("The Art Of Animation:Master," it'll have the same witch on the cover) If you got the book, there's a serial number stamped on the first page. If you didn't get the book, you will need to contact Hash and see what they say. Since yr new to this, I should tell you that the book barely skims the surface of what A:M can do. The real "book" is here in the forum, where you can find a zillion tutorials and get help from wizard-level animators. For free, even.

A'kid - what Mage is getting at is, the difference between an impressive model (like yours) and a knock-your-socks-off one is in how you detail the surface and how you light it. You already have what looks like a good computer generated model. What you want now is to make it so real it seems you could reach into the screen and touch it. 1. Decals, when you can use them, are magic. When you can't, consider creating (or importing) a procedural (mathematically generated) material. Start by taking the ones in the library and drag-dropping them onto the model. Then look in this forum for links to 3rd-party materials and try those. Finally, create your own. It would be interesting to see the marble-material exercise in TAoA:M applied to your model. (For future reference, keep in mind that procedural materials take much longer to render than decals.) 2. Lights are magic. People who tend to focus on the model and forget about how it's lit are passing up a very powerful tool. As the French impressionists would have said, it's almost more about the lighting than the model. Try playing with the lights, you'll see what we're talking about. You mentioned patch count. A:M does not require nearly as dense a mesh as polygon programs. You might want to make a copy of your model and experiment with eliminating splines to see how far you can go before you start damaging it - I think you'll be surprised. While an obsession about low patch count can become a vice - in particular, it can hamstring you when it comes to animating - in general, go light on the mesh.

It just screams, "Write a story!"

it would be interesting to see a shaded wireframe view of that.