phatso

I've accidentally deleted exercises and found that to be a good thing. The second time is faster, and I don't have to figure out everything as I go along. The third time it's a slam dunk, and 1/10th the time it first took. A:M does indeed have addictive qualities, and they show up at slam dunk time. Suddenly you're like God.

That may not be completely clear - you need to insert the A:M disc EVERY TIME. And it doesn't load the entire contents of the disc into your computer (tutorials, some libraries I think), so it's best to just leave the disc in while you're using A:M. Software piracy has become so rampant that this is necessary to protect A:M. It also has a benefit for the user, in that the software can't become corrupted. If a glitch delvelops, simply restarting almost always fixes the problem. By the time you read this, you will have become thoroughly confused. Happens to everybody. Spend some time with the Project Work Space. Note that things tend to appear twice. At the top of the PWS are the things you're working with - lights, cameras, actors etc - as they are in themselves. At the bottom are (usually) the same things as they function in a choreography. This will become clearer as you work. Clicking on these items in the PWS is the same as selecting them in the modelling/action/choreography window. Follow The Art Of Animation:Master exercises, every mouse click. You have to walk before you run, and it may seem like you're crawling before you walk, but you'll have real animations faster than you would have in any other program.

yeh. Now the first place my eye goes is the face. Especially since it's a bit spotlighted.

When Russian troops invaded Germany at the end of WWII, they unscrewed light bulbs and took them home. Many had never seen them before. Didn't realize you need electricity to run them - Votzk Eleioktrykhytiy? Yeh, it would have been nice if the lamp had lit up - two minutes' work in A:M. The other thing I would have done, which you might consider doing if you're going to be making lots of ads, is to make an actual sound-narration booth. All it has to be is a GOOD mike (chinese ones are available for under $100) and a chair with blankets hung around it to kill room ambience. That's what I've got. And if you can find a guy with a voice dripping with testosterone, so much the better. Those two things - making the lamp glow and tweaking the soundtrack - would have put this in the Madison Avenue ad agency league. Which brings up a point - do you still own some rights to this ad? You might make the suggested changes and shop it around. There are power companies everywhere that would like people to use fluorescents.

(slap forehead) Why didn't I think of that? Woulda saved me an immense amount of work. Atomike - not only does that model have personality, I happen to know that guy!

...and when you run into a brick wall (everybody does, again and again), avoid the temptation to say to hell with it all. There's always an answer, and this forum is where you find it.

I've always thought TV commercials and Animation:Master are the marriage that should be made in Heaven, but hasn't been yet. Nobody seems to take A:M seriously for feature films, but for advertising it's a natural. Cheap, efficient, lots of re-useable stuff, capable of complex work if you want it and fast work if you don't. There's also precedent (Tak for example) so we know it can be done. Why small-scale local ad work is not routinely done in A:M is beyond me. In other words, J2K, go for it!

Yeah, the tops of the small droplets are flat. Blood isn't like that (I know, I'm diabetic and I draw it three times a day); it's thick and you have to get a pretty big blob before you have a flat surface. You're close, though. It's good enough to make me recoil. Like Monet (I think) who said when he was painting a young woman he knew it was right when he got the urge to pinch her cheek.

Okay, a criticism (from someone who could not, myself, equal your work)... the pants and trike are so colorful and irridescent that they draw the eye. It is almost impossible to keep one's concentration on the character's face. You're probably familiar with "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. Though it has a very strong, eerie, supernatural effect, Poe claimed to have achieved this effect through rigidly logical, methodical craft. He wrote the climactic verse first ("Prophet," said I, Thing of evil!...") and then said that if any other verse turned out to be stronger, he would have deliberately weakened it. And thus with a model. Gotta decide what part should draw the eye. I bet you wouldn't say it's the pants and trike. The're nice, but ya gotta subdue them.

You get so much personality into those models! (Okay, goblinality in one case.) I don't think I will ever be able to do that.

And by the way, it looks like you ARE here for now.

Hmm. I don't. Maybe it's a Mac thing.

(conflagrate) Actually I'da done it if you'd had more time...

So, YP, if I understand you the concept of "edge loop" in a polygon program is just a mental construct - you mentally group the segments that abut a hole, and call them a loop. A fudge, in other words, like polygon modelling itself.

When you say hooks don't work, do you mean they just don't function? If that's the case, open a simple primitive from the library and practice. If necessary, hunt down the old tutes on this forum. If you mean they crease, yes they often do. Only 4-point patches are essentially crease-free, because the math that defines them is unambiguous. 3 and 5-pointers and hooks can crease. Rules of thumb: 1. Put hooks only across almost-flat patches if possible. The more bent-up a patch is, the more likely the hook will crease. If necessary, make the hook into a spline and continue it on into a flatter patch, and then make the hook there. 2. Try to move problem areas (there are some with any model) to where they will be hidden. For example, don't use a hook (or a 3-pointer) in the middle of a model's forehead. Continue the spline up into the model's scalp and put the hook there, where it will be hidden by hair. 3. Limited tweaking of bias handles can often work magic. Don't tweak them too far or they can backfire when you animate. 4. Keep in mind that there are times when you will want a crease (edge of eyes, nose) and 3-pointers and hooks can be handy there. I just did a model whose scalp makes him look like he was in a car accident. Don't care, hair will cover it. p.s. dang you, it took me a year to get as good as your first try.

Also, when you get to animating, you will find bias handles indispensable for tweaking motions.

(Oops, wrote a long reply to a question you didn't really ask... I'll just leave now...)

Come on, guys, you're being unkind. ...On the other hand, the middle one looks exactly like one of my jr. high school teachers. Narrow face, teeth, big specs, little nose, hair up in a bun. John, where'd you go to jr. high school?

Got the same problem. I'm just going to suck it up and live with the slow rendering. There's another way, not nearly as good but hugely faster: in photoshop or something, paint a radial hair map with an alpha channel. Import as a decal on a mesh, deform the mesh around the model's head. You wind up with a helmet that's transparent wherever there isn't hair. You can make it wiggle, blow in the wind (a bit) and so on. Just don't expect to get the same results as real hair. But for the stylization of anime, it may work.

Okay, I know the scrawny arms are deliberate. Part of the reason the model has so much character. But when it comes to animation, are they going to be able to do what you want? Not that I'd know anything about starting to animate and finding out I needed to redesign the character. Oh no, not me...

Just a guess - not every motion spline shows up in the timeline; it would be too crowded to use. If you crack open each of the items in the animation part (bottom) of the workspace (click the triangle) you will see transforms. Click on those and look at the timeline to see if you've set keyframes you didn't intend to set. Remember, every time you move anytihing - even if you move it back - a keyframe is generated if there wasn't one already. This means you have to be mindful every second of where the timeline cursor is.

Like I said, this drives everybody nuts at first. And I learned on other programs, so it isn't just an A:M thing.

I can see why this wouldn't look like something to play with before you added the inflatable stuff. Do you think these will be showing up in the USA? Now you need to suggest that you could design a whole series of inflatable stuff with different themes. You know kids quickly get bored with anything and are always looking for something new.

More on "ask yourself what you're using this for"... for buildings that aren't close up or building fronts that aren't seen in perspective, if you're not going to actually open windows and doors - just make a box and put a decal on it. There are lots of places you can download photos of building fronts. Suppose you've got six houses on a street and you want a character to open the door to one of them and walk in. There's no reason to model the other five closely, unless you're doing photorealistic. Taking 30 seconds to ask yourself, "Do I really need to do this?" is always worthwhile.

got a story line in mind?