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I second that: I've watched Victor's spline tutes several times and I'm going to be watching them again. But maybe a quickie answer will be useful. Everybody has problems with this at first. Maybe you know the following, in which case I hope you're not insulted, but if you don't need these hints there are other new users who will find them useful. 1. The most common mistake is to go into the animation a ways, move the model, and set a keyframe - forgetting to set a start keyframe, or intermediate keyframes if you want the model to be stationary until some point. If you don't want action to start until a certain point, you have to manually establish stillness at that point. Otherwise the computer will make "inbetweens" starting from a point where you don't want them to start. 2. Splines, unlike point-to-point lines, have anticipation that causes "floating." You can counter this by peaking the points where motion changes. Better is to right-click and select the "zero slope" option so you get smoother transitions. For really critical motion control, fiddle with the bias handles. Hope that is of value to somebody. But even if it solves the problem, study Victor's tutes.

If you use it commercially or publish widely, you'd be violating copyright. But just posting it in the image contest... probably no problem if you give credit.

...In general, Ivan, you'll find that even as a beginner it's worth spending time to memorize keyboard shortcuts. Almost everything in A:M has a shortcut. When you get in the habit of having one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse, things go much faster. I'm even building myself a custom keyboard so all the most-used shortcuts are right under my hand, and all with labels so I don't have to remember that "G" stands for Group etc. You probably won't want to go that far, but do get in the habit of using the keyboard.

It doesn't work for me. Prolly cuz I clean out the cookies a lot. And if you want to know the kinds of sites I'm visiting that make me want to clean out cookies...not gonna tell you.

Why is that a dumb idea? I can imagine any number of sci-fi scenarios where that would be appropriate.

Hope you don't mind if I respond to those complaints too... A:M can't have multiple windows? I model in 2 windows as a matter of course. A:M isn't crashproof? Whose program is? Many thousands of people use A:M all day long with no problems. That has to mean - has to mean - that the people who do have problems must have something wrong (or inadequate) in their computers. 3D animation is computation-intensive, and you have to have reasonable hardware. (Mine is a 2-year old cheapo Compaq with Athalon. Works fine.) A:M is primitive? I don't think anyone alive has come anywhere near exhausting its possibilities, and if that's true, it can't be called primitive. What it can be called is easy to get started with. If that's "primitive," it' a virtue. Bad tech service? Maybe. Perhaps we should take a vote: would we prefer that A:M become a $3,000 program with good tech service? I for one would find such a program useless, because I can't afford $3,000 for it. Bear in mind that if you are willing to do a little digging, you can find the answer to almost any question on the forum. Which brings us to the next "complaint:" The forum is filled with other users? Those "other users" include many of the people who developed A:M and plugins for it, and also the most skilled and experienced A:M modellers and animators on the planet. Aren't these the very people you'd most like to turn to for guidance? And they give you the benefit of their knowledge for free. Maya users should weep with envy. Rendering is slow? Even if that's true, rendering happens while you're doing other things. The time that's expensive is not the computer's time but your time, the time you spend modelling and animating. A:M has a very efficient workflow for those who bother to master it. This forum is censored? True. For those who want to kvetch, there are other forums. This one exists for the benefit of those who want answers to questions, who want to improve their work, who want to speed up their mastery of A:M, those who, in other words, take a serious, professional approach to learning and doing this animation thing (whether or not they are in fact professionals or amateurs). I personally could find reasons to kvetch all day long, but when I'm sitting in a cyber-room with a dozen people who are the equivalent of animation PHDs and who are willing to tutor me for free, I'm not going to waste their time or mine kvetching. The manual is not good? What it is not is complete. A:M has so many capabilities that the manual only scratches the surface. If you pay extra for tutorials and textbooks, you still don't get it all. Every day I run into some arcane thing in the forum that I would never have stumbled across otherwise. So this truly is a reasonable complaint. But how to solve it? Good, thorough, well-produced instructional material is extremely expensive - I know, I make it for a living. So, yes, this could be done better, but it would make A:M cost $3,000. An improvement I can't afford - an improvement that would take an affordable program and put it out of my reach - is no improvement in practical terms. (The kind of training I speak of is available for other programs. It's called "two year college" and it costs tens of thousands of bucks.) Bottom line: just try it. If you don't like it in 30 days, return it and get your money back. For my own use, I'd list A:M's advantages thusly: 1. It's cheap. 2. It uses splines and patches, which are to polygons as 3D is to 2D. Modelling and animation, especially of organic objects, goes a lot faster once you master the technique, and you aren't constantly banging up against the problem of trying to make roses out of shards of broken glass. 3. It has re-useable motion, which can be applied to more than one model in more than one situation and speeds up work a lot. 4. It has pretty good lipsync that's simple to use. 5. It has cartoon render. 6 Whatever you can't find in the manual that comes with A:M, you can find on the forum. 7. Extremely important, and not stressed nearly enough by Hash - it is both a beginner's program and a master's program. Why is this important? Because, if your time is worth anything, the main cost of any program is the value of the time you spend mastering it. There's no way around that. But the last thing you want to do is go thru the learning curve multiple times as you outgrow one program after another. A:M allows the beginner to make simple animations literally minutes after opening the box, and also has particle systems, hair, cloth, Newton dynamics and other powerful features for the professional to work with. There are also powerful 3rd party plug-ins. You can start with it and stick with it. For a measly $300.

At the risk of throwing a wrench into the discussion, there is another method. (Nice thing about A:M, there are usually at least 3 ways of doing anything. Very flexible.) I think the method described above is usually best, but here's another trick for your bag. Which one you want to use depends to some extent on whether you're making an organic or inorganic model. If you draw a continuous circular spline loop, you won't get a patch. Patches only form when 3, 4 or (with tool) 5 splines cross at control points. You can draw a loop with, say, 4 cps inside something and then attach its control points to the mesh with regular splines. The area inside the loop will be a hole. The advantage of this method is that it's real, not a rendering trick, which means you can see how it's going to come out when you're modelling. The disadvantage is that it's a bit clumsy and hard to make accurate shapes, which all but rules it out for objects that would be machine-made. For holes in organic models, tho, it is perhaps the preferred method. I said "circular spline loop" but, of course, if you peak the cp's you can get a square, rectangle, trapezoid...

You keep taking those kinds of drugs at work, yer gonna get canned!

You don't have to know what you're doing to post advice; I'm the poster child for that. Coupla things: 1. The atmosphere doesn't do much for the model. Real planets' atmospheres' dimensions are to their planets as an eggshell is to an egg. Way thin. Ditch the atmosphere and maybe add just a little bit of glow around the planet. 2. Lighting is extremely important. If you have the planet lit at an angle by some kind of sun, the transition from light to dark (or day to night, if you want to think of it that way) on the planet is very sharp. (No air in space so no scattering.) You can play with this by adjusting the falloff control.

'Specially love the dog. It has personality. Dog-o'-nality?

thanks ken, those are easier ways than what I had in mind. by stereo I mean red/blue glasses. when model making there are times when I have a real problem visualizing the geometry, especially in wireframe.

Before I suggest adding these features, I better poll the forum to see if A:M already has them. There are so many I haven't stumbled across yet... 1. One of those "other" programs (maybe more than one) has what would, in A:M, be two-sided splines, with different colors, so in wireframe you can tell which side you're viewing a spline from. Makes it easier to figure out what you're doing. 2. Is there a way to set shaded wireframe so the patches are translucent? One can adjust the surface properties, but a preset for convenience in modelling would be handy. 3. Along the same lines: 2-color patches. Again, I know this can be done, but as a preset for convenience in modelling... 4. Is there a way to do stereo in the modelling window? I would use it 100% of the time if I had it.

So now I go and actually try out porcelean, and boy, that one is magic! (insert "whee!" emoticon) ...seems to me porcelain gives you a good way to find flipped normals, even if you don't intend to keep it.

Also, if the patch is very convex, it will cover an inward-pointing normal - sometimes even if the normal is pointing outward. To be sure you're seeing all the normals, put it in wireframe. Then, to avoid confusion, group-select the surfaces toward you and hide the rest. Makes me sound like I know what I'm doing, doesn't it? I learned this YESTERDAY.

Where do I find the porcelain material? I've looked. (I'm using V13 at the moment)

As a certified dirty old man, I can tell you that my comments would NOT be appreciated. Except to say, nice job modelling. I wish I could do as well.

They have a syllabus? That would be interesting for everybody to look at. (When I'm on the forum it says I'm a master but when I'm modeling I feel like a newbie.)

Chest bounce: wrong phrase. Struggling little shrug? Anyway, you get the idea, a lot of people shift the weight once they get it shoulder high so they can raise it higher. The first part of the animation is really good, it gets the whole weight and balance thing across. When it's right, you just know it.

Decal if you can, material if you have to. Only a render test will tell you for sure.

Durn good until he gets it up off his chest. Hands way too high on the ball, and for part of it the left middle finger disappears. Try this. When it's up on his chest, have him do a little chest bounce to momentarily take the weight off his hands, and have the hands slip down under it further. Then when he gets it up in the air, after a moment have him stagger around and lose the balance.

Which leads to the impatient animator's golden rule: if an image (applied as a decal) will give passable results, don't even think of doing a material. Just for future reference.

You can get a strong suggestion of sunlight by having one light yellow light overhead and all other lighting very light blue. Also experiment with light yellow specular reflections off hard surfaces (eyes, wing covers).

A stopwatch (or firm sense of how long a second is) is a great tool. Act it out and note where the keyframes need to be. (There's a tool here somewhere for keeping track of timing, which I intend to download when I get to seriously animating my project.) Specific hints: hmm... How bout having the rear thom react to the poke faster and more violently, like he'd been punched in the stomach. And maybe have him shake his fists longer, until that moment, instead of standing there and waiting for the next indignity.

Stewie - welcome home. Major problems making a scale work right? Post the project here, and the family will give you all the advice you could need to solve the problem. And your mom says to eat your vegetables.

Yup, the resemblance to your work is pretty clear...