phatso

That should be pavekmuseum.org - duh.

I've been around for a while but never really said hi. I'm using A:M12, trying to find the money to upgrade but every time I get some scratch I take a hit from somewhere. (Medical, mostly, it comes with being an old fart.) I work at a nonprofit museum where we teach a basic electricity course to 10-13yr olds. A parent suggested that we put it out on video - public schools offer none of these "extraneous" courses any more so parents are looking for other options. But a video in any technical subject has to be updated every couple of years, which would mean hiring new actors (10-13yr olds age fast) and reshooting everything. Aha! - let's use animation, animated characters don't age! And with animation, you can show atoms and chemical reactions and fields and things that you can't see otherwise. So that's how I got into this. Gawd, what a project it's turning out to be, but the psychic rewards make it worthwhile, even if it never goes to completion. BTW, you should check out the museum. Google Pavekumusem.org

Should you put your investment in A:M? Where else! Any of the others that are simple enough to master quickly are limited, and the ones that aren't limited are tough to learn. Also most of them are expensive. Can you finish an episode in a year? Maybe. Cartoon style simplifies things. The real payoff comes after you get over the hump: with A:M's reuseable poses and motions, you'll be flying. What other programs do you need? Probably none. You already have enough 2D capability to bring in texture maps and such, but will you need even that if this is going to be cartoon style? Will it sell? If you have an artistic bent and like to create images, the things you'll achieve will give sufficient psychic rewards whether the product sells or not.

You can get paid to do that? Hmm.... -vern Let's just hope it's not by the pound... The dog pound you mean?

I think you may be getting the concentric spheres thing confused - "A:M, A Complete Guide" features a character called Washer, where an outer sphere is cut in half to form an eyelid. Using an inner sphere for an iris is not nearly as good as a bottomless bowl.

Hear Hear! Hafta say, the zillions of A:M features and procedures aren't nearly as intuitive as its creators think. I wish there were a truly comprehensive training resource - even the 600-page "complete guide" doesn't get it. Granted, good educational materials are unbelievably hard and unbelievably costly to write. And the expensive packages aren't any better. I got stuck in a Realflow tutorial that had so many spelling and syntax errors that it was almost impossible to follow on that basis alone.

http://www.hash.com/freemodels/

This may seem obvious, but one of the things I have found in my (few successful) rigs is that more often than not, bones to NOT belong in the middle of whatever they're controlling. Disney artists were taught that most things have a bony side and a fleshy side, and if you watch their old animation, you see how fully that idea found its way into their work. An obvious example is the human finger, which has a fleshier underside. You may find all of this so obvious as to be insulting, but I bring it up because I have so often seen otherwise competent models where the finger bones go right down the middle, and then the animator uses fan bones, smartskin and weighting to straighten things out. But if you put the bones just under the top of the finger and then simply assign CPs, the finger automatically curls with sufficient naturalness for simple animation. A little work with weighting makes it good enough even for close-ups. Same with other bones - exactly where you put them is more important than which rig you use.

That's just a truncated cone - or a bowl with a hole in the bottom, depending on how you look at it - with the surface properties tweaked to give a hint of metal-like reflectivity. You'd probably add a transparent cornea over it to give lights something to reflect off of. There are lots of eyes in the A:M Extras CD, and you don't even have to get the CD; you can just download the stuff. ('sfree!) The complete project for every model is there - wireframe, rigging and all - so you can select the eyes and study how they're made.

Rusty - if it gets into 13 or 14, can you do something - or maybe it already has this feature: I find that a truly magical trick to make lip sync believable is to go ahead and do the sync, and then to offset the entire audio track a couple of frames so the motion anticipates the sound. It would be loverly if Amplitude, being an automatic function, would also do that automatically.

That one is fall-down, crap your pants funny.

The motions & expressions of the guy running the show are awesome. When I watch these I always think, would I have thought of these particular details? No, I wouldn't have. Keep polishing. It would be cool to do more with the expressions of the little guy when he's in close-up.

That deserves to be stretched out to about 20-30 seconds. 'Twould be awesome.

What higgins said about too many splines. With poly models, adding polys makes things smoother. With splines, whenever I have trouble with wrinkles, I find that REMOVING splines often cures the problem. Also, careful adjustment of bias handles is magic. (...he says, as if he knew what he was talking about...)