phatso

If it's not unreasonable to assume you'll be starting the class in the fall - get A:M and spend the summer animating. There are basic mistakes everybody makes. (Like establishing a keyframe at some point in the animation, without first establishing a previous keyframe so the program knows when to start moving from one position to the next. It's 100 times easier to do in the right order, than to fix afterwards.) Then, when students trip over the same obstacles, you'll know what to tell them. DON'T wait to start until your students are starting. You'll be at sea. It cannot be said too many times: go thru the exercises in the book, The Art of Animation Master. I've been thru them three times and one of these days I'm going to find time to make a fourth pass. As you know, middle school students need rewards at every step to stay motivated. The problem with simpler programs is that they are limited, which will quickly lead to boredom. Once students have mastered a simple program, they will have to abandon it and start all over with a more capable one. A:M, on the other hand, is like a tricycle that gradually morphs into a bike with training wheels, then a bike without training wheels, then a car, then an airplane, then a jet, then a rocket. Students can start simple and take it a very long way.

Lathe concentric circles with maybe 16 segments, then delete part of the circle. Hold down shift and attach straight splines.

When you get around to it - The main thing I see is that the velocity of the particles doesn't vary enough. They should move out very rapidly just after the explosion, then slow to a gradually expanding cloud, then stop expanding and fall with gravity for a while before they flame out. If you ever see somebody throw something out a car window at 60mph, that will give you the velocity curve.

When I want to control hair growth from a particular patch, I create another patch and place it just beneath the original patch, so it's invisible, or just above, if I want color, and then have that be the hair emitter. This separate hair patch can be any color, any shape, any orientation, and I can change it at will without changing the eyelid geometry, so I have complete control. It can be assigned to the same bone as the eyelid patch next to it, so it will move properly when the eyelid moves.

Do you really want to model 200+ strings? (3 per note for most of the keys) If it were me, I'd put in a plane and apply a picture of the strings as a decal. The decal would need to have alpha, so you could see the hammers below. There is no need to animate them; no matter how hard you hit them they don't move to a degree you can see, except way close up. At the very least, I hope you'll use a decal on the copper-wound bass strings, instead of modeling coils. (shudder)

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." (Casablanca) Better warn you, you WILL run into snags and get confused. Don't let it throw you, there are people here who can answer any question, years of archives to search, and video tutorials by the dozen. Microsoft's online help should be so good.

Will he have a partner named Dr. Auf? (Okay, maybe only Fuchur will get that one.)

I don't know much about export-import, since I work only in A:M, cuz I find it easy just to do everything in A:M. I did a multi-element Yagi a while back, here are a few hints for doing models of machine-made parts in A:M. 1. A:M works only with splines, which is great for organic but can drive you nuts when you need sharp corners. In the model window, in the toolbar, note the ^ button. If you select some control points and hit that button, it turns them all into square corners. 2. Don't model parts to scale to start with. It's really easy to scale up or down, just select the object and pull on the corner of the bounding box. Also, you can change proportions by selecting the object and hitting S, then pulling or pushing on the colored squares on the sides of the box. 3. Name every part. You can name things as many ways as you want: Reflector, Beam, Whole Antenna. Groups are not mutually exclusive. 4. If you are going to have a lot of identical elements, make one and set its surface properties. Then when you duplicate, each copy will retain those properties and you won't have to go thru and set each object. For example, the elements of a Yagi are all tubes of the same diameter but different lengths. Make one, surface it, make copies, then group each one and hit S so you can independently adjust the length without changing the diameter. 5. For something people are going to get a good look at, realism is much improved if you bevel. Rather than doing it yourself, go into the library and find the primitive models. Bring one into your model window and scale it. If the bevels are too broad, I would suggest not rescaling them, because that will reset the spline curve values and the sides of the object will bow out or in. Rather, leave the bevels as they are, select the sides and rescale them until you have the right proportions, then scale the whole thing up or down to the dimensions you want. 6. For small or distant parts, where you can get away without bevels, for a cylindrical object just lathe a tube with closed ends. In tools>modelling, set lathe to 4 or 6 sections; no need for any more. My method is to make a very broad "C" shape, hit ^ to square the corners, then lathe. This way the ends will be square but the cylinder will be round. If you wait until after you've lathed, hitting ^ will point all the corners and you'll have a tube with flat sides. 7. Another way to make tubes, or long objects with any cross-section, is to use the Extruder plugin. You create a small closed shape centered on the model window's X-Y origin. Name this shape. Then, off to one side, make a spline in the lengthwise shape of the object. (For a beam or wire this would just be a line.) Select that shape and right-click into the Extruder window; enter the small object's name in the prompt and extrude. You'll probably have to undo and change settings several times at first.

This is excellent! Aside from the fact that it's maybe a little repetitious (and maybe a little repetition isn't bad), it's exactly what I've always thought instructional videos should be...above all, absolutely clear. I started with A:M myself to do this kind of thing. As a diehard admirer of the late Mr. Wizard, Don Herbert, I've always thought a demo is worth a thousand pictures. This is where education is going. I don't think traditional classroom-based, schedule-based instruction has ten years left in it, probably not five. Textbooks are essentially obsolete. Linear, "start at the beginning and slog thru it" teaching is obsolete. Blackboards and even whiteboards, to some extent, are obsolete. Modular, self-contained, random-accessable videos are the future... Oh geez, I got started on a rant, didn't I. Sorry.

David Bowie, huh? I was going to say Michael Jackson.

Which brings up another topic - something I've never learned to do well - you can hide whole groups of things in the PWS when you don't need to deal with them. In the case of fan bones and many other things, you set them up once, and from then on they work automatically. So you can hide them and not have them cluttering up your work. Tute, anybody?

Actually, he looks neurotic. Like the robot in "hitchhiker's guide...". Which is fun in its own way.

2 cents (pence?) worth: Tighten it up by about 30% until the ball falls, leave the timing intact after that. Morph looks like he's moving in slo mo.

Why wouldn't it work to just create a bone somewhere, and constrain the ball and hand to it (with offset)? maybe I'm just confused about IK and so on, but that's what I do.

That's a pretty jive-ey walk. Prolly not what you were after, but I often get things I wasn't after, and they turn out useful so I save them. If you were to put a big smile on the guy's face and have him walking up to a hot woman, it would be perfect. I 'specially like the secondary motion of the hands.

Vod you mean doesn't work? Works fine. Funny. You should go farther with this. Make it 11 seconds long.

Also, depending on the story you're trying to tell, you may want the barn to lean a bit, and make the roof sag. My barn does.

I doubt if the tank's tower would have been splayed that much, if at all. Splay is for when the primary force to be resisted is wind. When the primary force is weight, supports are vertical or slightly splayed. Other than that, these models "ring true." My grandparents had a windmill on their farm on the Canadian prairie, and your model could pass as a photograph of it (other than surfaces, but you'll get those).

Those are cool, spleen, did you make them?

I was gonna say, if you do a material for the windmill plus all those leaves and grass, by the time you get a sequence rendered you'll be old enough to go and celebrate at a bar. Use decals, for gossakes. More info than you want, probably: if this is an old U.S. farm, the windmill would have been used to pump water. There was either a crank at the top and a straight pipe down the middle of the tower, which went up and down to pump water - or a gearbox and a turning pipe to accomplish the same thing a different way. Visually the same I guess. In Canada, electricity didn't come to the prairie until the early 1960s. Windmills had generators attached, and buildings had large batteries in the basement. Entire farms were wired with 32V DC lights and appliances. So no central pipe. There, aren't you sorry you asked? A water tower with maybe a wooden tank and shallow conical roof would be appropriate. Since all the farmer needed was flow, not pressure, the tower would be short, maybe 10 feet at the base of the tank, and squat. Shack? Sure. Every old farm has at least one. (Mine has two.) Also a barn, a shed with sliding doors (big enough to get horse and carriage in and out, mine is 20'x40') and granary. The granary would have slats with 1" spaces between, so moisture wouldn't collect and rot the corn. Rectangular, maybe 6' x 8'. If the farm wasn't extremely old, a concrete silo. Oh - most necessary of all: don't forget the outhouse!

When this problem shows up with porcelain, it most often means there are flipped normals. I routinely apply porcelain as a test, even when I don't plan to use it, cuz it shows flipped normals so clearly.

Try stretching out the timeline beginning where the animal hits the ball - squetch the ball and make it take just a little longer to leave the frame.

The guy kinda looks like he's grinning. He's not supposed to, right?

It would be funny of the Pong "ball" were replaced by a real, up to date, 3D, well lit and shaded ball. You'd get props for your fine sense of irony.

The left foot slides a bit too far out to be believable. If that happened in real life, the guy would collapse. I like the way you took the time to do the little preparatory motions. They really get the point across that this takes extreme effort by the lifter.