phatso

Poser seems to be in the category of programs that are easy to master, but also limited. I've worked with a number of programs that are easier than A:M but I soon ran into a brick wall when the programs' limitations became evident. I value my time too much to invest it in a program if I'm going to have to abandon it and go to another when my needs expand. I also tried Blender and found the learning curve to be very steep. Too steep; I gave up. I think A:M is the only program that is easy enough to start "paying back" after a modest investment in time and money, and yet keep up with you as your skills improve. You are not likely ever to reach the point where you have to move on to another program to do the complicated things you'll eventually want to do. A:M's biggest benefit is not in the modelling, but in the animation. Once you get the hang of it, you can build models that move right, bend right, stretch and compress right - without a lot of fudging. The plasticity of splines and patches (as opposed to the rigidity of line segments and polygons) mimics the way organic materials like skin actually work. It's worth mentioning that A:M began as a polygon program and switched to splines and patches to improve its ability to animate organic objects.

Theyr'e sticking out cuz he's got beer cans in there. Hey, climbing buildings is hard work! Back many years ago, in the Batman comix, there was a minor plot point about Batman putting dark makeup on his eyelids. That way, in a dark room, if he ducked down behind something up to his nose and squinted, the bad guys wouldn't know he was there but he could watch them. They'd get the creepy feeling someone was watching, and that was a large part of Batman's game. If you look at the old comix, psychic stress was used more often than any of the mechanical gizmos. Kane did a superb job of putting the reader in the bad guys' shoes; I can still remember when the hair stood up. The pink eyelids you see in the movies now are an alteration of the original character.

Hm. I hit the wrong key and the reply got dumped mid-post. If this winds up being screwy, sorry about that. Danf, you can lurk, but don't. Not using this forum is like living next to a library and never going in. Another way to do the sign is to use 7-segment digits. Name each segment in the Project Work Space and turn it on and off by toggling its transparency. You can make the segments glow to make them more realistic. This is a more direct method than RC's, but more laborious as it's 100% manual, keyframe by keyframe. RC's method is more complicated but I think it's a better way if you're up to it.

You are SAVING multiple versions aren't you? So if you screw something up you can go back to a pre-screwed version? I had to learn that the hard way. Caroline, did you move?

spin each component around once, more slowly. Less roughness on the spike, and, um, weren't they steel more often than brass? Jus' cuz Edison was wrong doesn't mean his successors will automatically be wrong. Film demands a projector, screen, knowledgeable operator and dark room. It doesn't easily permit stopping (the film will burn) or backing up, it doesn't have links and hyperlinks. Its cost of duplication, distribution and transportation is fairly high. Editing and updating are physical processes, which then require new duplication, distribution and transportation. It's no surprise that film didn't take over. But we have a different situation now. Capabilities are far greater and costs are far lower. I'm reminded of the history of home video recording, beginning in the mid- 1960s: failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, success. What convinced me that textbooks are obsolete is that I already have the material for my first seminar in 3D, color and animation (thanks to A:M) and when I considered turning this into a book it became obvious that I'd have to give up most of the graphics and all of the motion. As limiting as going back to a typewriter. Maybe we need a separate thread to talk about the future of education. I think teaching methods are on the brink of a radical change, and it's people like you and me that will bring it about.

Basic rule of narrated animation: Do the soundtrack first! You will find that you need to slow down parts of the video by, oh, an order of magnitude - start talking while playing the video and you'll see. You don't have to re-animate or go outside A:M to do that, just stretch out the timeline...you probably knew that. You'll also find, once you write the script, that you'll need more images and animations to flesh things out. Quick suggestion: start with grass where the tracks are going to be, then fade to gravel - to show that the first step is laying down a gravel bed. This will also visually orient the tracks. Once you're done, you will have something that's so superior to just talking about a subject or showing still pictures that you will never want to teach any other way. That's been my experience, anyway. I've been asked to write a textbook and, frankly, I can't see the point any more. I think textbooks are going to be obsolete soon. By the way - I'm told that the home schooling market is huge and just beginning to catch on to the existence of purchase-able educational animations. Just something to think about.

When you have free health care, defrauding it is the easiest thing in the world. People go to the emergency room for a head cold. I know, I've been in plenty of emergency rooms - anybody with an iffy ticker and sixty years under his belt has - and I've had to wait in line for other patients whose "emergency" was that they were loud and drunk. Of course, this isn't free. A trip to the ER in Minneapolis, where my experiences have been, costs over $10,000. If you don't have insurance, you don't go to the ER for something as trivial as a head cold because you can't afford it. If you do have insurance, you don't go because you don't want your premiums to go up. But if you're on welfare, then hell, why not? Head cold, hangnail, stubbed toe, nosebleed, anything; it costs taxpayers $10,000 to treat your hangnail but you don't pay a nickel. So in Minneapolis, drunks routinely (many times a day) get "treated" at the ER at $10,000 a pop. You're probably having trouble believing this situation exists, but it does - or at least it did when I lived there, up until 2 years ago. Does going to the ER for a $10,000 head-cold treatment count as "defrauding" the system? If not, then the system has lost its mind.

My, everybody foaming at the mouth (pro and con) over Palin. Speculation, speculation. We have two months and a week to find out what her thoughts and plans are. Why don't we just shut up and watch for a while?

One interesting thing is that when you get down to the most basic basics - "What do we really want to accomplish?" - most of the differences between liberals and conservatives disappear. Do we want a single mother to be able to feed and clothe her kids? Of course, what kind of monster would be against that? So how do we do it? A liberal would say, tax people who have more than they need and give it to the poor mom. A conservative would say, that involves a host of problems that may not be obvious at first, but eventually hurts the people you're trying to help. The disagreement, in other words, is over tactics. We don't disagree about what we want to accomplish as much as we think we do.

Did somebody say something about nude beaches? Europeans who ask how Americans could be so stupid as to vote for Bush twice don't realize... we didn't. We voted against his opponents. The first election I was old enough to understand was 1960, when the people voted against Nixon. Since then, with no exception I can think of, a Presidential candidate has never won because voters chose him. They've all won because voters rejected the other candidate. It always seems to be a matter of who we hate worse/distrust more/have less confidence in. If "none of the above" had been on the ballot, we wouldn't have had a President for fifty years. And I'm beginning to think that wouldn't be so bad.

If you're experienced at making poly models, you're going to think splines are inferior at first - just cuz of what you're used to. However, there is a fundamental incompatibility between polys and organic forms. About two days after you get to the point where you want to throw A:M in the trash bin, things will click. Three days after that, it will have become so obvious that spline modelling is the right way to do organic forms that you'll never want to work with polys again. To me, making organic forms with polys is like drawing cartoons with a typewriter.

I'm convinced right down to my toenails that Obama wants to change things for the better. I just don't think he has a single clue how.

Somebody said they knew all this, but... Well, I didn't know all this. Every time you do one of these, Largento, I either learn something I didn't know or lock in something I only sorta knew. Like I said, we could use 1,000 of these.

...or better, extend the spline and make the hook somehwere else, in a 4-CP patch. 5-point patches can have smoothing issues anyway, and having a hook in there only makes the situation worse. Generally, when I can't get a 5-point patch to "make," even with the period, it's because I've duplicated a spline - got two right on top of each other - so I'm really selecting 7 CPs with the group tool and of course that won't make a patch. I find the dupe by clicking on each CP in turn and pulling it out of position, then using "undo" to put it back where it should be. Having said that, it's worth noting that one of the few things that will crash A:M is being too fast and loose with the undo. Save before doing the above.

I wondered how you got that combination of regular rendering and crisp outlines. I'm going to have to master that technique. I will be writing a textbook and I intend to put hundreds of A:M illustrations in it. I suppose you'll be wanting a cut of the royalties? (Don't quit your day job, it's a specialty book that may sell only 100 copies.) Now, of course, to really wow the client, you're going to animate the parts rotating and then fitting together, right?

AHA! Now you've got it looking three-dimensional. Next step, smooth out the creases. This is another area where having two views is handy, because you're going to be pushing and pulling control points by small amounts. To push a CP in or out, without moving it sideways along the surface, you need to be viewing it at right angles - but to see the effect of what you're doing, you need to be viewing it head-on or obliquely. Thus the need for two windows. When nothing else works to smooth out a crease, you can twist or resize the bias handles. There is a material called Porcelean which uses rendering tricks to smooth out a surface, but I don't like using it to substitute for manually smoothing the geometry. Porcelean should be used as a finishing touch.

A:M has the reputation of not being good for inorganic models. Bull. I'm at 250 such models and counting.

Of course, there's always a substitute for time: money. I've used the sculpture method myself, but I took a shortcut. I went to a place that outfits stores and bought a stylized mannequin head. They had one where the back had been smashed in, so it was cheap. No prob with that; don't need help modelling the back of a head. Nice, shiny plastic, the markings come right off if I want to change them.

You don't have to make the face narrower, that's not the problem. You have to make it deeper. Your face is still largely a plane facing forward; a real human face, especially a feminine one, is not a plane but a slightly distorted sphere. Look at the two video game characters you posted, specifically the one on the left. Her cheeks are almost 90 degrees sideways. The outer part of her jaw and cheek, farthest from the nose, is halfway back around her head and almost lined up with the ear. Now look at the top view Caroline posted. This is a cross-section slice at the level of the mouth. Note that there is no part of the face that's a plane facing forward. Note also that the head is deeper than it is wide. This is, as I said earlier, a problem faced by most people when they first try to model a human. The fact that you're looking at a flat computer screen makes you think like a 2D painter, not a 3D sculptor, and you have to get rid of that mindset. The first step, if you're not doing it already, is to take Caroline's suggestion. Have two modelling windows on your screen at the same time, which will normally be a front view and side view. (Go to the toolbar and open a new window, then click "tile vertically.") Then you will at least be looking at two 2D views from different angles. You don't have to remake your model to get it to look better, although by the time you're done you will want to do another one from scratch. You need to take the features in the center of the face and pull them forward, and take the features toward the edges and pull them back, until you don't have anything that's a forward-facing plane. By the way, I mentioned having models - and forgot to mention the most obvious one. You should keep a mirror next to your monitor; I do. There's a reason so many artists paint self-portraits, and it isn't vanity. It's because the best, most cooperative and cheapest model is the artist him/herself. Interesting note - at least I think so - People have always wondered what the Mona Lisa's smile is all about. Some have suggested that DaVinci found that his own face was similar to that of the lady he was painting, so when she wasn't sitting for him he was able to work on the painting using a mirror. The smile is supposed to be his way of acknowledging the inside joke.

Please post your flat-bottom nose.

Speaking as one who understands the process, but does not claim to be good at it - if you saw my organic models you'd know... A:M is designed, first and foremost, as a way to model and animate organic forms. It can do inorganic too, but organic is its specialty. Your ability to model something depends more on how well you know its form than on how well you know the software. So, really, the only person who can answer the question is you. Could you make a successful sculpture? If you could, then you don't have to. The fact that you could means you know the form well enough to make it directly in A:M. Not that making a sculpture to draw splines on is a bad idea. I just wonder if it's worth the time.

Howdy Blue! I spoze I don't have to add another endorsement for working thru the book... I'm on my third time thru, and I get better each time. By the way, I am the Bank of Nigeria. If you'll just make out that check...

This may be easier if you approach it with a different mindset: you're not modelling a face, you're modelling the front third of a head. You need to study someone's head from a number of different angles. A lean person's cheeks, for example, are planes that face almostsideways. This implies that you need a human model, which implies money. Here's a free alternative: Google "Hunter Parrish Whistles Weeds Theme". Download it and save it. He turns his head at all different angles, so you can pause the video and study his head. Granted, he's not the person you're trying to model, but when you can model him, you can model anybody.

First tries usually turn out very flat-fronted. People of European descent have very oval-shaped heads, looking down from the top; asian faces are a bit less curved. If the eye areas were regarded as planes, they would be turned to the right and left by about 30 degrees. I find it useful to draw an oval in top view and superimpose it on the model. Next make the model conform to the oval. Then add all the bumps and dips representing cheekbones etc. This isn't a good way to model, but it's a good way to learn to model.

Viscous? But that should be saved for when we're dealing with fluids. If this is made into a movie, I wanna play the evil Dr. Alias.