phatso

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.

Hmm. "4" to constrain in the direction of a roll handle works for me. "5" doesn't. Am I doing something wrong?

Is my monitor set too dark or yours too light? Everything is way dark, no detail.

You'll find that TAoA:M does not begin with modelling, which is a good thing. If you had to learn to model before you could do anything useful (as with most programs) you'd be working for years before you got any payback. TAoA:M starts you out with animating pre-built models within the first half hour. You can learn to model while you're also learning to animate. Cuts lots of time off the learning curve. You want to go thru those TAoA:M exercises. You do, you do, you do.

I wish we had about 1,000 pages like that! Largento makes an important point understandable, and if tweaked it a little (like on the first picture, continue the vertical cable on thru the cube) it would become obvious. In educational media, my goal, standard, benchmark, whatever, has always been the late Don Herbert, the original Mr. Wizard. His explanations and demonstrations were so lucid that everything else I've experienced in education has been a muddled bore by comparison. Now that I'm a seminar presenter, I measure everything I do by his standard. When I looked at Largento's explanation, I had a "Mr. Wizard Moment." Not many people can do that.

Hi Dennis! Hmm. Your experience is different from mine. I could never get anywhere with C4D. A:M does require a different mindset if you're used to working with polygons. A spline isn't just the joining line between two surfaces; it's a living thing with a story to tell.

I like the high voltage decal. The way a human would wear a name tag. I can see the robot at a convention: "Hi, my name is ZZZZZOTTTT!"

You mean I won't have to laboriously rig everything myself? Like it will save time and fit nicely with my basically slothful nature? WOO WOO! Thank you Anzovin. You know what they say: WORK is a 4-letter word.

Re: camera distortion, keep in mind that your eye distorts for the same reason. For your roto, you want a shot taken with the camera at a great distance so you can build an objectively correct model. But then you have to render it in a Chor with carefully chosen camera placement to see how it really looks. Shaded renders in the modelling window won't look right because our own eyes are used to seeing things with perspective distortion.

Bodies aren't all the same. Art students learn rules of thumb for average bodies first. Once you know the numbers, you can view any actual body as a specificic departure. Like, maybe Robcat is Greek - just a guess - Greeks tend to have longer torsos than legs. A wooden mannequin might be a good investment. You can get one at any art supply store or Barnes & Noble. The really cheap ones aren't so hot; try it out before buying to see that it will take and hold extreme poses. The one I got won't put its arm across its chest; I'm going to have to buy another. You've probably seen this:

thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't run across it. since I'm mostly doing machine models right now, that's gwanna save me a lot of time.

Caroline, if NSW weren't so far away, I'd come down there and rub your fur the wrong way.

We should have a prepackaged call-and-response routine for this. I'm a newbie and I want to make a new video game. Work your way through the manual first, yea, halleluia! But I've got this great idea for the next animate Star Wars sequel! Work your way through the manual first, yea, halleluia! Don't have time to model a flower, I wanna model a working V8 engine. Work your way through the manual first, yea, halleluia! But what about the jungle scene with erupting volcanoes and waterfalls and tropical birds flying around? Work your way through the manual first, yea, halleluia! I don't know how much of a newbie StormedFX really is, maybe this comment is mis-aimed, but to all who want the moon immediately: What will happen to a distance runner who takes off with all he's got and burns out on the first lap? Other runners, who paced themselves, will pass him. In contrast to some other programs, A:M is designed to get you going quickly. So A:M newbies can't be blamed for wanting to do that. But the best way to do it is to go thru the manual. There is so much capability built in to A:M that one can go a long way before needing accessories. EDIT: I sound like an old grouch, don't I. I just don't want you to repeat my mistake. I got so dazzled by the number of 3rd party plugins and materials that I took at least a 1-year detour in actually learning the ropes.

My eye goes straight to the left speaker - the perspective on the woofer is off. The dust cap should be offset to the right rather than the left. I know, nitpick nitpick nitpick.

You know what we oughta do? Everybody post the ONE thing they think is most important to shorten the learning curve. After a while we could gather them up and have them in a file for every newbie to peruse. I'm going to cheat and post two. 1. Learn the keyboard shortcuts. Get off total dependence on the mouse as fast as you can. A:M is designed for use with one hand on the keyboard, the other on the mouse. 2. Do the exercises in the book. Do them a second time. Then do them a third time. This is to build up speed and mastery; the second time will take 1/3 as long as the first time and the third will take 1/2 as long as the second.

I had to model a bulb a while back. You did a better job on the base than I did. A spiral is always tricky; a spiral that turns into somthing else is trickier.

How to do hair and lashes depends greatly on what effect you want to achieve; there's lots of ways of doing it. I'm modelling an anime character and the last thing I want is real hair-based eyebrows; that would completely ruin the effect. The upper lashes will be spiky, as if loaded with mascara; the lower lash will just be brown line. So it all depends.

I hope the following suggestions will not make you think you can skip the tutorials, you need to do them anyway, but... Doing eyes and mouth as concentric ovals is the way to go. Make them as isolated units, then model the nose, then join everything up. (Some people model the nose first.) Your first try won't work because you will find that there are too many splines "here" to join up with the number of splines "there," and you'll have to use an excessive number of hooks. Print out your first try and tape it up next to the monitor so you can refer to it and see what needs to be changed on your next try. There's another reason for starting with eyes and mouth as isolated units: models made this way lend themselves to natural animation. When you're trying to recreate something natural, building it the way mother nature builds it is a smart move. You can't independently move the skin on the left side of your neck - try it, you'll see - but you can move your eyes and mouth in all sorts of complicated ways. Mother nature treats eyes and mouth as independent mechanisms that are stitched together with skin. When you watch someone talking, you don't look at their left earlobe. You look at their eyes. Eyes, brows and mouth do 95% of the communicating. (The other 5% is cheeks, which puff up when a person smiles.) The left earlobe communicates nothing. So put your effort into modelling eyes and mouth, then just use enough splines on the rest of the face to stitch them together. That's how mother nature does it. One of A:M's strengths, the ability of the user to plunge right in and do stuff straight off, is also one of its problems. People are so eager to run they don't take the time to learn to walk. Go to the book and do exercise 11.5, "Make A Face." (It's still 11.5, isn't it? I don't have my book handy.) I've done it three times and it still isn't a slam dunk for me. Once you've done that exercise, hopefully a few times, you'll be able to do a good face from scratch. You may not want to put forth the effort to slog through the exercises, but it takes a whole lot more effort to discover the techniques on your own. No need to re-invent the concentric oval.

On the other hand, if you don't have a finished logo - just a hand-drawn sketch - it might be easiest just to go ahead and model it from scratch in A:M. Import the sketch and use as a rotoscope if you like. Then you'll have a model that's completely comfortable in A:M and you can select and manipulate parts of it and put bones in it etc.

tnx john, I dunno how to put it in the avatar space but I'll figger it out. (I'm kinda slow at these things.) (No, I'm really slow at these things.)

Hmm, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm doing, you haven't been stalking me, have you? Is this client doing educational stuff? Maybe we should work together.

The bullet time spline needs to be tweaked. Bullets have almost no change in velocity over short distances. From the moment you enter bullet time to the moment it hits the wall, the timeline spline that places the bullet should have a constant slope. Now, wouldn't it be funny if Humpty backflipped over the bench, hit the floor, and broke into pieces? Okay, that's prolly not the story line you have in mind. Just a thought.

I made my avatar a plain light blue space.

That green-on-black sketch has an almost Dr. Suess quality about it. Something like that would make a dandy fairy-tale setting.