phatso

You obviously know what you're doing. Outie, right?

No, they suck. If you can make things happen in A:M, then the problem isn't you. You've heard the old saying, "A poor workman blames his tools." To which I reply, "A good workman won't put up with crappy tools, he finds better ones and uses those." Like you.

Same answer as the other post: look in the book. Exercise 6 (Door's Stuck) takes you thru some of the constraints. Look in Help and search this forum for info on the others. There are years' worth of questions and answers archived here, on every subject, plus a gazillion downloadable tutorials. It takes a bit of effort - sorry about that, but the only place I know where you can learn to do animation in five minutes is Second Life, and those animations suck.

Well, a mouth is a bit different, since it's part of the skin mesh rather than something added. Most of the modellers I've seen make the mouth and eye openings first, the nose second, and then stitch them together to make a face. There are tutorials on this site if you search. Or, a good way to learn this is to open one of the models like Eddie or the ones on the extras CD, go into shaded wireframe mode, and take them apart. You can reopen and tear down a model as many times as it takes to see how it's built. If you haven't done exercise 11 in the book (Make a Face), do it. By the time you've completed that, you will know how it's done.

Um, sounds like we have solutions to two different problems here. If by "merge" you mean create a group to contain many of the other groups, just select the ones you want to make a new group and give it a name to make it "official." Just as you can group people by height, weight, hair color etc and some people will be members of more than one group, in A:M you can group what you've got as many different ways as you like. Groups are essentially conceptual ideas. You make groups according to purpose, and name them to identify the purpose. If by "merge" you mean eliminate the duplicate splines that come from copying and pasting, KenH has the answer. And as you do more modelling, you'll get in the habit of deleting duplicate splines before attaching CPs.

I can see the headline now: Old, fat, bald man trampled by walkers.

Wrong word anyway, "liquidity" is what I meant - meaning that the asset can be exchanged for cash. On what basis are you claiming a share? Because you're both older than me? I thought nobody was older than me. But maybe I heard wrong, the hearing aid is acting up....

I think anybody on this forum who objected to answering idiotic questions would be FORCEFULLY reminded of his/her own idiotic newbie questions. I remember a few of my own...pardon me while I go hide my face for a while. There's karma, you know: once you get familiar, it'll be your job to help out the next batch of newbies.

If I weren't such a jaded old fart, I'd say there's something supernatural going on... just when I need to animate some skywriting, and didn't know how, there's a project file that I can just download and tweak. Yesterday, I needed to create an office building, and there it was in the forum. Hmm. I need to create and print out a fully fungible winning lottery ticket. Let's see if this supernatural thing works.

Hmm, a cloth top. Interesting way of doing it. I have to model a fish tank, you may have given me a valuable hint.

Sonic, ya just saved me four days. I need an office model for a presentation I'm doing. IOU bigtime.

Unless, of course, you actually want to buy the disc - like I did - 'cuz I want to take it with me from one computer to another. For me, that portability is one of the things that make A:M better: it belongs to me, not to a computer.

Yeah, and you know what would be even funnier? Every time there's a "brrrrt" sound, bubbles float up from the bottom. On a related note, you could have the container get really full of liquid. Then Brain Fart goes in the bathroom and closes the door. You'd hear dribbling water, then he'd come out with the liquid considerably lower. What does it say about this crowd that even without a body, our thoughts gravitate toward bodily functions?

you may have answered this - at my age, I have a lot of brain farts of my own - is your character going to be humorous or menacing?

I like seeing it in the driveway. It's a little small-scale (or the house is too big-scale) and you need to tilt it up a bit. Can you reduce the reflectivity? It looks like shiny metal, not paint.

If you turn it a quarter turn each frame, it's going to look completely stationary. When I want to show something spinning faster than the frame rate can handle, I create blurred blades (or spokes, or whatever) in about three positions and then fade them in and out in sequence. Not nearly as good as the real thing, but with the real thing you can hardly avoid the backwards-spinning-wagon-wheels effect.

When you say "chicken" I assume you mean "rooster." A cartoon chicken would have wider hips and narrower shoulders. Us rural folk notice these things. Maybe that isn't healthy.

I wonder about other people's opinions on this... It seems to me that the reason Hash makes lights available for a model is that, if you're going to be rendering a still frame of a single model, there's no reason to go to a choreography. You can render straight from modelling, so you need to be able to light it. But if you are going to do a choreography, putting lights in a model will tie your hands later. You can still light the model to see how it will react to lights - good idea - but you want to remove those lights before you start the chor. At least that's what I do. There are always ten ways to do anything. Do others have different methods?

That's the key - what tools you use isn't as important as the order you use them in. The use of one often precludes the later use of another. For example, porcelean material hides mesh problems. If you apply porcelean and then continue modelling (without removing the porcelean), you're building in problems you may not be able to solve later. I put in fan bones whether I need them or not, on the theory that it's easier to remove them later than add them.

If you do that, remember also to reset the grid spacing (modelling folder) or you'll drive yourself crazy. This may be outdated info, still using V13. Got V15 at CES but haven't made the switch yet.

Oh come on! That's like, SOOOO overdone! (Mental Roy, anyone?) TL, have you chosen a personality for this character?

Hmm. Hadn't tried that. Sometimes I have to select the 5 points, hide everything else, then reselect the group. RC's way sounds easier. AMK - when you say you don't know where it is, do you mean you can't find the 5-point patch button? If you haven't moved your toolbars around, it's the bottom button on the right side of the screen, the one that looks like a pentagon (natch). It's greyed out. When you select the 5 points you want to make into a patch, it will turn to full glorious color to tell you it's ready to make the patch. Assuming you've tried that and it didn't work: A:M makes a 5-point patch by turning it into five 4-point patches you can't see. If there's anything funny - a flipped normal, two CPs in one spot (which happens a lot when people copy and paste), whatever - A:M doesn't know what to do. Computers don't think outside the box. When even RC's suggestion doesn't work, that's a giveaway that you need to save the model, then start taking it apart. Move CPs around and you'll find splines on top of each other and stuff. Clean that up and the 5-point patch button will work. As you get better at modelling, this will happen less often.

For the animating I do, simplicity, not detail, is the important thing. If you've got a simplified rig that works, I'm yours.

So you've got two useable poses for three situations: the latter is sad, the former is equally good for "God, I'm exhausted" and "Oh shit, things are really screwed up." You'll have a library soon. And you'll publish, all rigged, right?

The regular timeline, the one that shows splines (like position vs. frame). There are at least 3 ways to adjust that horizontal motion: 1. If you want the transitions between rest and motion to be smooth, right click on the CP and select Zero Slope 2. If you want them to be abrupt, peak the CPs. 3. If you want a custom curve, play with the bias handles. Since you've already got your project saved, go ahead and experiment. There's no other way to learn this.