phatso

Looks like he's shaking his fist at somebody. Try turning his head to his right so he's not looking at the fist. Maybe tilt the torso to the right to emphasize the upward thrust of the arm. Push the hips out so there's a smooth convex curve.

The other thing about naming a group is that then you have a label you can click to select the group - tremendously important later on when the model gets complicated. As to the coloring thing - I'm a little hazy on this myself, but it makes a difference what order you apply colors in. You first told A:M that everything was to be gray, and anything you say later may be overridden. As John said, select all patches except the one you want to be red, assign a name for them, and make them gray. This leaves the remaining patch undefined so you can make it red. One thing about selecting patches: if you select all the patches around a single patch, that means all that patch's CPs will be selected and so it will be selected too. You may have to select patches to one side, make them gray, then select patches to the other side and make them gray. This is a workaround used by people like me who don't really know the ropes. 'Taint right, but it works. Maybe one of the wizards will see this and set us all straight.

I thot the same thing, AC. "Could be much better?" How? Go ahead and texture the thing and you'll be surprised how good it is. I looked at it pretty closely and I think it's very good.

When I first saw this, my first reaction was, why am I seeing out the back of his head? Of course, I was seeing the tongue... but maybe ya wanna change the background color so this won't happen.

Run a bathtub full of hot water and soak in it for two hours. Bring a hanky, your sinuses are going to open. You'll be surprised how well it works. And if you have a sore throat, make warm lemonade with honey instead of sugar. Honey is a natural germ killer. An old cab driver told me that trick. 5 pointers - I assume you know to check normal directions?

Truly deliteful. The specular hilite on the leather chair should be altered. Bigger highlight but not so bright. Maybe change the color to lite red. Aside from that, you got one beautiful model.

The motion of the tree reminds me of a dancer I once saw who was wearing tassels on her...umm... But anyway, the grass is about perfect. Wouldn't know it from the real thing.

A lot of the strangeness will disappear when you have a backdrop to put it against. Also, it looks like the brain stem is going behind the tie; needs to be a bit longer. Maybe long enough to flop on the bottom?

Now, to totally upset the applecart... The problem I find when making a rotation out of four keyframes is that it isn't smooth unless I do a lot of tweaking. Doing it the Euler way pretty much automatically means you get "x" degrees of rotation for every frame, all equal. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.

The rotation seems strange - almost none at first, then super-fast spin. The models should spin faster when they pull their legs in, but not all that much. Disclaimer: videos in youtube may be smoother than they appear.

...or, if you want a laser to vary in brightness or ramp up/down, you can keyframe changes in the Transparency property. When you want no light, set Transparency to 100%. Not to complicate things, but it seems that, for a laser blast, you'd want to try the Glow property. You'll have to experiment with this; I've found that coordinating it with transparency is tricky. Post a video so we can see how you're coming along.

Gett'n better... I'd stretch out the beginning and end squats to at least 3 times as long. Even an olympic gymnast couldn't jump that fast. Which brings up a point - do you watch yourself do the motions in a mirror (difficult for a backflip, I know) or at least ask yourself, "Could I move like that?" People have a very strong instinctive idea of how the body moves when they think of it in terms of their own bodies.

If you searched for "eular" and got nothing, try again using "euler" with an E. Onnery cuss, ain't I?

yeah, we keep covering it. everybody has trouble with this at first. I sure did.

I always have the right answer, as I'm God's gift to everything. I have to move away from the computer now, it's getting really deep here and I have to go find a shovel.

Without seeing a project file, two guesses: 1. There's a slider at the top of the timeline that has to be moved to the end of the animation. or... 2. If you've rendered it, you may not have set the frame range in the advanced rendering properties.

Concept that may prove useful: People think forward, but an animation program (A:M or any other) thinks backward. When you establish a keyframe telling A:M that the model should be in THIS position at THIS frame, the computer looks backward in time to see how to get the model there. It looks for the last time you established a position (keyframe), then makes inbetweens. If you haven't established any other keyframe, it looks all the way back to the beginning. Note that not everything is keyframed every time, unless you do it deliberately. It is quite possible to keyframe some aspects of a model's position and not others - easy, in fact, you can do it by accident and probably have.

You could, of course, do both at once - serious work on TAoAM and screwing around on the stick figure. It's when you run into problems with your own work that you go back to TAoAM and really seriously learn the stuff. Re: setting frame range to 1 frame, that's 00:00:00.

The cell has to be closed in the middle. Also, it's always kind of lumpy. Let's see if I can get an attachment to work (not good at this)... The most important thing in imitating an electron microscope scan is lighting. There should be a general fuzzy lighting from behind and all around the model except from camera angle. cell.prj

They won't. That's where ANIMATION comes in! The Ken Burns thing could be considered a halfway point between the lame class you took in college (snore) and a full-blown Hollywood production. KB is light-years ahead of a lecture. A $50mil Hollywood film would be light years ahead of Ken Burns. And still, at that, dirt cheap - think how much it costs the taxpayers to have a couple of million teachers in a couple of million classrooms blathering away. And next year the same expense all over again. While the Hollywood film would last for years or, depending on the subject, decades. Think "Dick, Jane and Sally" for the 21st century. The sheer economic pressure that is building is why I think that, despite inertia, despite the teachers' union, despite everything, stuff like DJ's Lorenz attractor video represents the future - and teachers scratching away at blackboards do not. Speaking of Dick, Jane and Sally - when I was six years old, I thought they were lame. (Look! Look! Look! Oh! Oh!) Did you? Hmm. I seem to have hijacked this thread. Oh well... DJ, any way of making the butterfly flap its wings? Best if it would flap faster when it's climbing than when it's coasting; you could prolly write an expression for that. And for music, something dynamic -John Adams' "Short Ride in a Fast Machine" maybe. Edit: just took my own advice and watched it while listening to Short Ride. Doesn't match up, the music is twice as long as the video, but the dramatic impact is impressive. With better-matched music, what a great segment of a complete video math course this would make! Especially in a stereo view.

Undo is a lot easier than select and delete.

Generally, if you don't get the two halves perfectly the same, the character will look like he hurt his foot. Easier to use flip/attach keyframes than make everything match manually.

Sounds like pretty simple keyframing. Betcha it would be faster than trying to set up something automatic.

Ah, the educational possibilities. Instead of having a gazillion teachers in a gazillion classrooms doing duplicate lectures, we ought to have a gazillion people working on one creatively written lecture produced for DVD with a Hollywood budget. Think of what would happen if people with DJ's creativity were able to apply their talent to the business of instruction. You may remember the movie Amadeus. What started out as a (highly fictionalized) whodunnit involving Mozart and Salieri essentially morphed into a 2-hour music appreciation lecture that people with little previous appreciation of Mozart stood in line and paid to see. Such is the power of the big-budget approach. Two-bit prediction: in ten years, video teaching will completely replace the traditional classroom lecture. And A:Mers will be in the thick of it.

This may be a case where it would be worth subcontracting to somebody here. Add a nice profit for yourself and bill the client; they don't need to know.