phatso

About "grading" your work - no such thing here. The emphasis is not on how well or poorly you did this time, but on helping you advance. The coolest thing about this forum is that everybody is rooting for you; there's a complete absence of the kind of professional jealousy and turf wars you find elsewhere.

Hee hee... if you need help with some models, I bet you can find it here. LOTS of people would like to see an anvil fall on a phone when a telemarketer is calling. (Better yet, on the telemarketer.)

Um- distortions in the back? You'll have to point out specific areas. Also it would be good to post an image with ins and outs not set to 2%, so we can see what's peaking and what isn't. But here's a guess: One thing about peaking CPs is that depending on how you do it, not every spline gets peaked. If you select a CP and click Peak, it will peak in every direction. But as you know, a CP is usually - should always be, if possible - the junction of two splines. If you click on a spline near a CP, so as to select the spline rather than the CP, and then click peak, that spline will be peaked but the other spline won't. This is not a defect in the program. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to be able to have one spline peaked and the other smooth, for example the end of a dowel rod. Where you're having trouble, you might have selected a spline instead of a CP by accident. It's not hard to do, especially if you haven't zoomed in. But, once you've figured out how to peak everything - do you really want to? Isn't the 2% solution better? Very few things, even machines, have truly zero-radius edges. Non-beveled edges were one of the things that made early computer animation (e.g. "Tron") look so unreal.

Don't take a job rejection personally - lots of qualified people do DOZENS of interviews before landing one. The thought kinda makes you sick again, doesn't it? But then, what the hey, an interview only takes an hour, you have two dozen of those in a day, and when you finally do land a job you can hold onto for at least a few years, it doesn't seem like it took all that much of an investment.

It's also really easy to apply a decal from the images folder. Ya should do it, if only for practice.

That's "dithpicably." Make the duck more evil: snake-eye pupils, or camera-type irises.

I find it pretty convincing until the plane hits the ground. It should bounce, slide and rock. Maybe parts of the landing gear should fly up from behind the plane (still moving forward, but not as fast as the plane, and they should spin). A fireball coming from the left wing would be impressive.

Hmm. Old post, I'd thot somebody would have answered by now. You can go back to the modelling stage and change the bone, but depending on how you do it (I'm no expert) that can cause strange distortions when you animate. When it happens to me I just delete the bone, add a new bone, assign cps, then drag and drop in the PWS to get the parent/child relationship right.

Oooh, I like the idea of the yellow blotch. Better yet, the dog putting it there.

That would be simplest. But first decide whether you want a theoretical cube (sharp edges) or a real one (beveled edges). Most real things don't have perfectly defined edges, they have bevels. Importing the cube from the library is a lot easier than making a new beveled cube. The library one has big bevels, you can group-select and modify to shrink them.

Just for future reference... or if you wanna tweak just for the sake of tweaking... The strangeness at the top of the snowman's head is 'cuz the top ring of CPs have been pulled too close together, trying to make them into a point. If you start with that ring being a finite size and shrink it, you will suddenly hit a point where everything goes strange. Backtrack a little and you'll get a smooth surface. You can very easily imitate the rough surface of the real snowman by invoking the roughness attributes in the surface properties. You'll have to play with the numbers to get something appropriate.

Rodney is all heart. Actually, making a heart out of the 32-patch sphere is so easy a short description ought to do it. 1. Copy the 32 patch sphere into your "new model" window. 2. Go to top view. (keypad 5) 3. Switch to scale mode (s). Shrink sphere in Z-axis until you have an oval. 2. Go back to front view (2). Group a vertical selection including the topmost CPs and the front and back CPs one lattitude ring down. Scale the group smaller, then pull the group down. 3. Tweak. 4. Color red.

Hmm. Modelling by proxy. Somehow I never thought of that, even tho that's essentially what they taught us in drawing class.

There's no rule saying it's a "bad" way, it just depends on your preferences. Yes, you should learn photoshop (and so should I - like I'm ever going to have the time, hah!) cuz every additional trick in your bag is an additional degree of freedom. BTW, there are freeware alternatives to photoshop that may or may not be as good, but are probably more than good enough for the uses animators will make of them. I can't speak from experience here but maybe somebody else can. Is the mouth perhaps fading out because it's physically sinking into the face? You may have to adjust the precise positions of some CPs.

I look at those characters and I see an ethnically diverse neighborhood with infinite possibilities for plotlines, all - as in Peanuts - from the point of view of the kids, perhaps with never an adult visible. Schultz certainly did build a world exclusively with kids (and one dog) better than anybody else has been able to. I suppose you'd call that Peanuts Envy.

(sigh) Text messaging is such a crappy means of communication. If I had known how my comments would be recieved, I would instead have just said that Jirard has a masterful way of stylizing physical forms to reveal character - I wish I could do it the way he does. Creativity, by definition, involves a divergence from reality. Picasso and Dali were capable of creating realistic images, but so is a $5 disposable camera. They achieved much more by being deliberately unrealistic. Thus with Jirard: he is not incapable of modelling realistically proportioned feet, so the fact that he didn't do so suggests a conscious decision. My purpose was not to attack a critic's statement of opinion, but to point out that an artist's deliberate distortions are also a statement of opinion - namely, that stylized forms often tell a story better than realistic ones. They are correct in context if storytelling rather than portraiture is what the artist is after. I was just now looking at his mean little s.o.b. character, and every detail, from his fat face to his big feet, makes a contribution to telling us who this brat is. To do that without word or movement, just with form, is an achievement. I myself critiqued an earilier Jirard image. In that case an irridescent tricycle captured the viewer's eye, and made it almost impossible to pay any attention to the person riding it. I felt that the criticism was objectively justified, that the flashy trike was really an oversight, because the trike isn't supposed to be the focus of attention. But in the same image, the kid's cap was coming down over the eyes in a most unrealistic way. I didn't critique that because it was obviously deliberate, and helped tell the story. With every detail in art, the question is, does it look the way it does because the artist wasn't paying attention, or because he was? Jirard, I have been watching the development of these characters with more than passing interest. If you've got stories to tell about these kids (or partner with a good storyteller) you could take them to where they're as much a part of our culture as the Simpsons.

I, at any rate, shall refrain from setting myself up as the Art Police. History is full of examples of critics who made fools of themselves. Even intelligent, educated ones. Scribes, Pharisees and Zealots all, who can't see the forest for the trees. Or in my line of work, can't hear the music for the notes. I'm reminded of the very learned music critic Hanslick, who referred to a particular composition as "a stink in the ear." He was speaking of Tchaikowsy's violin concerto, which is now hands down the most popular of all violin concertos among musicians and public alike.

Style, man, style. If we always wanted realism we'd be photographers instead of animators.

Good way to go. In a month you'll wonder why you ever had trouble. You might want to try - be sure things are saved so you can go back if you don't like this - just making an overall keyframe at 30. Have you tried clicking on the little human in the lower left, then going to 30 and manually making a keyframe? This isn't a good idea for lengthy, complicated animations with lots of characters, but for what you're doing it might speed things up.

The hood fabric needs some thickness, so you can pull it away from the model's face and it won't look like paper. Other than that, what's bugging you?

Ya just saved me a whole bunch of time. I need a fireworks thingie for something I'm doing, and I haven't experimented with booleans yet. Graci Graci, and happy holidays.

One hint to start with - you prolly already know - this model was made in some other program, when you redo it with splines you should use a lot fewer of them. The face in particular has about five times too many. That's gumby be one impressive model if you can pull it off.

There are at least 3 ways of making a keyframe without moving a character. 1. Move it a little, then move it back. 2. Hit the "make keyframe" button on the bottom toolbar. Hover over the buttons with the cursor, they'll tell you what they do. 3. Copy a keyframe from earlier in the animation (in this case, frame 0) and paste it to the frame you want. What Vern said about doing the exercises in the book - and doing them more than once is highly recommended. Exercise 3, "Move It," is the simplest of all animations; not really animation but a series of still poses. If you haven't done that one, anything else you try to do is like pushing a rope uphill. If you search this forum for other people's versions of exercise 3, you'll find some really creative riffs on the basic exercise.

You are sick, you know that? Sick, sick, sick. Terminally warped. Congratulations.

In no time at all you'll be an accomplished hooker. Caroline, I thought that's kinda what I said... you have to select the 5 CPs before you can hide the others. Mebbe I wasn't clear enough.