Kelley

Thanks Ken. Yes, it's all A:M. Started yesterday afternoon, Finished this morning. Biggest time-sucker was cutting out sections for ailerons and horizontal tail surfaces. [gotta learn booleans a la A:M] Really winging it on colors. Couldn't find a color pic. of Lufthansa 1930's paint scheme. No project in mind. Just had to have one. I'll be sending it on to Steve at Hash. My biggest satisfaction was the cabin windows. I sliced off the bottom of a sphere-cum-ellipsoid, copied out a section 3 CP's high by 6 wide and pasted that into a New Model_01. Then I copied each spline individually and pasted it into a New Model_02. As each came in [neatly in place] I extruded it sideways, then extruded both backwads. Now I had a single rib [square cross-section] of window frame. Do that for each spline, texture and copy _02 back into _01. Use _01 as the glass and assign transparency. Looking at it more closely now, I'd make them fatter, but as a initial try it'll do to be going on with.

When I was but a pup, I was an avid reader of Air Trails magazine. Their premier artist was Douglas Rolf. Rolf drew with a very fine, almost fragile line [no color, minimal shadows] but very, very precise. His stuff was beautiful. Recently I went through years of morgue files culling out the chaff, and found a stack of xeroxes of his work. Among those drawings [just as good as I remember] was this plane: an Art Deco gem designed by Hugo Junkers somewhere in the mid-30's. It never got beyond blueprints and a scale model. But what a plane! I googled it, and even on Google, it's rare. There is a seaplane version that I'll play with next week. [on the trailing edge of the wing, those are tail wheels. No idea as to what the main landing gear might have looked like.]

Thanks, Ken. Don't know how that happened except that it was some time ago and I've since moved on to different mistakes. (lol) I assume this is the keyboard way to toggle 'sharp' corners/'smooth' corners?

A boney, 1913-vintage bike based on some Harley-Davidson pics. I downloaded. When the "Moving Foxhole" anim. gets done, this will cruise past. PROTO_HARLEY.zip

The project needs to be saved first. The consolidate option is inactive as long as there are a unsaved star on the projectname (e.g Project1.prj*) I guess that did it. I had done an 'Embed All', and more than once just to be sure, but..how sure is sure? There was a star, not by the projectname, but by the modelname. I highlighted it and saved again. 'Consolidated' became active. Thanks again.

I have been advised to 'consolidate' a .prj with one .mdl and textures. I found it under Projects, but it's greyed out. How to turn it active? As this is a first for me, any additional tips are welcome. Thanks. ps: I've gone into 'My Controls' in an attempt to change the name above my avatar to simply KELLEY. The entry under the avatar changed, but not above. Is there a dialog box I've not found?

Thanks Rodney. Your gracious response means a lot. Now...who do I report to for my first assignment? As to models: I have been promising myself for some time now to overhaul my website. Now I guess it's time to knuckle down and do it since none of my A:M stuff is up there. I'll break the 3D section into [1] A:M, and [2] All others...and post the models and textures there. It's been so long that I'll have to re-learn GoLive again, but hey..! [...and FTP stands for what?] In the meantime, anyone can contact me through the Forums and I'll send .zip files. ps: I guess I would be well advised to upgrade [from v.11] now?

Sweet Jaysis! The Grand Poobah himself! And straight from the halls of Oz. If I could blush over the internet, I would be doing so now. As to your suggestion: OK. Yes, I'd like to take a shot at something small. [no walkin' and talkin'] I have mulled over touching base on TWO, but the project appears to be beyond the design, modeling and texturing stages. My concern has been that the skills needed at this point are a bit beyond me. With that said, pick something out for me, and I'll happily give it a shot. Among the 'nuts and bolts' things I do enjoy is lighting. Robcat: it's not properly a 'housecleaning'. I'm not tossing the models out, I'm just opening the vault doors for anyone who would like to use them. As I will continue to use them. At the moment though, I've got too many possible projects to do justice to any. Plus, as far as getting a project to completion. I have always been most productive when I've teamed up with someone else. Alone, well...I have the East Coast franchise on using time unwisely. Dhar: check the zip file. Putz about with it at your liesure. There's no rush out here in Westport. There's also a second .zip file with textures, but it's taking forever to upload. Probably too much unused stuff in it. I'll pare it down and post it later if anyone needs it THE_MAN_AND_HIS_BEAST.zip

As the Pleistocene was ending, and just before the Apple II hit the market, [c.1970] I had moved to San Francisco. Being a graphic designer with fair-to-middlin’ design skills, but little drawing ability, I became enthralled by the idiosyncratic styles of the underground comic artists. Somewhere inside me, a voice said ‘you can do this’. It took a while, but I eventually put out two issues of “Four-Fisted Tales”. [just as the underground days were ending] After Issue#1, I posted notices at local comics stores looking for artists to back me on Issue#2. Thus I met Norm Silveira. As we rubbed along building Issue#2, it became clear that we each focused on different aspects of the job: my energy was highest while generating sketches, writing tales, composing pages and making sure all the text fit. After that came the final inking. It was tedious beyond belief. But Norm was the other side of the coin. He drew well, but it was slow going for him, and he was not interested in the writing. But…he loved to ink. He had even sent for Marvels packet of [Xeroxed] pencil pages for Inking Wannabees. He referred to inking as “the ice-cream of comics”. We began to see that we were a perfectly matched team. Then a drunk driver got him. I tell that story to demonstrate my bias toward 3D. When I got computer literate [1994] I discovered Strata Pro 3D, and I was off and running again. However, my real enthusiasm remains on the front end of the project. I love to design, write and model. Animating is interesting, but tedious. I suspect that I don’t have it in me to be an animator. Soooo…we come to the crux: I should very much like to partner-up with somebody out there who would like to take my models of The Sentinel, and Beast, rig them and make them go. It will call for a few more models on my part [like some landscape bits] but the movie is essentially very simple. It requires only the man and rider to walk across the surface of this spitball-sized ‘almost-a-planet’ while he broods on his isolation. He gets supplies, but no communication. He wonders if he’s been forgotten. Could the war be over? How would he know? Is his life being thrown away on a useless task? He always screws up his courage, and renews his belief, that not only is he doing an important thing, but it will be he who first sights the enemy. He will sound the alarm that will save humanity. He will be a revered hero. But after that, the air always goes out of the balloon, because, “Why? Why don’t I ever get any mail?” And that’s it. I’ll do the extra models, supply storyboards [all input welcome] and basically be a director if somebody [or more than one ] will rig and animate. I’ll stitch the clips together in Premier Pro. I’m thinking of a six minute short. The Sentinel only needs to be boned from the waist up since he never dismounts. Certainly he has to talk, but there can be longish shots with voice over. AND HERE’S ANOTHER THING… I have a store of A:M models sitting around doing nothing. I would be happy to make these available to the Hash community. If you get a project done using one, or more than one, give me a credit and a copy. If you make a million dollars, keep me in mind when you get a big-budget project dropped on you [because of all those righteous models!]. But basically, no restrictions. Commercial, non-commercial. All same same. For those of you who have not renounced Satan and all his polygons, check my website. [ www.robertgkelley.com ] There’s a host of polygon models there. Also sitting on my hard drive gathering dust.

Ken: Yes. Yes. And yes. The blades on the near UAV, at times, lose the Action and I have to pull it over from the Library again. Definitely the blades should rotate counter-clockwise, and will. That's another of the details stacking up. The turret is turnable now. Just a single bone as you proposed. And 'fast'? Definitely. The clips I put up here started out as 10-sec. and I collapsed the key frames down to 5-sec. While I frequently get impatient with American films with their non-stop 1-sec. cuts that usually impart more confusion than drama, this is definitely a 'need for speed' situation.

Well then...here we go: Bear in mind that these are rough-cuts, with much work yet to be done. A few examples: I added a road bed on top of the bridge and the tank treads are now sunk into it. There's camera bounce, landscapes will be textured. ground plane will become a river, yadda-yadda... However; all crits and suggestions are welcome. FLY_BY_01.zip FLY_BY_02.zip

...another thing dimly remembered from past excursions. Yes, I had seen, but forgot that, like 'Fog', there's more than one place to set it. Howe're, in this case, when I did look at it, the first setting was 15 and the second was 200. Haven't tried to play with new settings yet. That's for tomorrow. But thanks.

TreeZ?

Good news. All that was required was to go back to the Flash>Bones and re-orient the Light Bone until it pointed forward with the geometry. And the fall-off circle was seriously reduced. Now that the guns work, it's time to kick some butt.

Ken: In this case, the flash is real geometry. Following a past adviso from you on lights and 'glow', I went into Bones mode and installed a light. As you can see, a snapshot of the Bones window shows the flash glowing wonderfully. The pic. of the UAV from the animation, shows light spilling onto the turret, onto the rear of the tank, etc. but the flashes themselves are dark. ps: the turret is now a seperate object. There's a chain of 'translate to' constraints, flash>turret>UAV, with 'scale like'...seems to working well.

I put the bone in the turret...but, of course, the flashes stay oriented to the UAV and don't follow the muzzles. Can an object [the flash] be translated to a specific bone [turret]? Or, should I remove the turret from the model, bring it back as a seperate object, translate it to the UAV, and then translate the flashes to the guns/turret?

Right. I was unclear. The chin turret is a sphere housed in a cylinder. The cylinder swings the guns left/right, and the sphere moves them up/down. As you point out, this is hardly necessary. [The rotation of the cylinder will hardly be noticable.] The sphere bone will suffice. I went ahead and translated the flashes to the muzzles. I'm assuming that while they will move with the UAV, they will not inherit its properties [like size] over time? It would be nice to be wrong here.

I'm setting up my two [at the moment] UAV's for a straffing run. To make them appear very quickly from behind the tank column, I just translated UAV_T1 to its companion, T2, reduced T2 to about 5%, then enlarged it to 100% over a few frames. So far, so good. Now I want to add a muzzle flash to the guns. I got a good, straightforward tutorial on A:M. I propose to translate the muzzle flash to the gun, make a repeating action so the gun just fires constantly, and then use the ON/OFF to make it visible as necessary. But the UAV and the flash have to grow together. Can the bone in the flash be a child of the chin turret bone? On aiming the gun: I'd like to see the gun fire as the UAV approaches the target, swing 90 degrees to the left as they comes abreast, and then, a few last rounds as the target fall astern. Can the chin turret bone, being the bottom bone in the chain, be given a 'Point At' constraint when its parent may be directed somewhere else by the bones above? Or might a null be placed inside the target vehicle to direct the bottom bone?

Right. Right. That is what I'm shooting for. And thanks for jogging the memory. I recall seeing a run-down on that once upon a day and thinking to myself 'this could be valuable'. Howe're, I recall it being discussed for rendering a still as though it were from a video. But I will definitely check this out. ps: just found the link...and it was your posting. Cool. I had forgotten how much good stuff was in it. I can see some practice ahead with flame. Thanks.

Actually, the black is what the alpha channel is allowing to appear in those areas... nothing. If you want to see the alpha channel load a frame as a targa into Photoshop and look at the channels. Great! Thanks Robcat. I was just chewing on the Alpha problem as I went back to the Premier project and tried tp follow the advice tendered above. The book says click on a film clip in the Project window, go File>Interpret footage and you'll get a dialog box...but I find 'Intrepret Footage' greyed out. This will allow me to double check that the Alpha is there. A footnote to the foregoing: I took a .tga still [w/ an Alpha Channel made in Photoshop] into the Premier project and overlayed it onto a 2 sec, spinning rotor .avi clip. The "Interpret Footage" showed up, I rendered it out, and the Number 22 was nicely layered over the rotors. Writing this, I'm wondering if I should render my A:M videos as .tga? Targa. Of course. Wuz allwis a little slower then th rest of the children.

Now we're gettin' somewhere...

For just coming off the line, this is very nice. Nice PT tracks, even if not exactly as on TV. {I guess. I was never a Star Trek fan] Now, as remarked above, take what you've got, speed it up, add some light, triple the number of shots...and stars. Gotta have stars. I keep www.astronomypictureoftheday.com bookmarked. It's an archive of mouthwatering deep space photography. Good sized pictures, which you can click and get an even bigger, higher resolution version.

Posted the following, and then realized that the old pre-modified Bridge segment needed to be deleted from the chorography, and the new inserted. ['Seems I've got one more loose end: as you can see, I've got the model centered on the XY & Z axis. The bone is centered, and reduced in size. Then I get to the choreography and while they are properly reduced, they are still outside the model. I re-read your replies and I think I did it right. I even did a re-start hoping the system would re-set and modifications take effect, but they did not.]

BINGO! That did it. Thanks Robcat, thanks Vern. I agree that a bone should be big enough stand out and get a hold on, but until now I felt I was walking to Tulsa to move my house in Massachusetts. And then I couldn't see the house. Now on to those Alpha Channels.

It appears that when an object is put into the choreography window, the size of the bounding box and bone have little relationship to the size of the object. Frequently, an object like a house has a box approximately the size of the object. But, on the other hand, a very small object gets a bounding box that would hold Cinncinnati. Case in point: the bridge segment. The bounding box is nearly 300% bigger that the whole project. To put the cursor on the tip of the bone to rotate, I'm zoomed out so far, I can no longer see the object, let alone adjust its position. [ the red dot ids the bridge segment] I could zoom in so it's easily visible, then enter number values to move it, but the pivot point is 'way outside the object. Can the box/bone be reduced to some size more reasonable, and can the pivot point be set to a place inside the model?