iGeek

Think two Möbius strips stuck together. Sorta. But not. Same principal: it's nonorientable– that is, you could stick a label on it, then slide it around so it was on the back of the same face, reading in mirror. It's all detailed on the ACME kline bottle website as linked earlier. There is also a fascinating page about it on Wolfram's website. -Zev

And here's the movie.

An odd thing happened during rendering. This is something that I've noticed during a lot of long renders, but I remembered to document it this time. I'm running 10.5 on OS X. I'm waiting to upgrade until I absolutely need a new feature- haven't yet for the occasional school project, etc. Anyway, notice the abnormally large numbers. This happens at a certain point in all my long renders. This was rendered with the following settings: 320x240x24 targa, final, multipass 16x, shadows, reflections with 2 bounces, 20% motion blur, although I think it happens with all settings. Has anyone else had this happen? Is it fixed in the new versions? -Zev

yeah, I tried to post just as the forum went down. Here it is. This is something I've been wanting to try for a long time. It's a Klein Bottle, a 4D shape with zero volume. This is its 3D immersion- it usually hums along in 4D, without intersecting itself. Find out more at Acme Klein Bottle. Anyway, some weird things happened when I finished this model. First, all the normals ended up pointing the right way. I thought I might have a place where two adjacent patches would have opposite normals, but it all worked out (aside: why isn't there a feature where you select a patch, and all the surrounding surfaces mimic the normal of that patch?). Also, if I select a point on the "outside" and press "/" the entire model is selected. Weeeeird. Anyway, here it is. A short animation is on the way. Catch you on the flip side... oh, wait.... -Zev

http://www.lowrestv.com/lowres/tutorials/t...1.asp?tut_id=t3 This might help for the tires. The model looks great so far! I eagerly await seeing it go for a spin. -Zev

They are spike tape. For those not theatrically inclined, it is small crosses of glow-in-the-dark tape which help the stagehands place set pieces and dead actors in the pitch black between scenes. I'll try it with tickets, though. Good idea. -Zev

I made some changes and rerendered. I made the spotlight printed on the book more transparent, and I changed the color a bit too. I raised the book so it has a shadow on the floor, and I touched up the music inside and the Mask geometry a bit. I also gave the floor and ambience of 10%. It occurred to me that Windows has a really low standard gamma, and that the image probably looks like crap on a windows box. Consider getting a Mac. I hear they're running cheap now... This is the one I'm posting on A:M Stills unless anyone has any objections. -Zev

Trés cool! I just had a look through it, and the new stuff is really neat. It's great to finally see the Cooper tutorial where it belongs, seeing as how many times it's referenced to on the forum as THE definitive guide to face modeling. Wow, and me still here on 10.5... New I really want to upgrade, darnit! -Zev

I think you may be right. Is Animation Pit Stop either down or no longer running? I tried and couldn't load it or ping it. Who was running that? Does anyone have a contact? Thanks. -Zev

Thanks for all the input. Yeah, I may lighten the stage surface a bit. Also, try turning up the brightness/gamma on your monitor. I agree, though, the book look's like it's hovering. I'll raise it or something so there's a shadow. Does the spike tape read OK? I'm not sure what the book is, I just wanted some kind of book with music in it. It's just to fill up the scene. It's not meant to be directly related to anything in the book/opera/movie, I just saw someone drawing the mask and rose in MS Paint (pixel by pixel!) and felt sorry for her, so I decided to try a little something of my own. I'm including the image from the cover of a book. The spotlight effect is loosely based on an effect in one of Scott Kelby's excellent Photoshop Down and Dirty Tricks books. I didn't have the book on hand when I made it, but it's the effect I was going for. Maybe it doesn't do too well with the real spotlight in the scene? I could rework it. I was just looking for something that vaguely resembled either a program or a script, but I didn't want to write The Phantom of the Opera on it. What do you mean, the shadow offset shows that the word is not on the book? Thanks for all the comments! -Zev

And here's a wireframe, sans textures so you can see what's going on. I looked at the rose's info, and the creator is "noah li." Anyone know who that is? -Zev

A friend was drawing a picture involving Phantom, and it got me thinking... this was mostly a study in modeling and lighting. I was thinking of posting it on A:M stills. One item of concern, however: I didn't make the rose. I think it was on the forum. I seem to remember someone saying it was up for grabs. However, I wouldn't want to use someone's model uncredited. if you know whose rose it is, please tell me, because it's a really nice model. It's one that looks weird unless you apply the supplied pose to it. Thanks! -Zev

A little like the Abominable Snowman in Monsters, Inc. too. Still, there's something original about him. Very nice work. -Zev

This topic shows up completely blank for me. Is it even possible to post a blank topic? -Zev Edit: On the page to submit a post, I can see your post. Odd.

Yves Poissant's Primitives page has this to say about the Squared Wy: "Note that this primitive is not completed. There is a 6 point patch in the center and I did not find an elegant and satisfactory way to close it. If anybody finds an elegant solution, I would be glad to hear about it." Here's my offering as to a possible solution. Anyone else have a good one? I think the underlying problem with this shape is that there is not elegant way to do it in the real world. Take a lump of clay and try it, you'll see what I mean. My method is far from elegant, but it works. Then again, does anyone even use any of the primitives besides the cube? -Zev Squared_Wy.mdl

Use Apple's QuickTime Pro. It's well worth $29 for all the stuff it can do relating to A:M. With the movie open, type Command-L (Mac) or I'm guessing Ctrl-L (PC) to set it to loop. Then save. Now, really, was that so hard? It might require some tweaking. For example, if you have an object that takes one second to turn around, you copy frame 0, do your animation, paste frame 0 on to frame 31, then render only to frame 30. This is so you don't get the first frame repeated twice. Check out my avatar for a good example. -Zev

Finally, here's an update. I've messed with the lights a bit, and also thinned the film so the logo is darker. I've increased the opacity of the letters "FCC" from 17% to 40% in the original Photoshop images. Does it read, or should I change it? This render was 16 pass. I turned down the fill lights and turned up the ambience of the film so the curtain could be darner, because I couldn't get lights built into models to work right... How's it look? -Zev

Well, you could just make a pose for each possible combination. You'd just need a lot of RAM to load them all. Yeah, there are 43 Quintillion possible combinations of the cube. That's rounded to the nearest quintillion. The actual number is 43,252,003,274,489,856,000. Yeah. Big number. The thing is, I've seen animations of the cube before! And it solves itself! And there are computer programs that do the cube! !!! I know someone who works for Solid Works, a 3D physical modeling and simulation app (it can do some very crazy stuff, but at like 20 times the price). He said that in his program, he would just build the whole mechanism. Yeah, sure. I think the best way to do it is to animate frame by frame using control points. It still might not look quite right though. Maybe we need a "twisty puzzle" plugin. A pluzzle, maybe? Anyone wanna write one? Anyone? Hello? Is anyone still here (here here here...)?

I've posted the animation at http://www.avnertheeccentric.com/zev/virus/ Now I'm rerendering with 16 pass motion blur, just for myself. -Zev

Here's the final model I'm gonna render. I'm thinking like 320x240, then post it online and pick it up at school. Thanks for all the help. In the end I decided to just use paths, then bake the actions so I could delay them. Is there a way to get a path constraint to start at a certain time??? -Zev Attack.zip

I've messed with it a bit. I can't get the to stay inside the falloff radius and then expand with it later. grrr. here it is, see if you can figure out what I missed... thanks -Zev Bacteriophage.prj

Yeah, that did it. Thanks! Now I just have to see if I can figure out how to get them to not dislpay at the beginning. I may just have them all be in the nucleus to start with, then pop out and grow. Maybe also opacity... -Zev

Here's the movie. I want the flock to start at frame 5:20ish bacteriophage.mov

I'm making an animation of a bacteriophage attacking a cell for biology. At one point, the cell's nucleus needs to start spewing "baby" bacteriophages. I've tried, but I can't seem to get a flock to work. Every time I try, the swarm/birds flock just sits there and doesn't display any models. I was wondering if anyone here could help? I need to finish it by tomorrow morning. I'm including the model and a clip. If you're messing with the model, open the Cell model, select the "For Hiding" group, and press Hide. This will hide the front of the cell so you can see what you're doing. In the final animation, the front of the cell becomes transparent as the bacteriophage lands. Anyway, around frame 5:20, I want the nucleus to look like it's spewing more bacteriophages, and eventually the cell will explode (ie get bigger and then go transparent). How can I get this to work? I'll post the video as soon as it's done doing a quick render... thanks, -Zev Bacteriophage.prj

Yay, I'm not alone! Check out my avatar. My cube record is 29 seconds. See http://homepage.mac.com/igeek1/ for details. I also built a cube a while ago. Then I tried to rig it. As far as I know, it's impossible. That said, I'm sure there's a way to do it in A:M. I'm a novice when it comes to rigging, etc. The best I could think of is to manually do it by selecting a group each time and turning it, but you get some weird results. There's no "Euler" equivalent for selecting groups of CP's. Still, I want to see how this turns out. The rigging problem has been bugging me ever since I tried it. btw, the logo on your center white sticker is not the one that's on a standard Rubik's brand cube these days. Check out a new cube and look at the logo. The current ones have a 25th anniversary logo, though, which I don't really like... Can you solve the Cube? Anyone else here on the forums? -Zev