Roger

I'm very tempted to get the Surface 3 as I would love a cintiq but can't really afford one (unless I look for used ones, then I might swing it). I've also been looking at the Thinkpad Tablet 10, which should be coming out soon. It has one of the newer Atom chips and is supposedly on par with a lower speed Core i3. It comes with a Wacom digitizer. However, these are very much "wants" and not "needs". I have a Wacom Intuos currently but I have problems with hand/eye coordination given I'm not looking at what I'm drawing. I'm just leery of getting another gadget that will have a limited lifespan. So maybe I'm better off sticking with what I've got than trying to find a budget solution and ending up with something that isn't all that great. I don't do a ton of digital painting/photoshoppery and would like to do more, but can't quite get used to the disconnect between drawing on the tablet and seeing the output on a monitor.

Ok, I think I know what is happening now. The center panel is closed off properly, but none of the other facets of the panel are. Since none if the other facets are closed off properly, the only one that is rendering is the main one, thus hiding the others. I'm pretty sure that is what is happening, anyway. Edit: Well, I think some variation on the above must be what is happening, but what I've tried to fix it isn't working, so I'm going to step away for a bit and give it another whack a bit later.

I'm sure it has, and I'm just rusty as heck and forgot. However, made the correction and still have a solid surface with no indent. You mind if I shoot you an email?

Ok, after seeing your example I see how to fix it and was able to close off the inner panel. I just wonder why I didn't run into this before. Maybe I just never tried to create this type of depression before now, or forgot to create the interior patches in order for it to close properly. I guess this underscores the need to get back to daily Hashing.

I guess they must be, but how could they not be on the same spline? It seems like they would more or less have to be on the same spline. I see why it would fill with the 3 point patches, but it seems as if it should also fill the other way. But I realize that may just be the way it works.

Here is an example of what I'm trying to do. Although now I don't know why the inner panel doesn't render, since 4 points should be a valid patch.

So I managed to settle on a project for the sci-fi contest, and if I finish it early I may do another entry. It seemed like a relatively straight-forward bit of modeling, but something isn't working quite right. It could be that I haven't sat down in front of AM for so long that I'm missing something obvious. Here is my problem: I've got one rectangular surface with another rectangle inside, and I'm trying to push the inner rectangle inwards to create a depression or indent in this robot (I would post an image but it will be immediately obvious what my project is, I think). I thought I knew what the problem was, I didn't have any splines connecting the 2 areas, so I put 2 splines per side and then pushed the inner panel inwards. While it looks right in wireframe mode it doesn't look right in shaded mode, there does not appear to be any indent at all. What do you figure I did wrong?

I wasn't aware that was a requirement, that AM had to run in basic mode.

Is there a reason AM would be doing this? I think that might be why I'm having display problems.

Well I wanted to do a Breaking Bad tribute piece. While it is fiction and has science, I'm not sure it would be considered sci-fi (unless I have Walt cooking his meth on a UFO).

So does "mad science" count or is it more spaceships, robots, aliens and such? I'm interested in doing an entry but need to pick something g I can pull off with the new deadline.

I completely disabled the Optimus feature and the Intel graphics, so I'm going to load the ball bounce project I did a while back and see if that fixed the problem.

A while back I discovered a bug with the way my GPU handles displaying animation playback/scrubbing in AM. There is a bit of a lag and/or dropped frames which can make it difficult to tell what is going on. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the Intel HD graphics, the Nvidia GPU, or the Nvidia Optimus feature which is supposed to switch between the 2 (I'm assuming it may be due to Optimus, but haven't been able to confirm by testing all cases yet). Currently I've got only the Nvidia discrete GPU enabled and am looking for my project file to scrub through the timeline to see if it is still an issue. Does anyone else with a similar setup on their laptop experience this same problem?

Get rid of McAfee, it is garbage. You're better off using Avast or AVG or Nod32 (not sure if they still have a free version). There is a video floating around on Youtube made by John McAfee about how to uninstall McAfee AV. I'd post a link but it may be considered offensive. You hardware selection should be fine. If you can afford a cintiq, I'd get it. I know I would prefer one. Can't justify spending on even a used one, though.

I've had bad luck with Kickstarter so far, with the exception of some stuff from John Kricfalusi I don't think I've received anything for stuff I've funded. I knew there was a chance of that but they seemed like safe gambles.

I wish I had seen this before now. If this is really worth the 4 hundo I may have to pick it up down the road a little later, but I can't swing it now.

Roger, is it enough for him to fit through the hole or does he have to be exactly keyshaped when he does it? He should probably conform to the shape, that seems like that would be harder to do.

It's easy once you know how. Maybe I'll practice rigging Tom before I try doing my dragon character. Is there a big difference when the character has oddly shaped legs? Thom has legs that go straight down but my dragon has really thick upper legs that kinda go out at an angle.

How about "force a character through an arbitrary opening", say, a keyhole? Perhaps Thom is on one side of a door and a black hole is on the other side, sucking him through the keyhole (in reality the black hole would rip apart the door and everything else, but this is a special case where its gravity only affects the particles in Thom's body).

Rob, Just watched the rigging basics video and have to admit you make it look so easy. Was there a reason you chose to use a fan bone instead of a smart skin for the knee joint? Also, if you were rigging Thom's torso, how many bones would you use for the spine? Would you use 2, 3 or more? I'm curious because it seems kind of arbitrary and I noticed that TSM seems to add a lot of spine bones, and I've seen other people using a lot of bones for the spine.

She didn't seem terribly "hipster-y"...at least, there was no mention of artisanal cheeses or fair trade coffee. I've never really been trendy or "with it", though (they keep changing what "it" is).

I remember hearing somewhere (perhaps in a post from Martin himself) that AM works better on AMD cpus (would be interesting to know the technical reason for this, is there some enhanced instruction set AMD is using that Intel isn't?). What is the performance difference? If it is in the neighborhood of 15-20%, that; along with the much cheaper per core cost, might make it worth considering AMD cpus for a renderbox. Anyway, if anyone knows, I'd be interested in getting a confirmation.

I struggle with some of the same things. I've thought about farming out rigging and have spoken with forum members (Robcat being one of them) but I feel like it should be something I should be able to do, it is just a big stumbling block right now. From one standpoint, I look at it like "well probably is not rigging his own models" so it certainly can't be too out there to delegate work to others (provided you are paying or sharing the credit or both) but from another angle it seems a bit like cheating somehow. Maybe I'm just being silly about it. Another thing that trips me up (and I suspect others) is we look at Pixar shorts (or anyone really talented) and become daunted by trying to match that look or that quality level. I think that is a lot more common with CG than other types of animation.

Very clever. That is certainly one way to put together a 4 man band

Adobe is pretty notorious for having security holes, at least in Flash, so this doesn't surprise me.