Caroline

Have you tried closing A:M, then restarting it? Have you tried Help Menu > Reset Settings then restarting it? Normally one of those two will help.

Hi, Jake, sorry, didn't see your post - have you got particles turned on for the render? (Hair is considered particles) You are right about the io exception error - I used my own grass photo when I did the tutorial. However, if you load this one into paint, and then save it into another name as a jpeg, it works.

Great grass tutorial here: http://perso.orange.fr/ffave/e_herbes.htm

Maybe you should start an 'old-timer' undocumented tips thread - I'm sure there are lots of little things that would speed up the day. I stumbled across it in this post and I haven't seen it before or since.

I have to say that I never mastered Muhair, but Richard Harrowell's pointers here helped me a lot. I turned specularity off, and that helped too.

It sounds as if you are creating the bone, but not telling A:M what control points (CPs) are attached to that bone. There is a video tutorial for Exercise 9 - Flower Power that takes you through making a very simple model, then attaching bones to that model and making the flower move: http://www.hash.com/VM/ This page has all the video tutorials that go with The Art Of Animation Master booklet, and Exercise 9 is the introductory bone one.

I use Photoshop Elements. It's the 'cut down' version of Photoshop, and you can't do as complex alpha-channelling in it (you can still do it, but it's not quite as visual), but a lot of the functionality is the same. You can download a 30 day trial, and if you like it, lots of places sell it under the $100, especially if you're a student.

If you click the "Show more than drivers" icon, circled in the picture, that should show groups, decals, etc, so you can control them. Edit: That circle was a bit large - I mean click the one in the circle with the red x through it

I'm not sure about v10.5, but this is how you do it in v13: 1. In Project Workspace Right click Material > New Material 2. Right click the Material's Attribute > Change Type To > Combiner > Gradient 3. To enter those settings, assuming I'm looking at the right tutorial, change the properties for the Gradient, and enter 0s for Start and End, and 50% for the Edge Threshold. Click the + next to Gradient, and you have two attributes, so you can enter the Specular and Diffuse settings, etc, in those, as directed. To apply the material to the pumpkin, I'm guessing that you have a group for the pumpkin (I haven't done this tutorial in a long while), so you can just drag the material onto the pumpkin group. Same for the stalk. That would be a second material dragged onto the stalk group.

Did you try the on-line reference? http://www.hash.com/Technical_Reference/Cu...Lens_Flares.htm and http://www.hash.com/Technical_Reference/Ge.../LensFlareP.htm There's a dozen pages on it in the new printed manual, a lot of pages given to something that I haven't tried yet. Let us know if you find out the 'secret'. Re-reading your post - are you doing it in the choreography, not the modelling window? Lights don't light in the modelling window, but they do in the choreography. You would have to render it as well to see the effect, I would think.

I had a lot of trouble working out how to do this, and didn't really understand it until I saw Will Sutton's Decal video, which is 2 hours available for purchase from his logo just above, or from the Hash shop - the Siggraph 2006 video. Will has also written this tutorial: http://www.zandoria.com/uv.htm which is excellent, but in a complex area like this, a video is so much easier to understand. I have A:M Paint, which is also brilliant especially along seams, but I don't always use it. Sometimes I create the UV outline in A:M then paint it in Photoshop Elements or Twisted Brush, just like Will's tutorial above. It's a complex area, though, and needs a lot of time invested, and I'm still not good enough to publicly post decalled objects .

Wait till you have to hang around for kids at dance / gym / soccer / party with only an internet cafe to entertain you. The amazing thing is that there are still so many new tutorials that I keep coming across. A:M just has a huge number of resources. The main one of course, being Rodney

Thank you for taking the time to show that - it's so much more satisfying than just plonking a tooth into a gum. And the process is relevant for many other things too.

That's beautiful - she'll love it. Will you have other things in it too, or just the straight castle (I mean like bats circling below, or stars or a cat walking, or some sign of the fair princess), they might be too distracting though.

Colin Freeman's tutorials for making his son Cooper are great tutorials for modelling http://www.colins-loft.net/tutorials.html His eye modelling shows how to make a perfect sphere. Also, his Uber Eye is fantastic - here's a link to a picture that shows what it does: http://migrate.hash.com/forums/index.php?s...st&p=181457 And searching, I found a new one on me - it's a finished model that has a flaming iris: http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/~s_bruc...lamingIris.html And a cartoonly rigged eye: http://www.hash.com/amtutes/bootcamp/eyetut.html

Well that is odd, because that black at the end, but fine while it was rendering, is exactly what happened with mine. I wonder if it's to do with the 'Pro' bit. Because I bought Pro last week. But mine's fine now on Pro 7.1.5. If you find out what it is, do let us know! Presumably it renders OK on tgas and avis?

I had this problem at the weekend, after I upgraded my Quicktime to 7.1.6. What version of Quicktime are you running? (in QT- Help Menu > About Quicktime). If you're running QT 7.1.6 you can downgrade - see This Thread

Hi, Eric - 5 point patches can be a bit odd sometimes. One of the tricks is to select your 5 points, and if the button does not activate, press the "." (period) key, then press it again. The "." key inverts the selection, so when you invert it back again, the button should be activated. On the rare occasions when that does not work, I have found hiding all but the few patches around the 5 points, and using the Lasso selection tool (Shift G) to select the 5 points works.

I don't use sweeper, although I'd like to one day, but I did the first tutorial on the web site, and it worked for me. Did you create your cross section, and give it a named group? Then, create a path, highlight it, and go into Sweeper. Even though the dropdown for Cross-section on the dialogue window is blank, if you click the dropdown arrow, the named group should be there. It was for me anyway

That's a great start - love the render.

Information about the Treez plugin: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=26049 There's a whole forum devoted to A:M features, so it is really good to go and surf here occasionally - I just saw one I'd forgotten about: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showforum=112

You could try the gold and silver from: http://perso.orange.fr/ffave/e_ressources.htm Some of the materials there use extra things that aren't available to download any more, but I think gold and silver are useable.

There's a great grass tutorial at: http://perso.orange.fr/ffave/e_herbes.htm From there, you can change the photos to make different colours, and lengths. You can also tweak the length of the grass in the choreography, using the hair lengthening tool, and probably animate it there too, but I haven't tried that. If you want different types of grass, you can use an image map for the hair, as described at: http://www.hash.com/Technical_Reference/v110/Hair.htm but that would be harder to make it bend in the wind, I think.

??? I used the cube from the primitives, using the top as the emittor. I dragged the cube into a chor twice, so in the Chor I had Shortcut to Cube, and also Shortcut to Cube (2). Using the method described above, I could set each of the cube's emittors independently. (I don't understand the word "driver" in this context either. I shall have to go and surf.)

ParticleDemo.zip An avi movie to illustrate this - the main gotchas are clicking "show more than drivers" and also putting the interpolation to hold. These are shown in the movie. Let me know if this helps - I'm experimenting with Camstudio - I am amazed that 21mb zips down to 1.8mb.