Caroline

I've been working with A:M 2007 on Vista for a couple of days now. I accidentally bought the 64-bit version, so I expected more problems than I've had. Everything seems to work great - I had a bit of a hiccup about rotoscopes and decals showing white, but that's because I'd forgotten that Vista doesn't support OpenGL, but once I did the Aha moment and changed to DirectX it is fine. My community text was not showing up the other day, but it is now, so I can't blame Vista for that I guess. (That's not to say that every other program works well on Vista though ) Just saw Rodney's post - my graphics card is an ATI Radeon X800. I haven't even installed drivers for it - they seem to be built into Vista.

Brilliant. Can I ask questions? How long does it take to render this? Do you have a light setup that you always use and drop the models into it? Is it 3 point lighting, or lots of kliegs? Do you use A:M Composite? (I was recently storing away my 16 yr old son's lego (sniff!) and he built those special models just once, but I noticed that in the last couple of years the only bricks he used were the original rectangular blocks.)

I thought that was looking good and smooth without porcelain, but here's a small tute on it: Porcelain Tutorial. To find the actual material, if you do a Search for porcelain.mat on your CD you should find it.

What a great character, Gerry. I'm looking forward to the feature Are these in poses? With the nod, maybe his antennae could move - are they dynamic whosits? (I haven't got that far yet!)

You did mean that the patch won't fill, rather than not render? Have you tried the lasso tool? I have been able to close every 5 point patch by hiding everything in the way of the patch and using the lasso tool (shift G) to go around those 5 points and select them. Other things you can try are inverting the selection, so you select the 5 points, then press . to invert, and . again. That often helps. Also, you can try breaking and reattaching the points to the splines. The lasso tool works best for me though. Good luck with the penguin - I thought perhaps the flippers needed more flesh on them, but perhaps it's just the angle (the eyes weren't straight either, so it probably was the angle).

Nice plane. Dhar wrote a 3dPainter startup tutorial: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=23896 You can do automatic decalling in 3dPainter, but I think it looks better if you actually separate out all the bits for separate painting. Although if you're only painting bits of the plane, then you'd probably get away with it. Colin's head texturing William Sutton's definitive tutorial After I'd played around with 3dPainter for some time, I read the manual, and it's very good. Looking forward to seeing the painted plane!

Yes, I linked it, mage, any doofus could do that - what about all the words of wisdom that you can throw in about actually using it? Did you have to apply the decal in a special way? Does it need special lighting? Does it resize OK? What about all the other questions that I don't know to ask?

My bad - brain read but did not process, thanks for pointing out, Luuk. Black_mage has one for download, that I just rendered and looks good, but you have to register at Turbosquid (free): http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/307149 You could also try these links: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=22031 http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=20048

Disclaimer - I know nothing about it! But here's a couple of links that might get you going: http://www.ypoart.com/tutorials/skylights-intro.htm http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...mp;hl=sky++dome Have a search for "skylight".

Nice tute, Lee. There is one by the Master of Lighting himself, Yves - http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=P...=36&t=10132 It's very comprehensive, and I have to admit I haven't done it yet. Great turkey, Caleb.

That would be so hard to do a project - I think I would hate it after that. For me it's always been like Edward Lear's nonsense poems, with not much else to be read into it. But wonderful language and rhythm and images nonetheless.

No, no, mage - I love the trees - they fit in so well with the style.

Those Rig>Setup poses are a bit tricky. If you move the arm, and then turn IK Arm Setup ON, then you get what you are describing. Similarly if you move the feet, and then change the IK Legs pose, you get odd things happening. You could try a new action (or Action Menu > Clear), and leave those rig poses alone and see what happens.

That's an amazing baby - you've even captured his worried expression. Babies' heads are big - it's part of why they're supposed to look cute.

That's very nice - the front wheel guard appears to have a dent in it (where the head light points out). I guess with such a perfectly rounded car, our eyes expect to see a rounded wheel guard.

Still looking good - though some of your splines do look peaked (pointed rather than curved) - you can select the control point (cp) of a peaked spline and press "O" to smooth it. Did you fix your normals problem? (All your normals should be pointed outwards.) You could experiment with the materials that came with A:M - there's an Aluminium Tech one. The Darktree link is http://www.darksim.com/ and go to Darktree Repository. Otherwise, it's decalling - that's a bit more complicated, but you get to paint whatever you want on your plane, and it's a lot quicker to render than materials. The definitive decalling tutorial is at http://www.zandoria.com/uv.htm.

I caved in and googled - this was one of the hits: http://www.scamorama.com/jetson.html. It's Astro replying to a request for assistance from a Nigerian.

Let me be the first to leave you some feedback, Rodney I've looked at posts like David Higgins' baby and Michael Fortunato's TaoA:M, thinking I don't have the qualifications to be able to comment on those, I'll leave the comments to people who REALLY know - all I'd be able to say is "wow, fabulous, looks good to me", but I guess if it looks good it IS good, and if it looks wonky, then it IS wonky, so maybe I do have the qualifications after all.

The only thing I can think of: After making the bones, did you assign the control points to the bones? Create the bone, then make sure the bone is selected and lasso the relevent control points for that bone. In shaded mode you can then see what cps are assigned to what colour bone. Have you checked what the shaded model in bone mode looks like?

And here's The Making of the Leopard Queen which is an in-depth explanation. Brilliant. I went straight to the Tutorials section - So many to choose from, but I pick, again from Jim Talbot, the Texturing A Head movies. (In Tutorials > Decaling > Jim Talbot.) (Oh, and because I can't pick just one - the Proxy Model.pdf in Tutorials > ProxyModels.)

Thank you, Frost - I was in danger of drifting off 'the straight and narrow' and making it 'my own interpretation' (ie - not being able to work out why it doesn't look quite right!). I've been experimenting with the hair on the claws, but I think you're right, they need to be bigger. I've not rotoscoped him at all, just working with a pic at the top of the screen (thankyou DeskPins). Also, working in landscape, rather than portrait, makes it look a bit different. I'm having fun with the choice of colours, as that is completely up to me - I hope you won't be disappointed in that. (I did toy with salmon pink, but changed because I'd really like him to have a red waistcoat, but I guess if he were salmon pink, it could have been a black waistcoat.) He was originally green, but I thought that was a bit too obvious and dragon-like for the Lewis Carroll world. I'd love to see your animated film - it is a brill poem.

Lookin' good, Noganite (not that I'd know much about flying machines). Only one thing - the normals on the top of the plane look as if they're pointing in, which may lead to surfacing troubles later on. You'll need to patch select, and do right click > Flip Normals (or press F key). (Just in case they are annoying you, you can also turn the normal pointers off in Tools Menu > Options > Modelling tab > Display Normals untick.)

Hi, Daniel - welcome to the forums! You could also try resetting all the settings. Click Help Menu > Reset Settings.

Thanks, guys. Chrury - "group project" - lol - it's barely more than a twinkle in my mind! Just a li'l project so I can learn more. (And definitely go for TaoA:M - you'll learn heaps.) Update: I lost my rigging - moral (at least, I think that's what happened): don't mess with Copy/Flip/Attach after you've rigged - seems obvious now! Almost got it back again now. I spent the whole weekend doing this: Doesn't seem like much, but, thanks to Will Sutton's definitive decalling tute, and his great video on the Siggraph training CD, I think I'm almost on top of decalling.

Your's works for me as well, Rodney, (I bet if you were ever chased by a dragon you'd lose that sword pretty fast, no matter how shiny and new ) and I like the exaggerated rollback eyes. I think the issue with this image, though, is the quality of the render - I think it's the dust that doesn't swirl quite naturally enough, but I'd be interested in your comments on how to make the image a better "quality". I've noticed that the winning images have a kind of soft focus yet still sharp quality, that I don't know how to reproduce, and I don't have the techno-language to describe it either. Is it all in the lighting? Thank you, Riste, for making your image available for this kind of critique.