Caroline

Hi, TanMan - Have you worked through The Art Of Animation:Master - TaoA:M? This is the manual that came with the software. There is an entire forum dedicated to completing this, and each exercise takes you further along the road. The address of the forum: The Art Of Animation:Master Exercises 8 - 12 will take you through modelling, and Exercises 10 and 11 show you how to use a rotoscope (that's the term for a 2d picture) to create your 3d model. I'm currently working through TaoA:M myself, and at the end of the book I look forward to receiving a certificate. So I look on this as a full on-line self-paced course to teach me 3d modelling and animation. It's not easy, (Animation:Master is easier than others, though), and if you take it in small steps, you will learn the basics in a few months. And it's fun

Thanks Richard - it's my newbie "don't hurt me!" avatar - when I've finished TaoAM I'll have the skill to make my own, I hope

I did a search on +image +contest and came up with this thread Image Contest Vote which has the link to the contest. Personally, I don't see why you can't vote, even if you did enter it. I don't even see a problem with voting for yourself if you think yours is one of the best (but that's just my personal opinion, probably based on if I ever got to enter a contest I'd want at least one vote ). You get to vote for four, so you still have to vote for other people's as well. When you vote, you enter your email address, and theoretically you should receive a reply, but I think I've only ever had a reply for one contest - usually I get an error. But when I try to vote again, it says I can only vote once, so I am assuming my votes are being counted.

It's not in an obvious place, but it's under the Object's Properties > User Properties. There the poses are shown, and you can right click and delete.

I think it looks great - I love the atmosphere, and the broken up reflection looks good too. Only thing was that I was a bit confused by the wake (wave?) at the end, with the canoe being quite rigid on the water, as ruscular said, a little bobbing maybe.

Sorry, I forgot that mesh is a technical term in 3d . I meant the mesh on the microphone itself, the bit where you speak into it. I was just trying to work out how you would do the holes more easily - was it a lot of splineage, or can you use a transparency map? (I haven't done one of those yet.)

I loved those microphones - how did you do the mesh?

That's a nice fire, Jay. Thinking aloud here - do you think that coloured decals are necessary rather than greyscale? You could have several greyscale ones emitting different colours? I'll put that on the lengthening list to try out. Lens Flare? I haven't come across that being used - is it a good feature? And in what way doesn't it seem to work?

You're right, William, I have a knack for complicating things. I was going to put flickering fire on the back burner as I don't think I'm ready for the whole light thing yet, but today's a new day. We'll see what it brings. (Did you know that if you look at your blue Q in your sig, then look at a white part of the screen, you get red Qs!?)

That one should come with a motion sickness warning Can you not constrain the boat to the spline without the null?

Hooray - I got a moving klieg light gel! The tip there is to add it to the shortcut in the choreography, not, as I discovered after a lo-ong time, the object. It doesn't look much like I thought it would yet, but I'm now going to follow Bruce's tips. (Ungrateful person that I am, Bruce - I 'finished' my fire last night having given up on gel lights, I went for animated intensity. Then I saw your movie, and thought Bother - I'm going to have to redo mine. What a brilliant movie!)

Hi, qube - I just saw your post - I missed it amidst all the festivities, I guess. How did you want the traffic light? With an actual light, or will it do with color? Have you done the TaoAM exercise 12 Lip Poses? You can create ON/OFF poses for color like this example: lights.mov by: 1. Right click in Traffic Light model window, and click New > Pose > On/Off. You then get a new window, and underneath Actions, you get a "Relationship: Short Cut to Traffic Light - Pose1". 2. Click the + next to this Relationship in the Actions section. 3. Next to Shortcut to Traffic Light you will see a red X on top of "Show more than drivers" icon. Click this. You will now be able to change the properties of the groups. If you have a group in your Traffic Light model for the Red light, you can change the color from, for example, brown to red. Like So: If you are very new to A:M, this might make no sense, so please let me know and I will amplify. With an actual light I can't help, as I am still coming to grips with them

And looking at John's very nice explosion, 2 of the emitters had OFF and 2 had ON, and so you only get the alpha channel rendered for the ones where the emitter is OFF. I checked, and turned the other 2 off and got the full alpha channel rendered. Is this the way it's supposed to work?

EUREKA (I think). I'm doing Exercise 16. I took the three tgas from the tutorial, as specified, and in the emitter Color Method, I turned the Additive Color to OFF instead of ON. I also had to put an alpha channel in the tutorial tgas (thank you John), so that I didn't get the black surround on the particles. I now get an alpha channel when rendering. (However, the renders aren't nearly as nice as with the Additive Color ON, but I'm still working on that....)

Good find, Jay - when I take that model and put it into the chor next to my model, it renders the alpha perfectly on that model (not mine). So it should work. The only difference I can see so far is compared to my model, that smoke model is really really tiny. It still works when I resize it though. Screen capture of alpha channel: Mine is on the right and does not show the particles, only the emitter. On the left the emitter is transparent and shows particles. (N.B. It doesn't work either when I make my emitter transparent) I don't think it's the tga, as when I changed the model to use that tga, it still didn't work. I shall experiment more later.... (Yes, I'm using 13.)

Project attached I hope. It's a very simple project just to work out how to do this, just a sphere with the flame material on it. The sphere renders to the alpha channel, but no flame. Thanks for looking, Jay. Project1.prj

I'm trying to get my fire with a flickering light - I've looked through the forum and found that if I render the fire to a tga alpha channel I could apply it as a gel to a klieg light ( ) However, I've tried various ways - the simplest is rendering a ball with the flame material as described in TaoAM Chapter 16. I get the alpha channel for the ball, but the flames do not show in the alpha channel. Am I doing something wrong, or are particles not supposed to show up in the alpha channel? I was reading this thread on Compositing Particles, and, while it is all a bit too hard for me, it does seem to imply that you can get an alpha channel from particles. I tried an EXR sequence with the ball, but the flames only appeared on top of where the ball is - all of the flames that come out of the ball were not there. (I'm sure that there are other ways I could simulate a flickering light, but I did want to see what could be done with alpha channels too.)

Looking at your splines, they seem a bit pointy - have you tried pressing the Page Up key for full resolution, so your splines should be fully curved.

In the PWS Image properties, you can change the transparency colour of an image. For example if you wanted the black color of an image to be transparent, you would choose black as the Key Color. If you do not want any colour to be transparent, you have to change the Key Color of the image to Not Set: Right click the Key Color, and choose Not Set.

Hi, Todd, glad to hear you're following the dream! There's a good discussion on cigarette smoke here: Cigarette Smoking and of course the smoke exercise in the TaoA:M.

Yes, I was playing with something like that - a combination would probably work, if I could line up the rendered tgas properly. John, I've looked at everything you've done (although I still find the occasional previously unfound snippet to amaze and amuse me). Thank you - fascinating. I was going to return to smoke and fire as per schedule, but I am drawn back to flies. I shall have another go at putting it back together using your suggestions....

They are QT movs, but I didn't know if Macs could read zips. But I guess Windows can read .sits, and, thinking more about it, as Jim's homepage is homepage.mac.com/etc I would guess he created them on a Mac. Put it down to one of my many stupid moments.

I was reading Dec 3d World, and there's an article in there about making the Caltex advert, that had a car made out of flies. So, seeing as I'm studying particles, I thought I'd have a go: [attachmentid=22919] It raised a number of questions - like did I do it the easiest way? I emitted fly sprites from the undecalled transparent Porsche, and applied a lot of force to make it go backwards, and then reversed the rendered TGAs. So you can't send particles along a path? I wanted the swarm to form a ball and then swarm along a path to form the car, but I could not get them to join up with the backwards rendered TGAs convincingly. If you send out particles, you have less control than if you drag them behind the emitter, but they don't look right if you drag them. Particles are pretty fun though. The Caltex advert is here (34mb): http://www.animallogic.com/commercials/cal...es/qt/flies.mov and the making of is here: http://www.animallogic.com/commercials/caltex/flies/ CarFlies.mov

Jim Talbot has done some videos on decalling a face, and the first video shows how to flatten - I've used this in v13, so it worked for me the way he showed: They are in zip files, so I guess they're windows only. Flatten Tutorial Features Tutorial Eyebrow Details Tutorial Eyelashes Detail Tutorial

Thanks for the link - some great reading in this and his other tutorials - I hadn't found these. Footsteps in the snow here we come!