entity
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My daughter is interested in going to college. She wants to learn character design and level design for games. I am just a novist designer for cg animation. I would like advice from people in the biz. (I'm going to teach her what I can. She's already getting better than me. I feel like Yoda in "Return of the Jedi".)
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My computer died and I haven't subscribed for years. Do I need a disk in the drive? Does a new subscription mean I have to start all over? I do still have my subscription serial number. Does that still apply.
Its a long story, but 2 years ago I got mugged and had a fractured skull. I have a bit of memory loss. But I'm doing good enough now to come back to A:M. Miss u guys!!!!!! and girls!
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I have been down and out. Off the grid for a while, but I will come back in a couple of months. I miss u guys soooooooooooooooooooooooo much!!!!!!!!!!! I have no computer and no A:M disks, everything I had is gone and I was in a shelter for a while. Things are looking up now. I need a contact for MAAM. I live in North Philly now, so anyone close by would be nice.
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Hey... when is the next meeting... I moved to Philadelphia in August. I'm bout ready for a meeting... hopefully after the snow has been cleared away!
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It looks great...Did you use any Wizards for this? (AI/Font, or some type of rail extruding?)
Never mind, I read the rest of this post... sorry... for hand modeling from scratch it LOOKS GREAT. A few items might need some bevels so they don't look CG. Mostly the parts that have hard angles on them. You are very detailed here and it would add to the realism of the final render, especially for radiosity renders.
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I'm not Dre4mer,Hey, good to see you back here, Rich!
Hey!! Cat-dude!
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I have my model rigged with the 2001 rig and need her sleeves to move like the above movies,so how did you do that?
What bones is the cloth attached to? I have done the cloth and deflector materials and
created new bones, tested all kinds of ideas and just can't seem to get it.
If I attach the material to different arm bones when you move the arm it rolls and flips but
nothing like cloth, any suggestions?dre4mer
I'm not Dre4mer, but I can give you some suggestions to think about til he answers you.
As long as you assign the cloth cps like the body cps, and have all your cloth normals
facing toward the deflector normals, and the distance of the cloth is outside the detection
areas (or lower your Collision Tolerance in the "Chor>Plugin Properties>SimCloth") then "YOU B KOOL"!!
Another good measure is to set the Chore>Plugin Properties>SimCloth>*Solver Precision* way lower than the default *0.01*. I usually use *0.001*
As far as having it flipping too much... maybe doubling the cloths Bend Stiffness might work.
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When is the DEADline?
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Do you realize we all started on the forum a month apart from each other?>>> Vern in Sept. '03, John in Oct. '03, and me in Nov. '03!!! Just some trivia. John.... how you doing with picking some dates???????
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I'm not available those dates. November might be better for me.
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**BUT** we still need to have another bone closely follow this bone on the track (and many to follow that one too)- and the answer is simple: translate and orient a bone to the main tread and have it lag 1 in the orient and translate properties. then do the same with each tread bone you make... just translate and orient like the previous bone (piggy-backing).Eventually all of the lagging upon the previous bone causes A:M to multiply the computation for each bone down the line- not the most economical way to do it... the answer to making it computationally easy is to make all the treads orient and translate to the main tread bone, but with each next bone increase the lag by one unit (to make things simple: my unit= 1). You can adjust the unit to be anything that makes the treads fit next to each other better. My tread belt needs 36 treads to complete the link.
I'm still working on a solution to the timing issue... and I'm close.
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* the cps will not longer be equally spaced.This causes the timing problem... to compensate I'm going to try something to control the speed. I don't want to use aan expression... actually an expression could solve this whole problem. A brainstorm is needed here...
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Looks pretty interesting, though I see a few issues in the video.Yes... the tread skips on the loop... and the timing is not perfect... I will be working on this again, but first I must work on the other two special rigs I've been trying to work out and it wasn't really my intention to work on this, it was just "happenstance" and I clumsily tripped into this idea. I have an I dea for non-penetrating armor rig and a muscle rig.
I will be back soon.
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I was just experimenting with ways to use one bones movement to affect anothers and making a chain of wacky bones that move in all sorts of directions and ways... and it sorta just sparked in my mind:
Tank tread movement is sorta an eliptical movement- if I can get a bone to move in an eliptical path (without using a path), half the battle would be over. The details and math I don't know, but visually I can speculate the angles and speed of things, which led me to Turn a bone at an angle so that the handle movement looks like an elipse. Now how do I get a bone to only travel in x,y of this handle movement? #1- child a target bone to that bone in line with the handle. #2- make another bone (tread bone) translated to the same spot of the target bone. #3- now you need translate limits constraint on this tread bone. set so the bone can move freely in (world) x,y movement but restrict z to "0".
WOW the tread moves in an eliptical path..... but if I limit (world) y movement the eliptical movement is cut off by this and looks more like a belt that is streatched across two drive wheels.
**BUT** we still need to have another bone closely follow this bone on the track (and many to follow that one too)- and the answer is simple: translate and orient a bone to the main tread and have it lag 1 in the orient and translate properties. then do the same with each tread bone you make... just translate and orient like the previous bone (piggy-backing).
I've provided a *prj* file that you can look at or for observation. anyone that wants to take this and build on it you have my permission... try to post here or link to this post so all the info is available to people.
Thanks.
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MAC!!!!! Your Back!!! With another mini-mac? OMG!!!
You guys want to try a virtual meeting? Skype is the best way to connect. I probably will just need some notice in email and I'll be there... I'm working on DSP/TekNu right now.
RJ
PS- Mac- if you can get us into the museum--- WOWWWW!!!!---- I wonder how much that would cost?
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Hey guys...
I know we have already discussed this in emails, but lets make it official...
The meeting date is - 21/6/08 ! June 21,2008 ! Saturday after next Saturday ! 11 days away!
Please, start preparing your data NOW!
Presentations should be spontaneous, as usual.
Who will be attending, and where are we meeting?
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I will be at the next meeting...physically! I promis! I'm sorry, but I had a ride there and then I didn't at the last minute and as Don and I found out later after the last meeting, the bus schedule is a little awkward and I'm not sure where all of the bus stops are in the area, because they are not marked on both sides of the road. I miss you guys, terribly!
Vern- your ROR demo was ok... I was following along there, I still have a few more questions and I still want to "see" the code that was written by the program... I think it's amazing. But I couldn't grasp the editing part that you were doing because I couldn't see what was being edited, but I understood what was going on because you gave a very detailed discription of what was happening. Thanks.
Don- Are you going to help with the opening sequence of TekNu... (the space background animation?) If so, you have total freedom. Do what you think will sell it as space. We can composit ships in later. Can you give us a sample of what you are going to do so we can see what you have in mind? (The animatic for TekNu is just a guide and any work done doesn't have to perfectly align to the way I did the shots... the camera position and length of scenes can be changed. Thanks!)
Maybe sometime we could have a "virtual" meeting? Like when we haven't had a meeting for a long time and we want to fit one in between meetings?
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DJBreit:
You are correct! I know what you are doing here. Also the advice the others are giving you here is correct as well. You are going for exacting radius of how bones interact in the physical world. Obviously, you have found a way to put this into a rig. New ideas are always needed for greater detail... and it is my assumption this rig would not be used for a cartoon character or anime hero... this rig is for realistic characters?
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I found the project for the fake volume clouds. It's a 3.81 MB zip file. It uses A:Mv14... it may work in v13, but I don't know.
::CAUTION:: it will emit a LARGE amount of particles so I have two choreographies to choose from... Chor1 has one cloud (you'll have to change the camera POV to get a good angle.)... Chor2 has the multiple clouds with a nice backround sky image.
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Well, I slowed it down, but I got some popping in it now.[edit] updated, got rid of the popping.
The effect you're getting here is beautiful!
I've been experimenting with clouds to get some sort of volume shading effect. The best way I could come up with is changing the cookie-cut map to have a gradient shading with a nicely broken alpha "cloud shape"...
... in the animation I uploaded, gravity is set to (0,0,0) so the particles don't move, but the idea is the same.
I used grids to emitt different shades of particles. To get the different shades to work I incorperated different poses to control the particle color and size and emission rates for each patch on the grid. You don't need all of that control for this scene, but I was seeing how far I could push this experiment and A:M. The movement of the grids is controled by paths. This was only labor intensive in the rendering stage. I really didn't need as many emissions as I thought so the amount of particles in the scene is way more than my computer wanted to handle. Because of the shape of the cookie-cut map, you don't need very many to make it look like a cloud. I will try something lower rez later.
By the way... I can't find the project to upload it for you, but I have the grid model/with poses. Let me know if this will help out any. If you want the TGA of the clouds cookie cut textures, I can upload or send to you via email, but you could actually make the one I made by copy/paste of the images I have here.
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Vern: Yeah.
John: the 22nd of March
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We do go at it a bit! :- ) i wish I had time to write a manual! With luch more tech tutorials coming. December 1 is on, but the place is up in the air. Don, if you can host, great, if not, i can... but maybe somewhere in philly? Like the old days? We Shall see. we got to have the christmas meeting, it will be just to much fun.here is a suggestion, we all make a "holiday model in AM and we all import it into one scene and render and post it? and we WONT tell one another what we are going to make.... that might be fun... thoughts? we could make anything from a snowflake to a slead to a Christmas robot to an evil christmas robot or whatever anyone likes... even a holiday rock? thoughts?
That sounds like an interesting idea.
That reminds me... I forgot to ask you guys for your opinion on something at the last meeting.
Would you guys be interested in taking a crack at working on a short Star Wars fan film in A:M?
We've all got our own separate projects that we are working on now so I know this could be tough but I've been itching to shift gears out of Mechadelphia for a bit and do something like this for a while now.
What do you guys think?
Star Wars??????????????? Are you kiding... ???????- I certainly would like to do that! Unfortunately, I hope I'm not the only one. I didn't even see your post in september! I would have answered earlier.
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OK, Nancy, maybe Martin has decided that some scenes would have post processing in the NLE pass? I just have this feeling there is going to have to be some final overall post processing done.
...Also, I don't know what happened to you on those renders at your last attempt, but it seemed to work for me,... it could not have been the settings I used, because the project and files downloaded again right before rendering. This net rendering is so mysterious to me...
Need advice on good schools for game design...
in Open Forum
Posted
Thanks for that. I went to one. I did everything too fast, and wasn't ready when I graduated. I just want her to not do what I did. But I have faith that she is going to b alright. I did all I can do for now.