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I've begun building the sets for my short film project, and I thought people may be interested in having a look at how they were working out. I've posted an image to my website with an example. I'd be interested in peoples thoughts. http://www.shaunfreeman.com/cuckoo_images.htm Cheers Shaun

Check out this thread. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5635 You can download the project file here to use with the treez plug-in. http://johnl.inform.net/pages/treeswithleaves.htm

Wade, According to you you got some answers via Greg's demo. If there is anything else we need to nail down... we can do it. A good place to continue the dicussion though might be in the New Users Forum. Unless, of course, you are gonna show us more of your project!

Hey- Meet Harriet. Good Side: V 11's hair modelling tools are quite nice, and I love the way they react to your characters motion...I'm having fun and look forward to rigging Harriet with TSM and the new CP weights... Bad Side: This model keeps crashing the renderer. On this test I was lucky to get 69 frames rendered, but it was a 150 frame chor. I set it to render overnight, usually, and come in to see A:M has crashed. Today I came in and saw it had crashed so I figured maybe I should download the latest version, 11E. So I did, and then went to open this project. Crash. So I uninstalled v11 and cleaned out the registry. Reinstalled, open proj-crash, open model-crash, import model-crash... I finally had to open the model thru v 10.5, which made me delete the hair, but I was at least able to salvage the model... so I get to start all over on styling the hair, which is OK because I need to practice, but...c'mon! Qeustion: Does anyone know if the new hair respondes to forces? I havent been able to get it to... hair_V11.mov

I really love this project. Just beautiful.

OK, here goes... Life got in the way of this project for a few days, but I'm back. I modeled a basic stand-in neck and I started putting things together a few days ago and it was looking really nice, unfortunately I wasn't sequentially saving at the time and my body model got screwed up. I sent it off to hash, and they're cleaning it up right now, but until then I decided I should still model the pieces I'm missing. Pickguard: super basic stuff, used reference images to draw an outline. Extruded. Closed off. Very complicated, huh? Well here it is anyways. 56 patches. more to come soon. I hope to find a better way to model the neck than the last way I tried. I'll probably end up making it a bit simpler than it is in actuality. Zack

William, THANKS! This is great. I love the idea of all the decals on one image. That will eliminate a lot of project clutter. I have seen samples like this but didn't know how it was done. Thanks again, Jim

Thanks. The problem is that I need to make the mountain part of the grid's geometry. If you have the Siggraph 2000 training tapes, look at Brian Prince's landscape tutorial. He has a grid that has been modeled into a set of cliffs. The splines are physically (?) shaped to make the cliffs. i need this because I need to model things like buildings and a tube running up the mountain. That will also allow me to do a realtime flyby for my class. Isn't there some kind of plugin for this? Here's the project. Use the above image as the displacement map. K2.prj

Smudge, You've done some really great work here. Your project looks ambitious but it's obvious from your hard work so far that you can manage it. Well done. Adam

Philip, Very cute! Well done. The animation is simple and direct. Two Questions: Is the character made for a professional or a personal project? Are you creating more actions/animation with him? In other words I'd like to know more about your character and what your plans for him are/were!

ok, yet another portion done, I have now made 7 scenes. { PROJECT FINISHED DELET THIS THREAD } It is 22 MB and 1 minute and 27 seconds long. I wish I could make it smaller, but I just don't have the tools like divx, I am sorry. I still hope it is worth the download for everyone, 56kers I am so sorry, I will try and fix this somehow.

I've been working on a toon flower model for the trees with leaves project. I discovered something interesting. You can control hair guides with a pose slider. The model is set up for toon render, but I think I'll be able to set an image for the petals for normal renders. I'll be adding sliders for color, size of petals and for flower growth. Let me know what you think.

Wow. (jaw drops). I'm still in shock. That was great! Awesome! Superb! everything flowed smoothly together and everything. Wow. So how long did that take you? It's obviuos that you put tons of effort into it. Also, the A:M film page said it was award winning. What award did you win? and (last but not least) what did you do to get those statues to melt? (the ones that are after he gets off the train). I'm going to be doing a project with a character that melts, so it would be great to figure out how to do that. All in all, great work!

When I think it's done I post it for download as an add-on to the trees with leaves project. Still have a few things to work out. I'll see what I can do John.

Hi all, just wanted to share the results of my current project. Color of hair in generated by a bitmap. The Hairsystem is so cool, but after working a while with it, i would love to have som additional tools/options: It would be great to group/hide control splines. Brushing seems to affect only tle last controllpoints on a spline :-( If i highlight a cp in one view and change to another, the selection is gone :-( aside from that ... cool stuff! Cheers Heiner

Personaly working with his eye character I can say it is rigged well, easy to use, and fun. After I am done with my current project I think I will animate a short with the eye.

hmm. Well, I am animating like mad. so this next one is 19 MB and 1minute 14 seconds long. I wish they were smaller, sorry. Right now I am a little over halfway done with the whole animation. Enjoy. { PROJECT FINISHED DELET THIS THREAD } site is http://www.psyog.cjb.net Have fun with watching this, hope it is worth the download to you guys. Remember this is based on a true story that happend to me last saterday, just exagerated a bit.

I am still working I have the next part ready and the link is... { PROJECT FINISHED DELET THIS THREAD } It is 17 MB, I wish I had DivX but my trial expirerd, bummer. This one goes up to 1:06 seconds and I am already working on the next part. Sorry for the size, I will try and find ways to shrink it for all you 56kers, I used to be one and I know how it feels . Enjoy this next part. More coming soon, probobly tommarow or later tonight lol, with summer here I can animate as long as my brother sleeps in .

Progressing slowly but making progress little by little. It seems that each time I think it might be a good time to post on A:M Digest related happenings the timing just hasn't been right. Just to let everyone know where we are at this time here is a little update. The year is being broken down into themed issues. 12 themes in twelve issues. Underneath those 12 themes are 52 basic sub-themes. For instance: One theme (currently expected to be issue #4) is the "History" Issue. Four sub-themes start to emerge: - Hash Inc History - Community History - Animation:Master Features and Progression - Year in Review (and on to the future) I know that is a bit too generalized but thought I would give everyone at least something to think about. Especially you old timers... Do you recall something that others might find interesting. An example under Community History: Within the Community theme there is space for the legendary users of A:M to say their piece about what they have done and are doing with A:M. There will be space for new users too! So anyone who would like to promote what you are working on... or just say "I'm a part of the A:M Community" there should be space to do just that. Other sub themes aren't hard to guess. Just look at the current (and past) feature list. Then look at the Image and Animaiton contest themes... lot of potential there! Here are a few possibilities: A:M Forum/Community Navigation Anime Booleans Chat Choreography Coloring/Textures/Materials Comic Books/Heroes Contol Point Weights Customizable toolbars, menus and keyboard shortcut keys Decal View (UV Editor) Displacement Materials Distortion Boxes Dynamic Constraints Expressions Gaming Hair Hash Fellows Lighting (Reflective Blend/Reflection Filter/Soft Reflections/Fresnel Term/Light Attenuation etc.) Magnet Mode Mechanical Modeling Modeling Multiplane/Compositing Music/Sound Integration Netrender Non Linear Animation Optimum System Setup Plugins/Wizards Post Effects Programming Props Rendering/Render Settings/Multi-Pass Rigging Solutions SciFi/Fantasy Shading SIGGRAPH/Trade Show schedule Software Development Kit Sprite Emitters Support Timeline and Project Workspace Toon Rendering User Groups User Interface/Navigation Webpages and Establishing a Web Presence Well, that's not 52... but you get the idea... Once any specific sub-theme gets enough good information/articles to 'complete' a themed issue it will be put on the official schedule. So, deadlines are on a sliding scale to help everyone get involved. Do you see something I've missed? Would you like to contribute to a certain theme or lend your expertise to an specific area? I look forward to hearing from you! Let's get published! Rodney

Thanks JacK, I am interested cog cd in because I only hear good things about it.However I will not purchase it just yet because to do so now will defeat the goal of the Niomi project which is to push my skills in modelling,texturing,rigging and character animation to the higgest and share what I have learned with AM community.The effort is slooow in coming but is paying big dividends for me of which the rig is one.I don't know what new discoveries I will make but with your encouragement I will keep pushing Luv Pat

Thanks for the replies, people. I'm rerendering as I type this and hope to get the results of some of the minor tweaks up by Thursday at the latest. Now to address some comments and questions. CreativeAustin Yankee - There are actually thirteen lights making the glow of Thom. Extending from his feet to his head. I will probably use more lights in my project. I'm not certain why it looks like the light is predominately eminating from the middle of the character. :shrug: KingSalami - More info will be forth coming on this, if people are interested. But in a nutshell, the clip is comprised of three renders. A background render (contains all scene elements except for Thom), a gray-scale render (to create the transparency), and the render of Thom doing the action (contains all scene elements except for the glow effect). They are then composited together in Final Cut Pro.

Go to page 1 of this thread and you can download it there. There is a project file there too.

Hit a snag with patch count and limited computer resources. Experimented a bit with V11.0 and hair, but it's not quite ready for what I'm after. I have reworked a branch of my model to reduce patch count and increase leaf coverage at the same time. Here is an old branch with 2772 patches and 168 leaves: Here is the new branch with 1104 patches and 240 leaves: I basically reduced the patch count by replacing the leaf cluster stems with rendered lines. I further reduced the count by reducing the lathe cross section of the branch forms to 4. Thats a 60% reduction in patch count with a %43 increase in the number of leaves. I think I will make the trees smaller with fewer branches, too. My workhorse computer became terminally ill recently. Took this as an excuse to build a new one: AMD Athlon64 3400 with 1G of RAM and 240G of hard disk space. Maybe that will help some, too. Wish me luck getting the project done! Bill Gaylord

Not sure what super secret activities Vern is up to these days but the New Filter I believe has been certified "Vern-free" by some to top security people in the biz. The filtering feature allows you to locate words in the Project Work Space (PWS) that otherwise might be hard to find. I haven't used filtering so can't comment much on it's utility in production with A:M. For those with more complex projects I would imagine it could be quite useful!

I spent wednesday playing around on what you can do with hair, and just barelly getting into it. Selecting the mesh for hair emitter of my model (Erica) from my old V8.5 project. The new hair adds so much life into my model. Its almost like a barbie doll as someone pointed it out. The Hair emitter came with direct manipulation tool, and a comb, and lenghtener tool. I choose 3 point sectional hair, and in hindsight I would of maybe go for 5 for better shaping. I wanted to basically know how the toon render would be with the hair. For the life of me I had a couple of render that render the hair out to toon, and not really knowing what I did to make that render not render toon for the hair anymore. I would have like to show you both ways. Anyway I did get a toon render of the model with the hair and a realistic render of the hair.