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My first 3d project


EraserX

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I'm working on a personal project I hope to animate sometime soon. When I finish this model, it will be my first real completed 3d model. The entire thing is being modeled in Animation Master 9.5 (atleast until I upgrade to 10). As I get further along, I'll be posting finished models, textures and storyboards. Any tips, crits, or input are greatly appreciated. I'm teaching myself as I go.

 

testrender.jpg

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Very nice. Like the other Mike said, it's impressive for a first model. If only my first one looked that good! :lol:

 

The abs are a bit "blocky" though. And the bottom of the ribcage is a bit undefined and there's some some wrinkles in that area that just don't match the rest of the model. Minor nits, those are, imho.

 

Looking forward to the face getting done.

 

Again, great job!

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Let me just say first that this is an amazing first model. I still have trouble with the human form.

 

Now on to the crit. The ears don't seem to be sticking off the head at all. All ear, even ears that lie against the head, still seem to stick out a little. These seem molded right out of the "clay" of the head. It makes it look sculpted rather than a 3D model.

 

That is the only crit I can come with right now. Great work.

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I worked a lot on smothing out the face and correcting problems with the ears. Also, some other minor things here and there. If anyone has seen something explaining a good way to approach teeth and the inside of the mouth with spline modeling, I'd love to see it.

 

rendertest4.jpg

 

rendertest5.jpg

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looking realy good there. If I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about smoothing until you upgrade. v10.5 and later treat geometry differently and a lot of the creases that are there will go if you use biased normals. (you will have to find the icon in the customise options and drag it into a toolbox). Porcilain can also help.

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Hey John -

Could you explain a bit more about biased normals? How do you control and/or set ?

 

Thanks and sorry for the hijack eraserX.

 

Doug

No worries. I'm curious about this myself. Does it just change the way the default on the bias handles? Personally, I've used vector programs for quite a while and when I started using A:M, it was very difficult for me to leave those alone. After seeing a demo of how much trouble they can cause on animated models, I've been able to control myself though.

 

On a side note, does anyone know what company delivers for Hash? I ordered next day service for my upgrade and I'm hoping to get it tomorrow, but I'm not sure if they deliver on Saturdays.

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Biased normals are just like normal splines only you don't get ridges (as long as the patches are quite even and square). If you go to the customise tab in v10.5 then you will be able to add some icons to your modelling menue (it is a while since I did this so I can't remember exactly how to do it and I don't have acces to AM at time of writing). Anyways, once you have added the biased normal icon (a slanty red line) you can select all of your geometry then click it and you will hopefully see ridges dissapear.

 

Biased normals also can have a more rounded appearence. They do have the dissadvantage that they can be sensitive as to what is going on around them so they sometimes flip about but I have yet to find this a problem.

 

Porcelain is a good finishing touch and you can get a realy smooth result with it. Make sure all of your normals are facing the right way though.

 

Porcilain is a material that you can find in the geometry folder in materials in your cd.

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Ouch, but :lol: at the same time. (For inscrutable reasons since before this forum was born). Try removing the plug-in, as in delete the offending sucker and run AM. If it works, then maybe try reinstalling just the plug-in?

 

Alternatley, delete AM, defrag, reinstall components from a clean slate?

 

I'm still back with 8.5p and that shader's been with AM since at least 8.5. I cna't believe this bug is something added in via the .exe... that would be pretty silly.

 

G'luck.

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Well, I deleted 10.5 and reinstalled again without the update and it atleast starts now, but I'm having loads of other problems. For one, every time I try to open a project, the program shuts down. Not to mention the fact that it still shuts down randomly for some odd reason. I'm also having trouble with the porcelain material. It's beautiful where it works, but all of my 5 point patches and some non 5 points have a wierd black area around them. I tried flipping the normals and it atleast makes them not black, the shading is still off. I even tried breaking and remaking some of the splines and it fixed some, but not all of the problem areas. I'm just getting really frustrated. I heard upgrading would fix the stability issues and thought it wouldn't have to run off the cd anymore.

 

:sigh:

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After fixing the 5 point patches, if you find that the shading is still off, add some geometry and then get rid of it (just add a spline in the middle of space and right click to undo the operation). Iether do this or save and re-load the model. The artifacts shoud be gone.

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I just can't catch a break with this program. Now when I open my project (atleast it finally opens) the model looks like what you see on the left. I figured out that changing the Bias InMagnitude and OutMagnitude to 0%, then back to 100% fixes the problem, but even if I save, I get the same problem every time I open the project. This is getting just a little bit ridiculous. Animation Master would be such an awesome program if it would just work without all the little bugs.

 

whatthe.jpg

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It looks like you're using the Porcelain material; so the weirdness could be coming from patches whose normals are facing inward. Do a shift-1 and that'll make the normals indicators come on. The yellow things should be pointing outward. On the ones that are pointing inward, click on the patch selection tool and then on the offending patch. Hit the f key (to flip normals) and that should make them look better.

 

Sometimes, in my case, with nothing selected I hit the pgUP key (which increases the polycount for the shaded view) and that sometimes makes weird stuff go away (like it's a screen redraw prob.).

 

hth

 

mike r.

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Thanks for the tips guys. I managed to fix the black spots by flipping the normals. Unfortunately, every time I open the project it still looks all garbled like above and I have to mess with the bias settings to get it back to normal. Anyways...

 

I also modified the body a little to make it closer to my own. (I made the muscles less defined) Hopefully, I'll be back to making some quicker progress soon.

 

me.jpg

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It's just possible that your file might be a little corrupt. You might want to try and select all the CVs, copy them, create a new model and paste them back in there. See if that helps.

 

Oh, and when working...save new versions all the time. Disk space is cheap, a ruined model is not.

 

Ragnar

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