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Paul Forwood

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Started modifying the hat.

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AE_WIP_A01.mov

72 years ago, almost to the hour, Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E vanished with Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, while making a second attempt to fly around the world. Some say they perished while others speculated about further adventures which have added a touch of mystery and intrigue to her image.

 

Quoted from Wikipedia:

On July 2, 1937 (midnight GMT) Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae in the heavily loaded Electra. Their intended destination was Howland Island, a flat sliver of land 6,500 ft (2,000 m) long and 1,600 ft (500 m) wide, 10 feet (3 m) high and 2,556 miles (4,113 km) away. Their last known position report was near the Nukumanu Islands, about 800 miles (1,300 km) into the flight. The United States Coast Guard cutter Itasca was on station at Howland, assigned to communicate with Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E and guide them to the island once they arrived in the vicinity.

 

In her last known transmission at 8:43 a.m. Earhart broadcast "We are on the line 157 337. We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait." However, a few moments later she was back on the same frequency (3105 kHz) with a transmission which was logged as a "questionable": "We are running on line north and south." Earhart's transmissions seemed to indicate she and Noonan believed they had reached Howland's charted position, which was incorrect by about five nautical miles (10 km). The Itasca used her oil-fired boilers to generate smoke for a period of time but the fliers apparently did not see it. The many scattered clouds in the area around Howland Island have also been cited as a problem: their dark shadows on the ocean surface may have been almost indistinguishable from the island's subdued and very flat profile.

 

Whether any post-loss radio signals were received from Earhart and Noonan remains controversial. If transmissions were received from the Electra, most if not all were weak and hopelessly garbled. Earhart's voice transmissions to Howland were on 3105 kHz, a frequency restricted to aviation use in the United States by the FCC. This frequency was not thought to be fit for broadcasts over great distances. When Earhart was at cruising altitude and mid-way between Lae and Howland (over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from each) neither station heard her scheduled transmission at 0815 GCT. Moreover, the 50-watt transmitter used by Earhart was attached to a less-than-optimum-length V-type antenna.

 

The last voice transmission received on Howland Island from Earhart indicated she and Noonan were flying along a line of position (taken from a "sun line" running on 157-337 degrees) which Noonan would have calculated and drawn on a chart as passing through Howland. After all contact was lost with Howland Island, attempts were made to reach the flyers with both voice and Morse code transmissions. Operators across the Pacific and the United States may have heard signals from the downed Electra but these were unintelligible or weak.

 

Some of these transmissions were hoaxes but others were deemed authentic. Bearings taken by Pan American Airways stations suggested signals originating from several locations, including Gardner Island. It was noted at the time that if these signals were from Earhart and Noonan, they must have been on land with the aircraft since water would have otherwise shorted out the Electra's electrical system. Sporadic signals were reported for four or five days after the disappearance but none yielded any understandable information. The captain of the USS Colorado later said "There was no doubt many stations were calling the Earhart plane on the plane's frequency, some by voice and others by signals. All of these added to the confusion and doubtfulness of the authenticity of the reports."

 

The full story: Amelia Earhart

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Thanks for the encouragement. :)

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HairShadowTest_AM15f__A00.mov

A very quick test of hair in A:M 15f. Grooming seems more responsive and shadows DO NOT appear to be working. Render times are about three times as long as in A:M14c, and growing! :o That might be due to changes in hair or SSS in A:M 15.

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Haven't been able to do much lately but here is something that I have just started:

 

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Bark_Test_A00b.mov (Loop in slow-mo if possible)

 

This is pretty much a proxy model at the moment at 1134 patches and no textures. That figure will go up significantly when I start adding all the ship's rigging. Currently there is no interaction between the boat and the water but I intend to do that by hand.

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Thanks, Luuk! Yeah, quite a coincidence! :) Your Flying Dutchman RC is absolutely brilliant by the way!

 

Thanks, Mark! I see that the Sea Anemone has just launched too.

 

I have discovered a more reliable image of the great cabin windows so I'm going to remodel them based on that drawing and on some old ship plans for ships of a similar design and era. This is about where the model stands at the moment:

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BarkTest_A02a.mov

 

The Spleen's new thread got me sparked up to do another character. Still in the modelling, rigging and weighting stage. The current poses are just to help me as I weight the CPs but I will give him a good range of orator's expressions eventually.

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Barack_A02d.mov

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Thanks, guys! :)

 

Mark, I didn't manage to do any expressions for him today but I am hoping to get some roughed out tomorrow evening. Maybe then he will start to look more like Obama.

 

Ken, I will post something to YouTube when I have something more complete. At the moment I am still tweaking the geometry and weighting.

 

Robert, I haven't done the texturing yet but those features will appear when I get to that stage. Later in the week.

 

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Some minor tweaks.

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Pretty much, Steve. I 'm fairly certain that when Southpark started the animation was achieved with traditional construction paper techniques but they moved production onto computers at some stage. If I'm not mistaken they used Alias Wavefront, but you might want to check that.

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Edit: I have just found this description of the Southpark workflow:

Southpark Workflow

 

Cool! :)

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I would imagen its difficult to keep a 2d look working on a computer

Not at all. Just ensure that your camera and cutouts don't rotate and turn up the ambience on your models to avoid shadows, etc.

 

MJCK_A00a.mov

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Edit: Actually, after reading that article about Southpark production I should reintroduce the shadows. I haven't used any textures/decals on these models yet. This is just a bit of fun and helps my son out with a little project that he is involved with at university.

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