Doug's Den

[Dpendleton77]

I am going to give this a new. I am trying to model a guitar among other things.

[Dpendleton77]

Question how can I change the light in this scene. I want to make it dark like space. Thanks.

[robcat2075]

Question how can I change the light in this scene. I want to make it dark like space. Thanks.

First, I would change the camera's background color to black.

[Dpendleton77]

Thank you I will do that. I will see to it.

[Dpendleton77]

More fun and fruit.

[Dpendleton77]

More.

[pdaley]

Are you staying at a low patch count intentionally?

[Dpendleton77]

Yes for right now as I learn. I want to start simple and then build for there.

[pdaley]

Have you done any rigging on these guys yet?

[Dpendleton77]

Not yet. I am kind of scared of the rigging thing. I have toyed with rigging but I have not went hardcore on it yet. I think I will go home tonight and make a new character from scratch and attempt to rig it.

[pdaley]

You might make a copy of what you're doing and put some bones in it.Don't worry about "if it's right" or not. You'll want to see what happens when you bend a joint and then decide if you're cool with that or if you want it to be smoother. (there's some other stuff in the middle there, but that's the high point)

[robcat2075]

Hi Paul, haven't seen you around the forum for a while!

[Dpendleton77]

Here is the body sans head. I will make that tomorrow then I will try an rig it.

[pdaley]

Rob - Good to be "back"! I'm getting back up to speed so I can mentor my 11 year old son.

 

Doug - that'll work. Just a basic head will do the trick for this.

[Dpendleton77]

I am working on one as I type. Almost done.

[Dpendleton77]

Now on to rigging.

[Dpendleton77]

How can I keep this from popping up in all my action window every time I open it? I think I double mirrored or something. Thank you.

[Shelton]

Look in the relationship to see if you have an error. Under the user properties of the model

[Dpendleton77]

I fixed it Shelton thanks.

Saucy rigged.

[Dpendleton77]

Okay what went wrong. I go to my action and my bones oh well you can see.

[Dpendleton77]

I have another problem after I do all the things in the saucy rig vid. This happens to my bones in the model. Right leg bones are gone.

[Mechadelphia]

I have another problem after I do all the things in the saucy rig vid. This happens to my bones in the model. Right leg bones are gone.

 

It looks like you skipped a step or two but I would need to see your rigged model in order to show you how to fix it.

 

Can you post your model file here so that I can help you?

[robcat2075]

Here is a another possible topology for a guitar body, made by joining two lathed cylindrical shapes and slightly pulling the sides...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one is simpler, made by pulling the sides of one lathed shape . (Lathe set to 12)

 

[Dpendleton77]

Here is the project file for the rigged alien. Thanks and Rob I am going to make that guitar following your suggestion.

Rigged Alien_02.mdl

[Dpendleton77]

I took a crack at the guitar again.

[robcat2075]

Hooray!

[Mechadelphia]

Hi Douglas,

I looked at your model.

You did a good job actually.

You only forgot to right-click on the folder “Rig Installation Settings (Use only during skeleton install process)” and then select “Not Set” from the drop down menu while in your model window (not the Action or Choreography window).

If you do that now and save the file then the rig will behave as it should.

In IK Mode on your leg, the bones are not supposed to be visible. Use the the Nulls at the feet to position the leg.

The three bones that are visible on the right leg in your picture came from you running the Mirror Bones plugin. For some reason it generated those extra bones. You can delete them since they have nothing to do with the rig. Those bones start with the prefix “LeftGEOM…”

There are a few other minor things that you should have a second look at as far as your rigging of this model. For example, you missed assigning a few CPs to the pelvis bone. The CP assignments for the feet and thumbs could use some adjusting but overall you did a really good job.

If I have some time this weekend I’ll post a brief video of me going through your model and making adjustments so that you can see exacltly what I am talking about.

[Dpendleton77]

Thanks a lot I will look into that right now.

[Dpendleton77]

I know I totally jacked up the hand because Captain rush a lot that is myself decided to rig the hand before you got to that part.

[Dpendleton77]

I know that I need a rotoscope but how do I go about tackling something like say the starship enterprise? This for example. I seem to muck up rotoscopes.

[Dpendleton77]

I have another question how can I make this look like it is a plastic bottle with water in it?

[Dpendleton77]

I dabbled a bit with the sweeper tutorial.

[robcat2075]

-Transparency must be set to nearly 100

 

-Refraction should be set to something greater than 1.0

 

-it should have something behind it to see through it.

[Dpendleton77]

Here is the bottle.

[Dpendleton77]

I have yet another question texture to make a ball look like rubber?

[Rodney]

Texture to make a ball look like rubber?

 

 

Answer: Materials

 

Here's a test of materials and lighting on a water bottle.

This is a screenshot prior to my last tweak... the distortion at the top is due to displacement from a logo I was going to put on the bottle but I accidentally entered some number like 55555% (I wanted to enter 5% but my keyboard had a mind of it's own) and A:M is still trying to figure out what to do with that.

 

 

[Dpendleton77]

Rodney how do you take those still like that A:M? Here is some camera set ups I was playing with.

[Rodney]

Rodney how do you take those still like that A:M?

 

I generally use the PrtScn (Print Screen) key to capture the current screen and then use a utility to crop and save the image for easy uploading.

On a PC the PrtScn key is usually above the Backspace key.**

Pressing it copies an image of the screen to the Windows clipboard where it can then be pasted into any program with a (clipboard friendly) paste buffer.

My personal preference as a light weight image converter is Irfanview but there are literally thousands of programs that can be used to copy/paste/save the image.

 

You *can* use A:M's snapshot feature but more often than not (at least for me) the image saved will include wireframe/splines and control points.

There are several reasons why the snapshot isn't ideal but I'd say the primary one is that they are saved to TGA format which isn't directly compatible with browsers so... you'd have to convert the image from TGA to a web friendly image format (PNG, JPG, etc.). A:M uses it's own paste buffer so I know of no way to directly copy/paste images into and out of A:M from other programs or the operating system.

 

**I assume you are using the same method to get your images for posting here in the forum.

Perhaps you are asking about something else though? Staging the camera/objects?

 

Since we are on the subject you want to be sure to have a screen capture tool for video as well. I think you've already used Hypercam so should be familiar with that program. Any program that can capture video can usually capture still images also.

 

Of course, A:M is a rendering program so we can get the full render quality of lights, shadows and textures by launching a render.

Here's a screencap of a full render like the above but without the distortion in the bottle:

 

I've added the project file to show there isn't anything out of the ordinary in the setup.

I should note that I tend to discard the default Chor setup at every opportunity. This means deleting the three lights (lighting the scene from scratch to take advantage of objects in a scene), altering (or removing) the ground plane, and moving the camera to a different vantage point. Every scene/shot is different and the default setup is there to get you started but it will tend to make everything look generically the same and using the defaults will prevent you from getting the absolute best out of the scene/story you are wanting to tell... because the default doesn't know anything about your shot/scene, where 'real lights' are placed or where you want the focus to be... only you do. A long time ago someone passed on the tip to start lighting from a scene that is entirely dark/black (with no lights) and adding one light... then other lights as necessary. This method worked so well that I tend to use that approach whenever I set out to light a scene. I'm pretty sure this tip was formally championed for computer rendering by Jeremy Birn who is the author of the well known textbooks on Lighting and Rendering.

 

Added: I couldn't resist adding some fake bottle top threads on the cap.

I'll try to resist further tweaking.

 

Added: One more (or actually two more) tweaks; flattened the bottle cap and added a logo to the cup.

 

 

WaterbottleProject.zip

[Dpendleton77]

I wonder where I got this from???

[Dpendleton77]

Eyeball.

[Dpendleton77]

How can I attach this in?? I am at a stand still. Thanks.

[robcat2075]

I'm not sure which "this" you mean.

[Dpendleton77]

Sorry I should have clarified I meant how to get the mouth and nose connected. I was looking at Will's Kong tutorial and attempted to follow along using a human face instead.

[zandoriastudios]

Hotkey "a" to add, then click on the end of the spline you want to add to. NOTE: when you start stitching things there on the centerline (where you want to copy/flip/attach), often you will connect into the horizontal spline...So add to those splines an extra point and leave it dangling, then stitch the vertical spline. Afterwards delete the dangling CP.

[Dpendleton77]

I shall do that.

[Dpendleton77]

I am chipping away at this slowly but surely.

[robcat2075]

This is similar to my strategy when I've done a face. i do the fiddly parts like the eyelids and nose and mouth and then figure out how to spline them together.

[Dpendleton77]

This is similar to my strategy when I've done a face. i do the fiddly parts like the eyelids and nose and mouth and then figure out how to spline them together.

Then I must be doing something right. Woot!!!!

[Dpendleton77]

Here is copy flip attach.

[robcat2075]

I'm going to say she needs some splines to define the back edge of her nose.