Anim8or Community

colclough: Yup, me too.  It's relatively easy to make, say, a spaceship that looks really cool, but I am yet to see anybody, on any platform, make a CG human that actually looks like a human.  Sure, Beowulf comes close, but they still look artificial.  My personal interests tend more towards machinery and technology than plants and animals anyway, so I suppose my animation follows suit.

My modelling background is parametric (latheing, extruding, etc) and this whole wireframe modelling caper is kinda new to me.  Seems to me that there is a whole art just in edgelooping.  I also have little interest in gaming, so my models are built more for accuracy than low poly.

After doing this animation caper for a while, you find yourself looking at EVERYTHING and thinking, "could I model that...?"!!!

If you have a digital camera, or can borrow one, take a top-down photograph of your desktop, crop it to a square, make sure the pixels are a nice multiple of 8 (256x256 or whatever) and use it as the basis for the texture.  Can't get more accurate than that!

I agree with Rudy on this one.  I would encourage new users to sift through the old posts, there is much info and inspiration in those pages, but avoid posting in them unless you have a specific question, best demonstrated by bumping.  It would be better to start a new thread, with a link to the old thread if necessary.

Video Impression comes packaged with some digital cameras, like Olympus and Konica (at least here down under).  I'm not sure it is actually for sale anywhere, but there are other video editing suites available, no doubt substantially better than VI.  The later versions of Movie Maker are actually quite good and are well worth fiddling with.  Nero Vision Express also does a reasonable job, and is packaged free with just about every DVD burner sold here.  If you don't have anything like that, maybe you know someone who does, not that I am advocating software piracy or anything like that...

Welcome CataBina.  Scripts are not actually necessary for modelling, they just simplify some things.  For instance, you can model a spring manually, but it is a total pain, so a script exists that does it for you.  I have not downloaded any scripts, preferring to do all my modelling myself (working out how to model something is half the fun IMO).

As already mentioned, check out the manual.  For the first few weeks I used Anim8or I had both the program and the manual open, so I could flick from one to the other (which I did often!).  There are a few minor gaps in the manual, but there are always people here on the forums ready to answer questions, especially on the trickier aspects of animation and modelling.

The advice I give to anyone who asks is "experiment".  Anim8or's greatest strengths are its small size and simple interface, but there is still a lot of capability there.  Visualise a scene, as simple or complex as you like, and try to build that scene in Anim8or.  You may not get exactly what you imagined, but you will learn heaps by trying.  For instance, you might want a rotating light, like that on a fire engine.  In figuring out how to achieve this (using the manual) you will learn about light parameters, key frames, possibly even scripting.  Try the tutorials on this site, and there are others on other, less Anim8or specific sites.

Have fun, that's what Anim8or is for!

It has to do with the mine-cart's orientation point not being central to the mine cart itself.  I just posted the way to fix this in your Tutorials thread in animanon.com.  Let me know if it doesn't make sense and I'll do a tutorial or something.

Absolutely superb!  Amazing model, and really excellent use of lighting.  Because I am a picky b*****d I have just one crit.  In Drydock4 the planet in the background is missing it's atmosphere, which I only saw because I felt the atmosphere simulation in the other pics was a little bit heavy.  IMO it should be a little less solid and not reach so far out into space.  But I am splitting hairs here and it's only the background, after all.  Really fabulous work, mate!

thecolclough: Didn't ST:TMP use the NCC-1701A, a supposed "refit" that completely altered the shape of just about every part of the ship?