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Messages - ENSONIQ5

Pages: 1 ... 60 61 [62] 63 64 ... 68
916
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: Height based textures
« on: April 18, 2008, 07:49:32 pm »
Well, it kinda can now.  Use something like Photoshop to make a nice big square jpeg, something like 4096x4096.  Towards the bottom of the image paint a sandy texture, towards the top paint a rocky texture, and paint grass in the middle.  Use this to build a material.  Now, once you have your terrain, apply the texture, but set the UV coordinates from one side, or the front or back, rather than top.  The highest peaks of your terrain will get the rocky end of the material, the lowest will be sandy, and the slopes in between will be grassy.

I used this technique here for the canyon texture:


917
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Runaway mine cart
« on: April 18, 2008, 07:36:23 pm »
All you need to do is set the cart's orientation at certain key points, or nodes on the track.  Nodes are where the track changes, from straight to curved or vice versa, as shown here:

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q11/Boney_Moroney/TrackTest2.jpg

So, effectively, you have to define the orientation of the cart at these points only.  In scene mode, with the green button on, use the rotation tool to pivot the cart until it sits correctly at each frame that coincides with a node point.  The cart will smoothly pivot from one node to the next, or remain straight on the straight bits.  If it goes a little off track at times you may need to pop in a few more key frames.

For a follow cam, place a camera behind the cart and animate its movement to follow the track, the same way you did for the cart itself.  Then, in Camera Properies, just set the Camera Target to the element name of the cart.  That way the camera will always face the cart no matter where they both are in the scene.

Hope this helps and I look forward to seeing the result.

918
So long as it was not actually necessary to set the coordinate for each separate level every time.  The default should still be coincident UV coords, able to be separated as a choice.  But yeah, great idea.

919
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: an8 format suggestion
« on: April 18, 2008, 05:59:15 am »
Hmm... early versions of Corel had a "Save options settings" function, to personalise defaults.  Not a bad idea, I suppose, if it allowed you to set window configurations, like views, materials window on and set to "file", n-gon defaults, etc.  Kinda low priority though, when there are things like physics engines and animateable materials to come.....

920
Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Re: VOLUME SHADOWS
« on: April 18, 2008, 05:53:30 am »
No worries Steve. I've never really bothered with volume shadows, so you can't miss what you've never had, huh!  Dude, there's no rush to fix minor issues like this.  We are all having a ball playing with Anim8or, and I for one am in some considerable awe that this package has been written by just one bloke, in his spare time.  I have no doubt that the day will come when Anim8or will be sold alongside Lightwave, 3D Studio Max and the like, and when that happens you can employ a team of testers to fix little bugs like this, and get on with Anim8or V2.0, with physics engine, motion blur, particle engines, animated materials...... *enters happy little daydream of glorious things to come*

PS: The ART renderer ROCKS!

921
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Cloth folds
« on: April 17, 2008, 05:24:58 am »
I have done something similar, making sails for a windmill.

http://i132.photobucket.com/albums/q11/Boney_Moroney/Sail.jpg

The trick is to create the mesh with lines following the creases.  Careful selection of nodes, pulling some up and others down, creases the mesh.  Finally, convert to subdivided.  In my example above I did not perform edge reinforcement, where an extra edge is created just within the edge of the sail, to reduce the effect of subdivision rounding the corners off.

However, In your case, I would strongly recommend creating the sails as smooth regular meshes and applying photographic textures, which include the corner creases.  Applying a bump map of the creases should also work well.  The creases are such a shallow undulation in the fabric that this should work quite nicely.

I would suggest that it is more important, in sails such as these, to get the sewing seams right, making the sails pillowy in a grid shape.  This would be a more pronounced deviation from a flat regular plane than the corner wrinkles, and should be relatively easy to shape in a grid meshed sail, though it may work ok as a bump map as well.

922
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Interview with Tyson Ibele
« on: April 16, 2008, 07:26:57 am »
That's some pretty high standards you got there bud!

923
Hey!  That's excellent!  I love the spade, and the low down, up close camera.  Yeah, as others have said, turn the specular down on the sand material, and I would make it much finer.  As far as applying the texture to every face of the castle, you need to understand the principles of UV mapping.  How this is done depends on what version of Anim8or you are using (V0.95 has a few problems with UV mapping) but in any case I recommend a careful reading of the manual, specifically relating to UV mapping.  In a nutshell, you can map textures to individual faces of an object and control their angle, size and position.

924
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Interview with Tyson Ibele
« on: April 15, 2008, 05:31:22 am »
Wow!  Something to aspire to, huh!  Some great tips in there too.

925
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Animation Video Cropping Freeware/software
« on: April 15, 2008, 05:08:39 am »
Oh, I see what you mean.  You need a small animation that overlays, seamlessly, a static image.  Basically you need to crop every frame in an animation the same way a single image is cropped.  Hmm.. Corel can probably do it, but of course it aint free.  I'm not sure.  I will have a sniff around and if I find anything, or think of a work-around, I will let you know.

926
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Animation Video Cropping Freeware/software
« on: April 14, 2008, 10:48:01 pm »
I'm not really sure what you mean by cropping.  If you are going to animate the scene, why not animate the birds at the same time?  If the birds will be the only moving thing, why not just animate them and use the render as a background?  If you are trying to combine two separate animations, that will be harder, and will require techniques mentioned by Roygee and thecolclough, in my opinion.  Personally I would use a green-screen, alpha channel type method, using transparent backgrounds (see the section in the manual where Steve places the bird in the photo with the cat), but the frames would still have to be individually combined (in my case in Corel PhotoPaint, which can dissemble a video into editable frames and reassemble into AVI or whatever).  If the camera for each animation does not move in the same way, however, you will have quite a task ahead of you.

927
Finished Works and Works in Progress / Re: Bender
« on: April 14, 2008, 10:32:16 pm »
From memory Bender's arms are kinda like convoluted hoses.  I would use the spline tool to draw a zig zag line (with Snap to Grid turned on) and lathe the zig zag.

928
Hey, don't get rid of this model, though.  Apply a yellow/white material with a nice fine bump map, simulating sand, model a bit of a beach, whack in a star fish or bucket and spade, and this model would be excellent as a sand castle.

929
General Anim8or Forum / Re: The Rotating Chair Anim Advice
« on: April 13, 2008, 08:33:31 am »
Excellent, glad we could help.  I would recommend uploading anything you do to YouTube and putting links to it here, rather than email, so anyone reading this thread in the future can see and learn from your experiences.

930
General Anim8or Forum / Re: The Rotating Chair Anim Advice
« on: April 12, 2008, 06:33:37 pm »
Ok, just to be certain.  Go to Object mode and select the object that is the upper part of the chair.  Combining my method and hihosilver's, go to the Top view and move the entire object so the centre of the seat coincides with the grey central crosshairs.  Now, click the button below the select mode arrow button and use the movement tool to move the coloured arrows that represent the object's centre of rotation to also coincide with the central grey crosshairs (you will need to be in wireframe mode to see them).  Now, still in the origin mode, click on the select arrow (not select mode) and click on the screen, somewhere where your object isn't so the object deselects while in origin mode (this can be important - without this sometimes the origin does not stay moved).  Now you can return to select mode (top left button) and then to scene mode, and the object should rotate about its own centre.

Also, I notice from your images that the chair is rotating wonkily.  If you deselect the "Y" and "Z" buttons when rotating, rotation will be constrained to the "X" dimension (left/right in screen coordinate mode, which you are in) and the chair will stay straight.

I hope this helps.  If it doesn't make sense (which is a distinct possibility - I have just got out of bed, its Sunday morning, and last night's indulgences are punishing me severely) I will post some screen shots.

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