Anim8or Community

It's been a while since I updated anyone in the community on my happenings lately, so I figured since some big things in my life have been happening I'd update everyone!

College
So college was the first big happening and probably the biggest!  I applied to about 6 colleges and god into 4.  It took forever but I finally found out about financial aid and decided on USC!  I was accepted to the Animation/Digital Art program in the School of Cinematic Arts (which is just got a new building, from money donated by George Lucas!)  So next fall I'll begin my formal education in Animation/Digital Art!  I got to visit the campus and USC (especially the school of cinematic arts) is amazing!  The facilities they have are mindblowing, the connections invaluable and the social atmosphere tons of fun.  I'm so excited for it, and can't wait to finally be free!  

Internship
My second big happening began last Friday, and continued today.  Over the past month or so, while at school I've been working on lining up a senior project (unpaid internship wherever I can get one, and is approved by a committee.)  As a senior at my school, I get the last month of school off for a Senior Project that I line up.  I pestered and pestered and pressed, gave out my website and finally got an internship with my first choice, Bent Image Lab!!!  Today was my second day there and it's amazing.  I'm working with the CG department (as they do stop-motion, compositing, CG, etc.)  It's amazing to be working by professionals and watch them work on commercials and things that everyone will see on TV!
If you want to read more about this, I have a public blog here!

If you have any questions feel free to ask!  I'm just so excited to be in this position right now with so many opportunities and my whole life ahead of me!
Thanks for listening to me ramble a bit.

Best,
Hihosilver

That's right, Christmas time is coming up for many of us, and we moderators thought it would be a wonderful to get the community together to make an Anim8or Christmas Tree!  We'll provide the tree in the end, so what we need from you all are decorations, meaning ornaments!


So here's the deal.  We want everyone to participate by making their own ornament.  Get creative as you want, or stay as classic as you want.  Feel free to post renders here, but most importantly, be sure to attach the Anim8or file.  With this we can put all the different ornaments on the tree, and have a beautiful final render, which we can send to Steve as a Christmas Card "thank you!"

So bring your holiday cheer, and lets deck out our tree with all kinds of art!

Deadline: December 20th

Walk Cycle [Voting] (See entries below)



The Competition:
The goal of this competition is to create a walk cycle.  That's right, animation!  Either with one of the rigs provided, or with a rig of your own, animate a walk cycle for your character (from scratch).  You can always give it a bit of flair!  Make it happy, sad, overweight, seductive, or whatever you can think of (or just stick with a simple walk cycle).
Entries must be submitted as a rendered animation, and make sure the animation loops repeating itself at least 5 times (it's a drag to have to replay a character taking 2 steps over and over again.  The more steps the better!)

The Rigs:
(available in a .zip file below)
Pose Man 3 was created by SirBonovox who gave me permission a long time ago to distribute this file.
Zigs, Storyteller and PoseableGuy were all created by Jeb.  The models were downloaded and hosted by Bob_I_Ts.
figureskel and survaysequence were both created by Bob_I_Ts and hosted on his site.

Deadline: Monday, August 31 (8/31/09)
Good luck and happy Anim8ing!

Entries:
youtube.com/watch?v=gMbF8zah2K8[/youtube]]http://www.

- AirAKose

youtube.com/watch?v=sNTeWeUhYuY[/youtube]]http://www.

- ENSONIQ5

http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2563.0;attach=5607 - menamarco

I believe a "spin edge" command would be wonderful for Anim8or.  Perhaps this could be implemented with a script, but would be much easier to use if there were some kind of keyboard shortcut.
Here is an example of the command in Silo.
The tool is very useful for quickly altering polygon flow without having to delete and edge then rebuild it and fill holes again.

Thanks for your consideration.

One of the greatest modeling tools I've come across is the edge extrude tool.  I think modeling ability could increase even more if the edge extrude tool were changed.  Instead of extruding along the plane of the previous faces, it would be wonderful if you could click and drag like in 3ds max.  So you could click, the new edges would appear, and you could drag to where you wanted to place them.
Perhaps it would be better to have a compatibility where you used move rotate or scale with edge extrude as in 3ds max.

Here's what happens in 3ds max:
You shift click with the move tool - the new edges appear and follow the cursor and place the edges in relation to the cursor position.
You shift click with the rotate tool - the new edges appear and are rotated with the mouse
You shift click with the scale tool - the new edges appear and are scaled in respect to the mouse position.

It would be great if this were possible because I find that the edge extrude method of modeling is very useful and simple.

Alright, here's my first error I'm posting here.  The rest I've been able to deal with, or other people have already addressed.
I've been trying to render my mustang model, but Anim8or continually crashes on me.  I believe it may have something to do with the cubemap, though it's tricky as it will occasionally work with different settings, but not with those I want.
I'm using the "specular>reflection" attribute in Anim8or.  The render seems to crash every time I use a cubemap in the scene.  Though, it has also not crashed on me a few times, once when I used a specular level of 0.4 instead of 0.2 for the material.  Also when I used a spec. level of 1.5.
At first I thought it had something to do with the model being only one poly thick, but after shelling, I still got the same error.
So I'm a bit stumped with this issue.
Here's the file with the Cubemap textures, I hope this can help!
hihosilver.anim8or.org/Mustang_crash.zip

I've decided to model the Mustang GT, I just love the car for some reason.
I hope to be able to update this at a good rate, but we'll see!
So here's my progress so far:
C&C is highly encouraged.