[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Bill,

What are you trying to accomplish? Invigorator uses keyframes to determine the locations of sets. Beyond that, you can edit the motion curves or use ease functions to smooth the path.

Does this help?

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Zax always does a great job on documentation. Follow the training>documentation link on the zaxwerks.com site to get an idea.

If you have a specific challenge not covered in the manual, post it here. We’ll try to help.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Joe,

Don’t think so, but you can always save your customized materials library separately.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Joe,

Try the “reset” command at the top of the Invigorator effect in the effects control panel.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Jim,

Sorry to hear that. Question: What happens when you launch ProAnimator as a stand-alone app? If it doesn’t freeze up, it may be an issue with After Effects. Maybe a cache setting or something like that.

Perhaps Matt will chime in… wish I had an easy answer for you.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Joe,

I do like the tint on the reflection map.

Whether it would be easier to build in another app depends on a lot of things:

The time it takes to build models like this in any app depends on how well you know the app. If you are starting from square 1, my belief is that the learning curve for lightwave, maya, etc is much steeper — it would take you a lot longer to learn enough in those apps to be useful, than it does to learn how to work Invigorator and ProAnimator.

So long as you can break objects down into components that can be extruded from simple shapes, Invigorator and ProAnimator are up to the task. I’ve seen some very nice, very complex models created with these tools.

Having said that, there are some things that absolutely should be done in Lighwave or something like it — organic shapes and character animation come to mind.

Hope this helps.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Joe,

It’s really coming along. Thanks for sharing.

One thought – you might want to play with the reflection map so it appears to contain colors or even suggestions of elements in your scene.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Joe,

You’re almost there. The aspect ratio of the map should be the same as the aspect ratio as the object you’re trying to cover… height to width. You may be able to use a photoshop distortion filter to apply the inverse of what the map is doing on the object, so the circles aren’t distorted.

Great job so far,

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi Joe,

I actually used one of those in my college radio days. Great microphone!

Figuring out how to create the map depends on how you built the mic…. whether the shape is considered an edge (my assumption here) or a front or rear face.

In the case of edges, you need to remember that Invig wraps the map from the lowest, leftest portion of the object all the way around, sort of like a ribbon around the sides of a box. When the edge is curved, distortion naturally happens. The simplest way to see what’s going on is to create an image of a grid of squares with numbers in them. Once you have that, you can determine what sort of distortion you’ll need to do to the transparency map to get it to look like. The transparency map will be a grayscale image applied to the transparency channel of the material you’re making.

Hope this helps.

Jon

[Jon Okerstrom]

Hi ctheslender,

You can do it a couple of ways – using layermapping or by simply adding the image to a material and applying that material to the face of the object. You will probably want to crop the image because borders affect how it will be applied to the object. You may also want ot change the resolution of the image and save it as a tga file.

Hope this helps.

Jon