[Randy Johnson]

I played with it too and ended up at the same solution as brian.
/randy

[Randy Johnson]

What part?
-image in the background? Go into a flat view. ie.Top, Right… press shift V and in the back tag choose an image.
-Tracing the image with splines? He used a bezier spline. traced each section connected the splines that were the same depth and placed then in a extrude nurbs. repeated a few times.
-then he dropped a texture on it

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

If you have cloth you could take a series of spheres and put a cylinder around it. Make the cylinder the cloth sphere collider. Then in Cloth tag make the size % smaller and smaller until it fits nicely.

Or you could box model it and use a hyper nurbs…then get a good displacment texture to get the details right…i think that would be needed for the cloth way too.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

I generally use a hyper nurbs.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

No, no, no.
Look in the render settings: output, you will see Frame…mine defaults to current frame change that to one of the other options AND / OR right next to that you have two spots that say #F there you can set the frame range you want to export.ie 1 to 100.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

If you are rendering to a quicktime file (best for use in FCP) You will need to put depth to millions of colors+. That + is your alpha. Otherwise FCP sees the alpha as black…even if the alpha settings are on straight.

(and I i just press shift r to render.)

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

The slider will only move in the Z axis not the Y making your model follow a flat surface.
/randy

[Randy Johnson]

Your ik test looks fine.
I set it up with out any joints and got perfect results.
I placed “front” in a null. I put that nulls axis where i wanted the pivot, in the is case directly on the hinge. Then I created a new null(controller) and added user data slider. i added an expresso tag to the controller null and dragged both controller and the front null into the expresso. Then in the controllers red box i selected user data: front null. then i attached that to the front nulls blue box: coordinates:global rotaion:P

and then you have a controller and can easly set up a walk cycle. you can add a slider to ik the same way but this is the simplest way.

If you are going to be rigging things up you need to set up the higharchy and connect more pieces. The way the model is now is too much to try to rig.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

Yea metaball gets a nice flow but rarely worth the time.

for steam you could use a light with visability and noise turned on.
Or you can try pyrocluster on with steam setting…but personally i would make it in AE or combustion or any other compositing.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

1. For a cube animation i would try a Free Form Deformer and Point Level animation to animate it.

2. There are a few ways you could animate the phone. Its far easy to make suggestions if you post the model.

/randy