How are you rendering the final sequence out? Quicktime? Have you enabled the alpha option? Its listed under G-buffers. I only tried alpha's once and I failed. BUT I think what the best way to do this is to enable alpha under G-buffers (in the render room) and then render it as a photoshop Sequence....both the Mac and NT composer should be able to see this. I did a title once but it was a .tif sequence...and the alpha didnt render...I ended up using the AVX plug in "RGB Keyer" and that worked fine but you are correct if you are thinking that that way sucks :) What Kind of Avid are you working with? I will try to render an alpha photoshop sequence this friday and see how it works out....

very nice :) I was going to attempt a car lighter tonight..never even thought of a cigarette lighter. Did the 15min include the textures? I am going to try to do my model tonight.

Sounds good to me....what kind of time limit? 15 min or 1/2 hour?

well that would be impossible but you wouldnt be learning if you where cheating...its like art classes when you learn to draw..a common exercise is quick sketches...once you master those skills the more complex stuff comes later. Besides I am sure that it will be fairly obvious whos cheating....but its not like there is a prize either....:)

Nice ring Chip. This is exaclty the kind of challange I can handle :) If anyone else is intersted of course. Maybe someone gives a subject and a time limit...I dont have time to do those big challanges listed elsewhere on this board. Besides in my business this is about as detailed as they are going to give us time for :)

Ok this may sound dumb, but the reason i could never accomplish anything in this room is I didnt know to keep adding cross sections. I do have one question about it tho. I can keep adding cross sections on the Y axis but can I add them on the Z axis or X axis? I am also guessing you changed extrusion settings from pic 5 to pic 6 b/c I see the green line on the floor of the working box? Anyway with art I find that I am able to take rules & proceedures to adapt to what I need to do, but I am very slow to figure them out for myself :) Looks like I have to spend some time in the spline room for a bit :)

All my problems happen in the spline modeler :)

My big problem with the spline model is the 3rd dimension. I make the initial outline but I cant get it to extrude (is that word I want?) properly. Lets say I make a human head. I draw it and its extended. so I can then grab the line on the bottom to move it and set its thickness. I now have a flat extruded object. Next I can change the extrusion envelope. It then lets me adjust the extruded area (it puts up blue and green lines) but the orginal flat face that I drew out cannot be modified. Am I just missing something simple? Does this make any sense?

I thought you said you where working on Avids? We had media cleaner pro budgeted for this year but then recently cancelled it...Avid 10.0 will be out in a few weeks and it will include mediacleaner.....you'd think they would stress that point a bit more :)

Attached Link: http://brenthomer.tripod.com/tutorials.html

I have a quick Alpha Suggestion that will apply mainly to photoshop users. As an editor I use alpha's all the time for graphics. When I first started using them I ALWAYS had halo's around the objects. I found the little secret to get rid of them in photoshop. 1)Put the object you want masked on its own layer. 2) Load Selection (dont use majic wand...it is not very accurate) and then save selection. You should see the alpha in in the channels window now! 3) Your not done yet...make sure the background layer (make sure it says background, not layer 1, in photoshop this makes ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD.) is selected and then make it black. This will work now 90% of the time. However sometimes you have fuzz's or transparency on the object you wish to blur. Lets say it is a drop shadow. Make sure the background color is exactly the same as this fuzz, frindge, shadow, etc. Photoshop takes a bit of the background layer so if the colors wont match then you WILL get a halo effect. This is my super fast tutorial and looking it over I can see that it sucks :) Here is a link to the page a made awhile ago b/c I was sick of explaining this: http://brenthomer.tripod.com/tutorials.html

Some one is developing a bones plug in right now. Once the new Carrara owner is announced Im sure we will be seeing more of these types of plugins (well thats what I keep telling myself).

Some one is developing a bones plug in right now. Once the new Carrara owner is announced Im sure we will be seeing more of these types of plugins (well thats what I keep telling myself).

Is there a place you can post it for me to download? I will run it through my system at work for you. Maybe post it up as a jpeg sequence or something like that?

from the pictures I found I thought it was close...was it so far off you didnt have to go into a rant about the movie?? :)

I like it :) It looks like E.T. grew up, mutated, and now hes coming back to earth to kick some @ss :) I really like the skin..pretty cool. Did you do it all in C or did you use Poser?