hmmm.... Renaissance with bioluminescence... an interesting thought... ;) jonthecelt

Arien... you the same delightful lass doing such magnificent work texturing fredrik's models over in the DAZ freepozitory? Love your work, milady... :) jonthecelt

1024x768 :)

Attached Link: http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1046/1/320

There IS a tutorial out there, somewhere... while I'm searching for it in another window, I'll give a brief lowdown on how this is done. I've done a similar trick before with someone dealing cards, moving a card from the deck, to the hand, to the table. Ok, the links at the top of the page. Now, to summarise... To do what you want to do (drawing the sword from the scabbard), you actually need TWO sword props. One remains parented to your character's hand, the other to the sheath/thigh. See, the thing is that you can't change parents mid-animation... what you CAN do is animate the transparency of the two objects. At the beginning, set the transparency of the sword in your character's hand to 1 (transparency edge to 1 as well), with the sheathed sword fully visible. Create the movements for your character as normal. Now, at the point where your figure grabs hold of the sword, swap the transparency settings over. Before doing this, make sure that the trans channels are set to animatable. Finally, you want to make sure that there's a sharp transition from invisible to visible. To do this, either step back a frame, and reset the channels to the frame one settings, or go into the animation palette, and change the interpolation style for the two swords' transparencies to the linear selection. Hope this helps. jonthecelt

The problem in both cases (Carrara and Poser) is that GI only works with light sources, as far as I understand it. The neon light ISN'T actually emitting anything, so you need something like the gather node in order to collect the colours thrown off by it. jonthecelt

By step, do you mean left-rght, or simply one foot in front of the other, Ockham? jonthecelt

ok, then, let's give this possibility a try... and then I'm going to bed!! This is only theory, but it might hold to work well enough. Take your obj, and do the glow thing, in whichever fashion you choose - probelight, ambient, combination, whatever. Take another copy of the obj, and scale it up slightly, so that your original 'lights' are skinned, as it were. (memo to self - this might prove tricky if you scale up the entire sign, as you get scale drift - can you scale up each letter in turn in Carrara, and export as a second obj?) now, we need this second skin to give us the atmospheric glow. It probably won't extend out far beyond the original, but it should give us enough to work. In the skin's diffuse and transparency channels, we need some kind of atmospheric noise plugged in - noise, perhaps, or fbm, or clouds - whatever would make a good 'atmoshpere material' if you were trying to create one normally without the atmosphere material itself (I think relik over at Runtime DNA could suggest a couple of things for this). If we then plug in the gather node to whichever channel we want (alt diffuse is always my favourite, but YMMV), then the dust clouds generated by the diff/trans procedural should catcher the glow of the original light object, whilst still allowing us to see the scene beyond. It all depends, of course, on how dense you make the dust cloud. Please bear in mind that I just wrote this without Poser in front of me, off the top of my head, on my way to bed after a long day of looking after my teething 15-month-old daughter. I make no promises as to the workability of this scheme... but the theory does seem sound to me at the moment. hope this helps. jonthecelt Do you think that

There's also the fact that, if that's an official DAZ pose, then maybe there's someone at the DAZ forums who can offer a proper answer. Have you tried over there? jonthecelt

Yeah, I know wot you mean... part of it depends on whether your text is actually a 3D object, or whether it's a transmapped square, as mine was? jonthecelt

Let me think on it... a couple of possibilities are running round my head... :) jonthecelt

Ok, so... looking at the three, I noticed something in hindsight which hadn't been immediately apparent to me at the time. When rendering each f these, i was trying to get a similar look from each one. In so doing, all of them seem to require a 'value' of 8 for the glowing object - whether it be from the ambient calue, the probelight's exposure, or a multiple of the two combined. This would account for the closeness in appearance betwen the renders. That said, there are small differences between the ambient only one and the two using the problight. In some areas, such as the inner ring of the 'o' (I'm looking on the wall here), the ambient only render loses definiton slightly, resulting in a less distinct 'hole' in the middle. Although it's very close indeed (probably as a result of me mucking about with the 'brightness' settings), for my money, I think the alt diffuse one looks the best by a tiny margin. jonthecelt

The other key to a walk cycle would be the walk path. This is what allows your character to move from the spot they begin in, and automatically makes your character walk across the space. How long is a pace? It depends on how long you make your path, and how many paces you want her to take along it (the number of times the cycle is repeated). Of course, it'll look strange to have your figure goose-stepping across the space, but only moving in tiny increments with each step - you have to work out this relationsihp for yourself. But so far as I can tell, there is no 'standard' step.