It's going to have a lot of articulation, which I'm not used to doing. but it's coming along OK. 

Here's a short clip of the Robot arm in action 

I do have a slightly related question.   The sub has a number of movable spot lights.  I've attached one of them.   I've got the light cone coming out of the lamp as I want it,  by placing it so the start of the cone is actually behind the lamp.  Which means you can see a tiny part of the light cone behind the lamp.    

Is there some trick to remove this?   Easy in post, but I want people to be able to animate the model.

You can do your Half Angle to a more righ value, this way the borders of the light spot will be a little large and you will need to move it more out...

But in truth theres no real trick to do this...maybe mark know something. This is a feature request in Daz3D bugtrack for a long time now.

You can put the light inside of the container. However, choose "invert shadows" so that when the light hits the container, the light cone is actually created instead of the shadow. That is how I got the cones to light this image in the tutorial I did for 3D World Magazine. 

Mark

Ooooh, OK, gonna try that.

OK, That works!  Thanks a million.

Looking forward to your final renders!

Attached Link: Mini-sub in action - Youtube

Now another question...

In Carrara animation, I can set a starting keyframe at frame 1 and say another at frame 144 and I want the propeller to rotate say once every 12 frames.   Do I have to set a keyframe every 12 frames frames and rotate 360 degrees, or can I just tell it to rotate 12 times?    I can't set a rotation of more than 360 degrees it seems

The trick here is to engage the Modifier > Behavior > Spin to the object and simply set the parameters for how many revolutions (or fractions of a full revolution) you'd like in a second. It's completely key frame free and fast to do. 

Mark

Once again you're my hero.  I know very little about the modifiers and really should.    A while ago I was trying to create a Babylon 5 type space station and actually used the modifier to warp a mountain into a tube shape.    

I really should read the manual on this thing.

OK, I gotta go to my real job now.  :-(  but that is doing something weird.  I set it to rotate 2 times per second for 7 seconds and it rotates maybe 60 degrees one way, then back the other way and repeats.     Probably something silly.  i'll play when I get back.

Real jobs, they always get in the way of what's important!

This can be an optical illusion based on frame rate of the render (just like seeing wheels that appear to be not moving when driving under street lights at night or wheels that seem to move backward on television) This is always a balancing act between cycles per second and animation frame rate. 

Mark

Animation looks great! You get a pretty good sense of depth there Drawbridge.

Congratulations, it looks great.

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsdF3kfrAJo

I see what you mean about the sub prop.  How did you get the water to move like that?  Have you tried a test animation of just a prop with nothing else in the scene?

The water is a standard Carrara 8 wave.  So it automatically animates like that.   I think I can get the sub to bob on the surface before sinking.     

I'll try the prop on it's own tomorrow and see if it works alone. 

I do not have 8.  Is the wave available in version 7?

The Pro version of 7 does.    The standard probably doesn't.

Thanks, I do have the Pro version.

I fixed it!   I have constraints set so that the prop can on spin around the Y axis.   Which I think gave it a 180 to -180 range of motion.    I needed to change the rotation order to YZX from XYZ and now it works.

Hooray!  It always makes me feel good to fix things like that.

Hey Phil, are you planning on adding particle emitters to simulate the little floatie things often seen in deep-sea footage? I figure that might be an interesting touch if you can get it to work.

Yeah, cause i'd like to blow my CPU up.  :-)    It would look cool though. I want to do one with animated caustics too.