3dbuzz Mech project in trueSpace

[trueBlue]

I hear you on the shortcuts and remembering part!
Not sure on your Star Null object use.
Also not sure on trueSpace's Desktop - Hide Camera Widgets. If you uncheck Camera the camera's mesh still renders unless it is selected.
Anyway I compared your Star Null to a Camera and noticed you are not using the Object Hider node.
I deleted the FOV attribute on the Camera node. That should stop the FOV from changing using the Camera FOV widget.
Added an Alpha Shader to make it invisible by way of a scrubber.

[clintonman]

I hear you on the shortcuts and remembering part!
Not sure on your Star Null object use.
Also not sure on trueSpace's Desktop - Hide Camera Widgets. If you uncheck Camera the camera's mesh still renders unless it is selected.
Anyway I compared your Star Null to a Camera and noticed you are not using the Object Hider node.
I deleted the FOV attribute on the Camera node. That should stop the FOV from changing using the Camera FOV widget.
Added an Alpha Shader to make it invisible by way of a scrubber.
StarNull.png

The purpose of a null is to basically have a matrix for position/rotation/scale and to not render.
Removing the FOV connector was a clever idea but still a no go. You can see by select the null then ctrl select a camera. Deselect and see the camera FOV changed.

[trueBlue]

Oh bummer!
I was selecting the opposite way and the FOV did not change.

[clintonman]

Finished the walk animation lesson.

The whole process went more smoothly than I expected. I had to make one change to the skeleton rig to get hip rotation control. My only complaint is the overly mechanical nature of the walk. I used the keyframe interpolation scripts to keep the feet from sliding and that made the overall motion very stop/go ish. I used the linear interpolation tool after the render and the walk looks better than in this render.

The camera cuts were made with animated constraints on the position of the camera.

Next up is trying to create footprints in the ground and make it snow.

[Draise]

The camera angles really add in a sense of scale to the mech.

[bitkar]

you have some powerful skills... very impresive. Making trueSpace to become Maya :D gj!

[clintonman]

Morph based footprints and sky dome.

The original lesson for footprints had 2 techniques, morphs and physics based. I tried using cloth sim but it didn't work out. The mesh has to be dense and the cloth sim was crashing with the 300,000 vertices on my walk plane. Reduced down to 20,000 and no crash but physics was basically frozen.

While doing the morphs I discovered that the mesh editor auto triangulation needed to be set to "None" or I ended up with some random mesh noise. The sky dome material is a mixture of a ramp and a tiff sky image, so the tiff loader script was needed.

The snow material lesson uses a normalmap and I was getting crashes when trying to use the bump to normalmap node. I rewrote the node to use better math. Image above shows before and after the change. It looks better, has a new strength control and hopefully fixes the crashing.

[clintonman]

The new normal mapper didn't fix the crashing.

Scene file size was 35Mb.
Converted materials to scene instancing file size 27Mb - still crash
There was 2 copies of the mech in the scene, removed the animatic version and file size 26Mb

Finally was able to apply the bump map without crashing.

[clintonman]

Lighting and snow material are done.

Still get some crashing and materials seeming to lose their proper color.

Next up is snowflakes falling from the sky.

[trueBlue]

Sad to hear about the crashing.
Looking forward to seeing your successful ending.
Snow tracks look very convincing.