No, it has nothing to do with Texas secession.

A:M-wise, can you guess what's unusual here?


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That's a nice flag Robcat! You are really coming along! Before long, you'll be creating characters and dragons and all kinds of things! ... just kidding ...

WHAT!!! No bevels?

the red/white of the diagonal stripes is wrong, ie not mirrored correctly

That's the correct placement. The diagonal "Cross of St. George" has offset arms in the official flag. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's graphically stronger than a straight X.

Ahhh...Interesting. Apparently the Union Jack, according to this link: is a superposition of the flags of Saint George (for England), Saint Andrew (for Scotland) and Saint Patrick (for Ireland)

So that's why.

Now back to A:M - You did it with gradient materials? You modeled the stripes? Did you ever reveal how you did the 2 color-sided render of the 1 sided curly-q-screw?

Whoops, you're right, the diagonal one is "St. Patrick". I wonder if they'll take that out when Northern Ireland reverts to Ireland?






Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!

It's a MATERIAL!

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constructed with gradient combiners:

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You have waaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy too much time on your hands

That's pretty clever! Now, lets see you do an American flag! No wait...everybody hates that nowadays... a LONE STAR flag! It's good to know you can get that graphical with simple materials...but THAT material is not SIMPLE. Did you ever reveal how you did the 2 color-sided render of the 1 sided curly-q-screw?

Actually, on Bill Young's "Material" CDs from Anzovin* he does an entire American flag with 13 stripes and 50 stars. My Union Jack pales in comparison but I wanted to try it.




* currently unavailable

.

Oooooo...I guess I get a rubber chicken in my pot!

That's quite clever (as well as insane).

Oddly, I understand why you did it.

that is very cool!

Very clever stuff Rob ,The ST George is used more these days though

What? You made that with gradient materials?

I didn't think you could do that with those... I guess I thought they were used more for... well, gradients. I've got to try that.

Very clever Rob! The materials cd from Anzovin has a whole exercise on creating a white star on blue background with gradient materials, then another exercise on creating an American flag from materials. I happened to watch both just last week. Really pretty amazing and eyeopening use of materials. I recommend the cd.

I did reveal how the curly-q was done but I haven't yet revealed how the 2-sided cloth in that same post was done.

Very nice flag. I have one question though: why did you choose to use gradient combiners as opposed to say, spherical combiners? I think spherical combiners would have given a similar result without requiring such a complex nesting of gradients. Nevertheless that is one fine material.
Actually I have a second question: How long did it take to develop the material tree?
Thanks.

Javier

I suppose you could orient spherical combiners to get straight lines too but I'm not sure it would make a material that was infinitely deep along Z. Maybe you could make an example of what you mean.

but the gradient combiner just intuitively seemed to be the choice for making so many straight borders






It took me about 4 hours to figure out one quadrant, then the other 3 quadrants took another 4 hours.

Hello Animation Master Geniuses,

I've only used the gradient combiner a few times, so I'm no expert but if I remember correctly you set the start point and the end point and choose the colors... So I was looking at your gradient tree and was trying to figure out how it was possible to make the image. I suppose if I sat down and started fiddling around with it I could maybe figure it out, but I was wondering whether there was some kind of resource that showed the basic principle of how you could make something like that with gradient materials?

trick 1) if the start and end points are VERY close together they appear to make two solid colors on either side with no haze in between
trick 2) if the start and end points are are diagonal to each other, the divide will be a diagonal perpendicular to them.
trick 3) if you put a 2nd gradient as a child of a 1st gradient, the 2nd gradient can only color the half of the 1st gradient that it is on, so the 1st gradient is really making a boundary beyond which the 2nd gradient has no effect.









I've put the material in the contributor's cue so you can look at it.

Anzovin used to sell a great Materials CD that went into extreme detail on such things but, alas, it is no more.

I wonder if Anzovin would consider making some or all of their old tutorial CDs available through something like Lulu where they could just put it up and forget about it?

It's a shame that users don't have access to them anymore. The few that I got from them were really helpful.

I have written them to suggest putting their CDs up on such an on-demand publishing site, but they said even the time to do that was not economical.

Maybe if more people suggested it? Maybe if someone volunteered to set it up for them and then give them the key?

That's to bad.

Thats what they told me when I asked them about TFM for AM

Thanks for the explanation Robert. It seems like it could be really useful, although I can't see when to use it rather than a texture map.

I suppose since it is procedural, Lets say the camera started really far away from something and wanted to zoom into a macro level, this texture would never run into any resolution problems. That could be very useful.

Also, since it is done in A:M, it can also be animated, could it not? There could be a lot of possibilities there.

By the way, how does one get to the "contributers cue"?

Regarding the Anzovin stuff, my opinion is that if they are not willing to sell it, they should release it in the public domain or give it to someone here to make it available to those who are dedicated users of Animation Master.

I'm not sure either! For a flag it's mostly an interesting exercise. It's a solution looking for a problem.

my gradients are about .01 cm wide which should be safe from most distances.

Yes, it could!

it's at the bottom of the "A:M Exchange" section. Rodney moves stuff from there to the appropriate section.



I'm convinced!

Animas, email me at gerrymooney(at)earthlink(dot)net.

Not doing the USA flag in gradients too?

Impressive, I first thought the toothpick city was insanely tedious but this blows me away.

Good stuff

Robert,
It is easy to create a combiner that is infinite along a given axis. With a spherical combiner simply setting a given axis (in the scale dialog) to 0 will do the trick. So, for example, a setting of: 0x, 100y, 0z will produce horizontal bars that extend into infinity along the x and z plane but are controlled by the ring 1 and 2 sizes along the y plane ( i.e. if ring 1 is 10cm and ring 2 is 20cm, it will repeat alternating bands of 10 and 20cm into infinity along the y axis). The same is true if the settings are applied to any given set of axes. The sharpness of the border transitions could be controlled by the blur function of the combiner. The spherical combiner is one of the most powerful combiners in AM.

Javier

Yes, you can make repeating uniform-width stripes like on the US flag, but there are no repeating uniform-width stripes on the UK flag. Every adjacent stripe of color is a different width. Right?

Now with 100% more hoisting and waving and flapping action:

http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com/2010/04/union-jack.html

Nice.

That's great, Robert! Very well presented! I almost felt compelled to stand to attention.

By the heck makes you proud to be british lol,Very well done Robert ,I love the way you got it hoisting up aswell

Looks great, Robert!