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@Rodney the latest update to Chrome has fixed the problem of John's GIF animation in the first post not showing up. Does it show for you now?

I should add... Clicking on the sprockets at the top will refresh the forum and thereby display any new content.

We don't get to compete for placement on an A:M program CD any more so the banner is a good way to pick up where that left off... with even more frequency. The emphasis is to highlight topics of interest from the moment someone opens the forum. Post cool stuff and we'll spotlight it at the top of the forum! If you have interest in special imagery for the banner not related to specific posts or images or animation you'd like to see released on a specific day... let that be known and we'll try our best to accommodate the request. Private message @robcat2075 or @Rodney for any secret squirrel stuff.

Cool!

At the top of the forum is a banner of film frames highlighting interesting A:M work, which was a feature of the forum years ago but somehow got lost in a forum-software up date. Click on a frame and it will take you to the relevant post! New frames highlighting new work will will be rotated in over time. Thanks to @Rodney for creating the code that makes the banner work!

Duckling Whisperer

I got the download with two zip files. I'm very surprised it has a topografical landscape explorer, which creates realistic environements. Also the way it creates plant guestures and ways to influence them. I'm a long time user of the vue4 program. The way it makes atmospheres so clear. It takes a long time to use the manual, and import and export are very restricted. I can import obj forms, but the way it uses textures (*.vob, *.mat) is not clear to me. Remarkable program! Feels like an Eastern Egg. 🙂

I have been using v19 regularly because V19.5 crashes when I try rendering anything. I believe I sent you the specific files related to the crashing a while back and I think you passed them on to the programmer. I was just checking to see whether any changes had been implemented yet. Thanks!

Yes, it is the latest official release. I keep v19.0 installed for when I run into a problem that is peculiar to v19.5. If you find something that doesn't work in v19.5 try it in v19.0 and let us know either way.

Is AM V19.5b the most up to date version available? ( I am not referring to any versions still in Beta.)

Today at Live Answer Time we learned how to transfer a Pose from one model to another. Note: Late in the discussion we encountered the need to copy the edited CP weighting of one model into another. There is a menu item for that... Clone CP Weights: @ChuckGram @Roger

Rename it to exe. But be a little careful. It means the webserver does not recognize the format correctly.

I just noticed the give-away includes VUE itself, the landscape generator. That's a big deal. But I get a download that is an .xls file... a spreadsheet? Does one need MS Excel to use this?

Interesting final downloads... it is a 2 GB ".jpg" ;). Very likely you can rename it to exe or zip after download, so it is very interesting. Thank you very much for mentioning anyway. *Fuchur*

Get your show back on track with answers to your A:M questions at Live Answer Time at Noon CDT, Saturday May 11, 2024. Songwriter Irving "There's No Business Like Show Business" Berlin was born on this day in 1888.

Rob- Thanks for doing the testing. That is a very informative analysis of how the software emits sprites. Thanks!

I have often wondered if particle emission rates are per patch or per group. Your test project is a good chance to examine this. First, however, I'll note that the two squares in the Chor are not quite equal. DenseMesh is about 100 cm across while SimpleMesh is about 150cm across then scaled down to 62%. Scaling an object will scale the particles it emits so that may explain why Simple has sharper corners than Dense... If I edit the squares so that both are 100 cm across and both 100% scaled in the chor, they are starting to look much more similar... The emission rate in the Sprite Emitter is set to "1000"... It's possible that is so high that an overload of sprites is masking any difference between the two results. I'm going to scale that value down by adjusting the Emission rate in the Sprite System. This value is always a percentage, not a count. Why are there two controls for... the same thing? It is possible to have more than one "Sprite Emitter" as children of the "Sprite System". For example a fire material might have a flame sprite, a smoke sprite and a spark sprite, each with its peculiar settings for many of the parameters we see in "Sprite Emitter". Having these percentage settings in the "Sprite System" lets us uniformly scale the whole effect without needing to edit each emitter. With the emission rates scaled down to 1% we can observe the sprites being born... Frame 0: Frame 5 Frame 10: Frame 15: Frame 20: Frame 25: Even though DenseMesh has 25 times more patches than SimpleMesh, both seem to be putting out an equal number of particles. This is the opposite of what I expected. I thought the number of particles would increase with the number of patches. I thought the lumpy result your original PRJ had for SimpleMesh was because it had fewer sprites to blend together, but it was really because they were scaled smaller and perhaps had less overlap among the sprites. Thanks for inquiring, Tom!

Not Sure to mention it here, but it looks as if Eon Software decided to give the PlantFactory for free download! 🫠 https://gamefromscratch.com/e-on-vue-plantfactory-and-plantcatalog-now-free/

Running a test with the Sprites material and the question is, does the patch count effect the "look" of the material emissions? Here is a picture of two meshes (project attached) and the denser mesh seems to have a smoother looking cloud... It would seem that the more patches, the "busier" the picture would be but this is not the case.. Can anyone explain this phenomenon? (BTW- the picture is from 30 rendered.) CloudSpriteNewTests.prj CloudletDisc.tga CloudletDiscDarker2.tga

Those were very interesting cloud transformations! BTW- Here is Clouds.wmv a force blowing some of the sprite clouds away. This approach has possibilities...

Thanks for your declaration, Robcat! It seems like I need some more patch knowledge. It works fine now. 😊

Your original question... how to do these morphing clouds in the fashion of my more recent clouds made with noise combiners... I'll have to think about that more.

Yes, that was a cool particle project. I will have to play with the zipped sprite cloud file I just downloaded. Thank you