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Hey everybody. I want to wish you all a great pre-christmas time and have as each year a little treat for you created with A:M, which will hopefully give you a smile or two with each little clip each day till the 24th of December. I hope you have fun and wish you a nice time (don't forget to visit it each day, since there will be a new clip for you each day opened up): https://advent.targomed.de/adventskalender.php?lan=en Best regards *Fuchur*

this as about a 30 minute tinkering frosty.prj

I'm sorry for the delay getting this posted. My work has been out of control. We have a list of systems that need to be replace and very time when think we get ahead. Another systems needs to be replaced. Windows: Windows 32Bit Windows 64Bit SDK: v19.5 SDK Change Log: Fixed 0007278: Files above 2 GB not correct read Fixed 0007277: ImageIO HDR fails on some supportet files Fixed 0007276: Crash , when obj Files with decals importet Fixed 0007275: RenderServer crashes without notice on this project Fixed 0007267: Feature: node cloner for materials New entrie in the menu for materials "Clone Material" creates a new material with the same attributes New entries in the menu for material attributes "Clone Attribute" creates a new attribute with the same settings "Copy Attribute" copies the settings from this attribute (including childs) into a buffer "Paste Attribute" paste the settings wich are copied before into the now selected attribute the last 2 actions working also between different materials and different projects Fixed 0007272: Dragging Pose causes crash Fixed 0007271: Deleteing unwanted Hair Guides leads to crash Fixed 0007264: Duplicator Wizard causes crash Fixed 0007274: In v19.5c, cannot render an EXR file without a crash Fixed 0007268: Crash during Radiosity render Fixed 0007273: on Path in Chor causes crash

Way back in 2000, Casio released the first MP3 player that you could wear on your wrist. It had a staggering 32 MB of storage and could hold about 1 hour of 60kbps audio or half an hour of 120kbps. It looked like this I got one in about 2001 and it eventually died, but I loved that watch. Fast-forward to 2021 and out of nostalgia I bought another one. I still love it, but 32MB of storage is a bit useless for modern sensibilities. Sadly, even though the internal card reader will read and format a larger card, for unknown software/hardware reasons the watch refuses to allow anything more than 32MB of data to be sent to it. 😔 In 2022 I bought a Kospet Optimus 2 Full Android 10 smartwatch that could use custom watch faces and I'm sure you can see where this is going. I used a combination of A:M, Photoshop and a program called Clockskin to make a digital version of the watch that had all the same functionality as the original watch. pressing play for instance opened the watch's media player etc. But it also had a step and heart rate tracker and battery display that the original didn't have. Here's a shaded wireframe of the A:M model and a pic of the finished watch face. I renamed it the WPH for "Watch Phone" because the Optimus 2 is a full android phone in watch format and it's now an ACE.CO product instead of Casio.

I was lathing a shape and thought I could easily turn it into a giraffe's head... A few hours later this dragon thingy appeared: The motion blur... a bit thick no? I thought I'd be lazy and make the eyelids be patch images that turn on/off. That was probably more work than it should have been if I would have just made actual eyelids. It kinda worked though. Had fun with a few things that won't be particularly apparent such as having the color of the horns change so that the lightest/grayest horn is always in the back (presumably aiding in giving a sense of depth). This guy technically has no mouth although he does have a jaw bone. He really needs a mouth. I was going for flat shaded and almost got what I was after. I need to explore that more and get that approach into muscle memory. He needs a body no? I thought about faking the reason for not having one by adding ripples of blue to indicate water. Added: Definitely needs eyebrows! It was a fun 3D exploration that reminds me that when doodling especially... there is always something more to tweak!

So much that could be changed! Regrets? I do wish I had used more cross sections when lathing the neck as it would allow for better placement of his differently colored belly. His mane/back scales need more detail/definition. Perhaps a sense of bones/webbing. Mouth. Need mouth. Nostrils. If the entire eyes were patch images or decals I probably could get away with more there and have better control of the look/feel. Why do I always resist just modeling the stuff in the first place? I wanted to have his horns be more turned but perhaps for this guy these are the best? More ornate horns might be reserved for other dragons this guy would encounter. Some additional deformation/detail and the cheeks and chin would suggest scales/hair. Ears... not very subject to gravity in this iteration. Those might be some of the obvious areas to work on. What else?

Robert asked me to post a shaded wireframe of the rig in action. It's not a brilliant rigging attempt, and it required a lot of muscle mode tweaking to get it to where it is. It's not really rigged to be animated so much as to get it into the smile position and render it. Sequence 01_2.mp4

Finishing the animation. Four new poses coming soon

For future reference: Four mods must be made to a Console project's properties in Visual Studio for SDL to work. They must be made to both the Debug and Release configurations C/C++>General>Additional Include Directories must point to the SDL2/include folder in your SDL repository (probably on your C drive) (Choose "Apply" after every edit to these properties) Linker>General>Additional Library Directories must point to the SDL2/lib/x64 folder in your SDL repository Linker>Input>Additional Dependencies needs this string to be pasted into the circled edit box: opengl32.lib; SDL2.lib;SDL2main.lib Linker>System>Subsystem should be set to Console (/SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE) Finally, when a "release" exe is created, it must have a copy of SDL2.dll pasted to the same folder it resides in to be able to run. If an exe is distributed, the SDL2.dll will need to be included with it. Ideally, we would have made our SDL template include all these changes for both Debug and Release. @Rodney @Roger

Today at Live Answer Time we were looking at my attempt to write a program to help thin out meshes... for use with Transfer_AW After some more monkeying I got it to survive a more significant test case. the left image is the original model the middle image is a copy of just the splines I want in my thinned mesh. However, this still retains many CPs along the splines that I don't want. the right image the result of processing by the program. All the CPs not at spline intersections have been deleted. Still to do... getting it to complete the first spline loop. @ChuckGram @Roger @Rodney

I think I've got it! the program correctly re-establishes spline loops even if the CP that originally carried the isLoop flag has been deleted. I need a nap before I test this anymore. Somehow the magnitude of the remaining CPs would need to be increased to puff out the curvature. However, these donut shapes are a special case where the deformity is most obvious. That sounds like the right idea. Fortunately, for the purposes of creating meshes to use with Transfer_AW, the curvature of the splines won't matter. I don't think it matters for the interpolation of weights from one mesh to another and the thinned mesh is just in-the-studio stuff, the audience never sees it.

Fixed form some reason the uploader said it replaced the old files but it did not.

Love the new Material Clone/Copy/Paste feature. I was missing that duplication capability recently and had no idea it was being added. This implementation is even better than I was hoping for as it allows us to copy/paste materials from one project to another. Nice! Here's a quick material created via copy/pasting and tweaking:

The bones for this 'not a giraffe' are simply placed and not at all designed for precision. I added new child bones on the fly as new parts of the model were added. A functional rig which makes me want to investigate more that gap between such simple functioning rigs and what might replace it later as a more fully articulated rig if the simple model were upgraded to a highly detailed one. The jaw bone in particular was an attempt to just get a little bit of movement to those areas to hint that there was an actual mouth there. There is something I really like about this doodling approach to designing a character in that while working through it I start to see those things that would need to be updated and replaced. If diving into the more detailed and final model a lot of time encountering errors would make that a frustrating experience. As opposed to this approach which to me feels more like drawing and sketching ideas. Not as fast as drawing but with the benefit of actually having a working model as opposed to ideas on paper that still need to be implemented.

I've never tried a "Spring System" before! They were introduced as part of the previous cloth system. Although that scheme is gone, the tools for making springs are still there. Unfortunately, the essential "bone to spring" constraint seems not to survive a save and reload. That will be a bug to report.

Happy New Years Everyone! 🎉 Just completed a Time-Lapse video been working on over December. Cheers