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I was nearing the end of my third and final year in Illustration when my teacher approached me with a volunteer assignment outside the usual class projects. In Oakville, there was a summer festival that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s called the Oakville Waterfront Festival. It was a major event at the time, featuring live music, games, food, and craft shows. The previous year, my teacher’s studio had illustrated the festival poster, which featured a 3D rendering of an ice cream cone. Having seen what I was capable of modeling in A:M, he asked for my help in creating a 3D version of the festival’s beloved mascot, "Jake from the Lake." Over the next few weeks, I modeled Jake and his buddy, Fishy, and the rest is history. Below, you can see a screenshot of the final poster, along with the Photoshop revisions my teacher made, including the addition of the ice cream cone from the previous year. It was such an exciting time I had never seen my work in print like that before. The poster was displayed all over the city, featured in newspaper articles, and even printed large scale for bus shelter ads.

Okay....so I have been endlessly tweaking things (I'm still debating the level of bloom). Here is an updated image and I'll post more soon. ------------------- EDIT ------------------- I didn't realize one of my settings was off and made it a little dark...I replaced the original image with the updated version.

Probably the most exciting project I worked on while at my teacher's studio (around 1998/99) was the package design for the ATI Rage Fury video card. I remember hearing they wanted to incorporate an eye-shaped ship created by another animation studio, but we got to design the main character, a sexy cyborg girl with a glowing sword. How cool is that! After modeling the character in A:M, I experimented with a few poses until we settled on the render below followed by further edits in Photoshop for the final packaging. At the studio, they had a storage closet for supplies, as well as a collection of old manuals and software boxes. To this day I still think about some of the marketing slogans printed on those boxes. One was for Electric Image (EAIS) which said: "Render Fast, Retire Young!" That was so cool. Another package had the slogan: "Dream, Create, Astound." One of the best marketing lines a software company could use to inspire an artist!

robcat2075, everything worked out. You were right, we needed a spline in the middle.

One of the places I used to frequent most on the Hash website, besides the gallery sections was the "A:M Users" area. They did a great job making it feel like a community of 3D artists. In 1999, I connected with Paul Sterling through A:M Users after seeing he was based in Oakville where I was living at the time. We chatted via email and when we decided to meet for coffee realized we lived literally five minutes away each other! We were both graduates of the Illustration program at Sheridan College and like many college grads continued to live in the city. Paul was working on pitching an animated series based on a script his friend had written and asked if I was interested in helping out. It was called "Guardian Force" unfortunately it never got off the ground partly because Paul started a web design company with his roommate, where I ended up working for the next few years. With the help of the Wayback Machine, I was able to look back to when Paul and I had our websites linked to the A:M Users pages.

Here is a collection of 22 of the 26 "A moment With Walter Lantz" segments... 0:00 Show 1: Origin of Woody Woodpecker 3:58 Show 2: Drawing Woody with Proportions 8:16 Show 3: Woody's First Appearance 10:52 Show 4: Animal Characters 12:07 Show 5: Drawing with Basic Shapes 16:50 Show 6: Where Do The Stories Come From? 20:00 Show 7: Character Model Sheets 22:15 Show 8: Animating with Emotions and Movement 24:22 Show 9: The Evolution of Woody 26:52 Show 10: The Director's Job 30:56 Show 11: Timing Cartoons with a Metronome 35:05 Show 12: More on Character Movement 37:42 Show 13: How Animation is Filmed 42:17 Show 14: The Animator's Job 46:03 Show 15: Creating Backgrounds for Cartoons 50:07 Show 16: Recording and Timing Voices 52:41 Show 17: The Inking Department 54:28 Show 18: The Painting Department 57:03 Show 20: Further Tips on Drawing 1:01:52 Show 22: Sound Effects in Cartoons 1:05:56 Show 24: Storyboarding a Cartoon 1:10:03 Show 26: Creating New Characters

aftter having to shovel again found snowman model and did quick render snowfolk.prj

Lately, I've been seeing some posts on here and on other forums showing vintage CG stuff, it got me looking through some of my old projects, reminiscing about my first experiences with 3D and starting my career in 3D graphics. I figured maybe this is a good space to share some old works that I never posted on the forum before maybe some of you will recognize some of the stuff. I got into 3D in the early to mid-'90s in high school and college. I didn't quite understand how 3D graphics were made in high school and used programs like DeluxePaint Animation to try and create my own. I even did a few projects for teachers, animating the high school logo. Then, I eventually learned about POV-Ray and tried every free 3D modeler available at the time that worked with it but it was never satisfying. I eventually started using 3ds for DOS and was able to get somewhere. I used it to create a 3D gallery for my uncle’s website, showcasing his paintings, drawings, and sculptures. I switched to Ray Dream Designer but it wasn't until college that I found out about Martin Hash's 3D Animation Pro, or A:M 4.0. With A:M, I was able to model organic shapes that I had been struggling to make in other programs. I used A:M for my computer class projects while taking Illustration at Sheridan College and because of what I was able to do with it got hired by my computer teacher at his design studio in Toronto. Below is one of the first projects I did for my computer class using A:M 4.0 I'll be posting more as I sort through my files

I remember Martin telling us that A:M WAS being used professionally, it just wasn't getting credit for it!

Here is a posing tip I had not encountered before. It may work better for puppets who can never shift eye direction, but it is important that your character appear to have purpose in where he looks.

@Rodney It occurs to me that even if we can find a way to run those three sort programs in week 3... we never get their answer as to which was which.

Not sure about that codec. I used it because the original becomes quiet large.

@Rodney For our C++ use, the "main" line of the Caesar's Cypher program needs to define argv[] as char *, not "string" (which was shown in the lecture)... int main(int argc, char* argv[]) after that, you can treat any element of the argv[] array as you would a string, such as cout<<"Argument: "<< argv[1] <<endl; I presume this will be true for future programs that use command line arguments. I don't know why string doesn't work since it worked for them in C in the lecture.

Here is another one. Inspired by the illustration of Lois Carrel's cover of Alice In Wonderland's Catterpillar. I'm beginning to get intrigued by a way to change the mesh of the model into another shape.

Hello to all, I share my github for my various projects 😁: My Github From now it is very rough and wip ☺️ My main programming is C and C++ but I am learning other programming languages as well😅 Thanks and keep it up for happy coding !

320x240 is indeed what it was most of the time.

Very impressive list of applications Would be interested in seeing screen shots and renders that your renderer makes. 🤩

Those are fine-looking pieces, Michael! They would have been great 25 years ago and they are still great today! I really like that blue hippopota-something. He should get animated and have some new adventures. v4 was where I came in. Ouch. After you made a model, you had to cut it into separate "segments" and then piece it back together in the Bone module to rig it. I'm jealous of you guys having A:M in high school. When I was in high school I sort of knew what computer graphics might become because I had seen imitations of it in movies like "2001" but there were no home computers back then. In high school we had occasional access to a computer via a terminal that connected by a 10 baud modem to a "time-shared" computer that existed in some other city. We wrote little math programs in BASIC and stored them on paper tape. Each school got billed for the minutes of computer time it used. I recall there was a minor scandal when one kid wrote a program that ate up seven hours of computer time. Ten years later, the whole home computer scene had arrived. I had my AMIGA computer and I'd wait seven hours for one frame of a 3D ray-traced animation to render.

Back when I was finishing college, a friend from high school started his own web design company. He pitched the idea of creating an online poker game and came to me to create some graphics for it. The game was going to have a top-down view of the poker table, but I still wanted to create everything in 3D. I had just started modeling some of the players before the project got canceled but I was still able to reuse some assets for later projects.

Initially, I wanted to pursue illustration to become a book illustrator. Some of my favorite artists at the time were fantasy illustrators like Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, the Hildebrandt Brothers, and Keith Parkinson. I thought studying interpretive illustration would set me on the right path, but I found that many illustration teachers in the ’90s were jaded about the industry’s direction. With Photoshop taking over many traditional illustration jobs, photographers could now do work that had once been the domain of illustrators. Maybe that’s why computer class was one of my favorites, the teachers were excited and enthusiastic about this new field. Many of the skills I learned in those classes, like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, are tools I still use today. This was one of my projects for computer class. I believe the assignment was to create something using Photoshop, and of course, I used it as an excuse to do something in A:M, using Photoshop mainly for creating textures and final touch-ups. I was also experimenting with achieving soft shadows in ray tracing by creating a small cluster of bulb lights.

I got "Mario" and "Scrabble" working and "Change"

I didn't know we still had that! That is left-over from long ago. 😮 If you click and drag, it will make a two-point spline. Back in the dark ages, "A" would get you just that two-point spline behavior and you had to SHIFT-A ("lock mode") to get the continuing spline-making that "A" gets you today. I think you can ignore "lock mode" today.

The y key. Normally it adds a CP between two CPs, but if you select a CP by clicking just beyond the end of a spline it extends the spline by one CP.

thanks to Robcat was up and tinkering again whatsup2a.prj

I hope everyone had a great Holiday, and will have a happy new year! Windows: Windows 32Bit Windows 64Bit SDK: v19.5 SDK Change Log: Fixed 0007283: Action lost on PRJ Save Fixed 0007279: Splitpatch gone? Fixed 0007286: Can't select target for Group Constraint Fixed 0007281: DarkTree/Symbiont Materials render blank Fixed 0007285: Importing MDL files will result in "No Name" as the name of the model Fixed 0007280: Imported Materials have no name Fixed 0007209: Texture Sequence as a Decal: Image > Timing > Frame is ignored by final renderer

Getting in the spirit of Halloween, so played around with an older model and some lighting.