Leaderboard

Well here is the follow up to the previous animation Simple Pleasures For those having issues here is the Youtube link: MP4 version: Simplepleasures2.mp4

[Mod note: Don't miss the many excellent WIP images above this post!] Okay, it took me a while...I think I worked the kinks out. Here is a test render that I'll probably watch a thousand times and second guess most of what I did (1920x1080 MP4 H.264). It's a quick pan around the room....it looked correct on a few players like VLC and Windows Media Player, but one it was washed out (I'm assuming it was the color correction in that one...it's more geared to viewing EXR sequences). If it looks washed out to anyone, let me know. BreakRoomFlyThrough_04_10_2025.mp4

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.

MONADA3_207_AlCHEM.mp4

Hello All, For about a mount plus I my real job has been taking over all of my time and I had some personal stuff too. I have fell behind on Animation Master stuff. I'm at work now and have a 4 hour drive back to my office. But I'm going to work through email and PM backlog tonight and tomorrow. I'm really sorry about not being around and I'm back at it

Hey yall! I've had some trouble uploading images to the forum and finally got around to starting my own html page on neocities: yopachi.neocities.org they give you 1gb of free website and it's super fun to make a simple page using LLM as a helper for the code. The site is just one page for now but I'll be adding my worthy splines are as I go. I even made an animated favicon! did you know you can animate favicons?

May you have a festive Ground Hog Day.

At long last... the results of the "Finish the Unfinished" Image Contest! See all the entries, hear the winners interviewed and, yes... The Big Scratch-Off! Congratulations to the medalists and a BIG THANKS to everyone who entered! Get yourself a soda, fire up the big screen and... FINISH THE UNFINISHED! There was more than one winner in the Big Scratch-Off... you'll have to watch it to know who you are! Send me a PM on the forum and I will arrange to PayPal you your winnings! @Shelton @johnl3d @Goss @Roger @ChuckGram @R Reynolds @Vance G @wedgeeguy @Michael Brennan @svetlik @createo @Madfox @Rodney @Tom

Hi Guys, About 4 months ago I started working on a short animation (keeping up with the Mid Term Goals in my profile 😄 ) I'm getting close to posting the final video, so I might as well get the ball rolling. Will be posting some Time-Lapse videos here in the comings weeks as well. Cheers.

Thanks for all the comments guys, yeahh I like the topic of food and drink for an image contest great subject for still life. Finally uploaded my short to YouTube, after many months of hard work, I give you a whopping 1:4 minutes of distraction.

Simple Pleasures Well I have rendered the animation. 17 cores at 16 passes utilizing 77% of CPU and 38%, running at 5ghz at 39 Celsius, 1440x1080 resolution, 156 frames, took netrender 59:07 minutes. Here is Hans finding something new For those who can not see it on the forum here is the Youtube link PickupFlower.mp4

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

wow cool ! I used it in a video!

Once again I must remind everyone of the sage advice offered by my friend three-finger-Pete ... "If it's explodin' ... Don't be holdin' " ... Have a safe and happy 4th of July! [Mod note: Posted on behalf of password-unremembering forum member.)

In 2001, I was commissioned by a designer friend to create a book illustration for a novel called Angry Young Spaceman. A few years earlier, I had done the back cover illustration for Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask by Jim Munroe. For this next novel, I got to illustrate the front and back cover and even created a short looping animation, which we made available as a screensaver. It's always so fun to work on book illustrations and then go into bookstores and see your work on the shelves. Proudly all made in A:M

In 2002, my friend Paul and I started our own 3D animation studio using the old office that Streamline Media originally occupied. It was one of the most exciting yet stressful times of my life I never thought keeping a sleeping bag in the office closet would be a good idea until then. We were trying many things to promote the studio, Focus Chaos Inc. so I submitted my Valentine's Hash image contest entry to 3D World magazine and then completely forgot about it. It wasn’t until our friend Steve, who rented us the office came in one day and told me he saw my image in a magazine at the bookstore! I still have a copy of the magazine, 3D World May 2002.

A new render of my third assignment for AnimationMentor, 20 years ago this week. Now with my own trombone sound effects! The assignment was that the ball had to do an anticipation into its first leap, then bounce around the obstacles.

The Oakville Waterfront Festival poster design for 1999. Reusing the models from the previous year made things quicker but looking back wish I took more time to clean things up, making the models a little less lumpy. Was a fun project nonetheless,

My first bouncing ball for classwork at Animation Mentor, 20 years ago this week. Now with sound effects! The assignment was to animate a rigid bouncing ball for at least four bounces. It was OK to have it just bounce in place. I had never really done a rigorously accurate bouncing ball before and I wanted to get this as right as I could. Looking at the time stamps of my PRJs, I see that I spent more than 30 hours on this.

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!

not mobius mp4 version: MOBIUS3.mp4

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*

Hi, everybody. I've not posted much recently, I've been busy with my YouTube stuff for most of the past year, but I've kept tabs on the forums. Hope everyone is doing well. Anyway, I've been working on a bit of something in my downtime so I thought I'd share the work in progress. Still a lot of work to do.

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

Installers: Windows: Windows 32Bit Windows 64Bit SDK: v19.5 SDK Change Log: Fixed 0007263: Crash on PRJ Save As Fixed 0007262: Crash after adding CPs to Hair Group Fixed 0007266: Freeze on selecting particle emitter Fixed 0007250: Material Preview Orb has false shading Fixed 0007250: Material Preview Orb has false shading Fixed 0007260: CP weighting lost on save and reload happens only if cp's are weighted to the modelbone with a lower weight than the weight for the other bone Fixed 0007256: 5-pointers render badly Fixed 0007258: Renders not saved Fixed 0007257: Crash on Save As Fixed 0007254: Netrender crashes on startup Fixed 0007249: Orient like constraint behave incorrectly Fixed 0007252: NetRender can't start RenderMessengers Fixed 0007251: Decal animated sequence keyframes ignored Fixed 0007248: Animated decals only work when set as "Color" Chaanged: Switched to Microsoft Compiler, because ICX2024 has some problems with MFC and slower than MS both are slower as Intel Classic on Intel CPU's, but Intel Classic is not longer developed (removed from oneAPI) a comparison can be found at http://www.sgross.com/am_test/amforum/Compare_Times.html Start to switch to std::filesystem instead of the old handmade code (over twenty years old , as example with a Win95 tree...) Flock, Volume, Turbulence and Texture plugins revisited and corrected(unused parameters removed, default values corrected, fixed computations) Fixed some bugs for composite (false filenames, not displayed composites) new attempt to fix 0007241 looks like a never ending story

I added the inside of the mouth and did some rigging on the lower half of the face. She can smile now.

I served myself a bit of a hazard job by trying to convert a *.stl file to a low poly object. It obtained about 3 milion verts and 2 miljon faces. The file I needed had a 2000verts 1000 faces limit. So I tried to convert it with MeshLab back to that low count, but as expected there was hardly a form left. So I used Furcher's retopologize methode (thanks for that!). Still a bit of a whirle as the object prop was so dense I could hardly trace the outline. To keep the relief right I know that exporting .OBJ files from AM: to .3DS leads to the half outcome of the model. This needs some clarification. When exporting models from AM: like this OBJ one:2680v /5563t. Importing it in MeshLab and exportin it to 3ds I get a file with 1007v / 2045 tris. And that's precise the limit I needed. Still a bit confused why this works that way. Then I could import it to Quake and give it the right texture. 🐘 calendrius.mp4

Congrats to the winners! Rob, thanks for taking the time to run these contests.

The results of the "Finish the Unfinished" Image Contest are finally here! Watch the video at FINISH THE UNFINISHED

thats mad ! you got me digging the crates for old work lol , TVC for Doritoes

Hi all, soooo, just upgraded to Win11 from Win 10 ( had a crash and decided to upgrade ) and have installed AM 19 / 19.5 ect. have noticed some slowdown over from Win 10, has anyone encountered this who's on Win 11, granted my rig is still an old mac pro / DP Xeon 3.4g / 128 Ram /Radeon RX 580, but AM was much faster with windows 10, looking to upgrade the rig soon to a Minisforum MS 1 or Dell precision compact 3240/60 just for AM, with possibly an RTX A2000 / 4000 GPU, am working with Perry Animations on a few things for his feature moofee and the small pc's would be great for potability for onsite work. On GPU front does anyone know if AM loads most of the workload / models in GPU Memory or still in RAM ? Because if its primarily working from GPU memory then I would like to get a GPU with as much memory as I can. Is 3D painter still available ? I have been looking for this and the website is no longer active, can someone point us to where I can buy a licence and download the program. Latest build, accordion with working keys / bellow is really taxing the system ! - used robcats spring tute to get this working, works like a charm ! Thanks robcat

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

In the early 2000s, I was working with my friend Paul and his roommate, also named Paul at his web design company called Streamline Media. It was a fun little place to work filled with multimedia artists, sound engineers and programmers. We did our fair share of 3D work for websites and print. One of our bigger clients was a local company that made CNC router tables. I had the opportunity to model and sometimes animate their tables using A:M. It wasn't until they asked if we could import some of their CAD files that I realized I needed to start learning a polygon modeler like LightWave 3D. That took me down a different path for a few years. Here are some renders I did for the CNC tables using A:M

Hey.., great bone structure, RobCat! For some reason I couldn't conserve the feet targets. This other bone hiearchy shows a lot better. I was forgotten to give the umbrella a good outlook. So I exctracted it to the new mesh and it works a lot better. Thanks for the hint!

Some progress renders of the creepy Swamp Demon guy. 😱

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

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

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

One more for the day. Archie or Andre, was rigged with TSM. A little more flexibility especially for the bow and arrow.

I found the rendering of Timothy walking. Here is Timothy the Goblin

this as about a 30 minute tinkering frosty.prj

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!

A brief test using SimCloth for Autumn leaves... YouTube version: BooH264.mov UPDATE... here is a shaded wireframe render of the full cloth simulation that takes place before the rendered portion above. Although "Show backfaces" is ON, the cloth patches only show their decal on one side in shaded mode. Not sure why. Boo Cloth Simulation.mov mp4 version: Boo Cloth Simulation.mp4 PRJ: OctoberSurprise.zip

Next up (I think I captured a character but not the character in the rotoscope. Thought this guy's jaw would be easy to rigs so added that.

Hello, As some may already know, I have been a user of A:M for more than 30 years. I walked right into the front office of Hash HQ to buy my first copy in 1993, and I still have the disks. I am not usually able to show much of my work outside of the studio, however, at the request of Robert Holmén I have assembled a brief look at how I use A:M in my design work. Even though in my job I need to know a large library of applications, I still like using A:M when I can because of how quickly I can get from an idea to something moving on the screen. Often, I am using A:M to create previz animatics just to show conceptually how something will likely move and to create some parameters for fabricating. Things like locating the axis of movement and how many degrees it may move, or how fast it might move for example. It is to develop a starting point for engineering data and specifying actuators, or sometimes to simply give the client and my team clarity on our direction. There is rarely any kind of finished detailed rendering of these kinds of animations. Everything is relatively primitive. There are occasions though where I can take the animation a little further. Over the past few years, we have used the previz animation to drive the programming of a finished animatronic. You can see examples of this in the current shows running at the Wynn in Las Vegas. https://press.wynnlasvegas.com/press-releases/wynn-las-vegas-brings-entertainment-back-to-the-strip-with-debut-of-the-new-lake-of-dreams/s/62fa1fa1-64dc-4009-a73b-4fc7099eb279?cultureSeoName=GLOBAL When we were tasked with creating all these new shows and updating our frog to a more modern control system, the frog had been in show since 2005 and a lot has changed since then, I was able to update the way we animate the shows finally. To animate the original version of the frog, someone would need to sit at the edge of the lake in Las Vegas in the middle of the night with a mixer board adjusting one axis at a time. It would take several nights to get a song dialed in. Even though the animation was being recorded to an animation tool it was designed for automation control, so the only animation interface is a timeline and spline features. You have no visualized double of your character to monitor. With our new process, now I can just animate a new song in A:M in an afternoon from the comfort of my desk and upload it directly to the frog from almost 1000 miles away. The following posts are a brief look at the A:M projects I have created and the process for this set of shows.

Some video of The Frog doing one of his songs... And some "Lady Birds"...

Sure thing.

Some new models I made lately. For some reason this fidling with game options keep me facinating.