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Hello, Here in France I have a few days of vacation to accelerate my exploration of AM which I find brilliant, only the rather long calculation times bother me. The rest of the program is fine with me. In the tutorial : at 8:57 the user clicks on a bone and duplicates it with the control key. I can not reproduce this action !? I do not understand why ? Do you have another example please? I don't have any examples of how to use smartskins, do you have any? This is what animation master lacks. These are simple examples of simple situations. When I understand the basics of AM better, I will try to find time for many very simple examples. This can help promote this fabulous software. Thank you in advance ! See you soon teo

With the animation for Stalled Trek: The City on the Edge of Foreclosure finally completed (only took two and a half years!), I went back and made a new HD version of Amutt Time for the blu-ray! Going back to a project that's almost a decade old was definitely a challenge! For one thing, it was my first real attempt at doing a film. Although I would eventually develop some organization, the beginnings were a mess! I didn't have production notes, so I had to do a lot of digging to find things. In the first sequences, files were scattered around in different places and there was some of that "final_revised_2b_final_b" kind of naming going on. I was assembling it in Premiere on top of the original video, so I at least had that to work as a blueprint. Originally, I had experimented with re-rendering the frames in 1080, but it turned out that just wasn't going to work. At the time (more than two years ago), there were plugins that no longer worked on the Mac version, mainly the Darktree textures. Attempting to render them in the Windows version failed because for some reason, the decals would all have to be renamed and updated. This worked sometimes, but not always. I'd open a choreography and the decals would be checkerboarded across the models and it was just a mess. Also, for the most part, there really wasn't any detail in the models. Most models just had colors assigned to them with maybe a noise pattern. This meant, after the added time of rendering a frame in 1080, the results didn't look noticeably different. So, I went with upscaling the original frames and it worked surprisingly well. Thank goodness I hadn't thrown them away! It helped also that I could re-do the post-render Photoshop work in HD. Although there wasn't a lot of detail, there were places where the added resolution was noticeable. Usually this was because what I'd done to the shots after the fact had given them a soft focus look. It was very weird going back to this after so many years. Especially after having just worked on a newer Stalled Trek. The temptation to just re-do the whole movie was definitely strong. That old adage about creative projects never being finished, but abandoned is definitely true. But re-doing it wasn't what I wanted to do. I also didn't want to "Special Edition" it up with new things. The biggest change is the color, which was greatly hindered by the original renders just being too blown out. Especially the reds. All that stuff about the gamma that I never understood did come back to bite me! I spent a lot of time trying to dial it down with limited success. I'm keeping both versions up on YouTube.

Thanks for sharing the thread Mark I'll definitely be reading through that for inspiration. That is impressive 4 months to create your animation, the usual story is "I thought it might take a month or two but ended up taking years". . Sorry to hear about all the obstacles, it's so true what Michelangelo said: Genius is eternal patience.

Having tried some small projects and often giving up after they became tedious, It's fantastic that you accomplished it, very well done!

Hi Teo! At 8:57 I see him moving a bone, not duplicating a bone. Did you mean some other time? You can duplicate a bone in the heirarchy by CTRL-dragging it onto the "Bones" folder or to any other bone that is not its child. The cursor wlll show a + sign when you are hovering over a valid target. Note that this duplicates the bone and all its children. If you didn't want the children duplicated also, you will need to delete them manually.

I found this cd as I was sorting stuff and thought I share what I saw on it placing all he models into a group shot

Thanks David!

Hi Gang! Another time-lapse modeling vid, be sure to watch till the end for a little somethin extra 👽

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