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.