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MONADA3_207_AlCHEM.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.

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.

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!

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

I realized that this month is the 26th year of owning and using AM. I bought my first copy in 1999 from CompUSA. From the 6th grade I have always wanted to do animations. I have been around computers since 1977 in High School, and once I got to college I saw that a computer could help me create an animation. I have had Maya, Studio 3d, Infini D, RayDream, Lexicor and one I can not remember from the Silicon Graphics days. But I have always come back to AM. I am hoping once we get moved in the next couple of months I will get back to that dream of creating an animation project. It is funny, as I have been cleaning out for the move I found a render I did of all the characters in Cupids Sick Day and the Coffee Shop. It is crazy how many splines I had on some of the characters. one of the female characters had over 9k patches. Anyway, All of them are my creations except for three which I got off the extra dvd. And I only used parts of those characters. I still have another 20 not shown in the pic that are still being finished. Over the years of had created some 50 +/- characters with AM. Many are not rigged while others are partially rigged. I have about 15 with full rigs and weighted. I have many rigs installed. From Zundle Rig, Holmes Bryan Rig (LiteRig), Mark Skodacek (2008 Rig), David Simmons (squetch Rig), Mack Chappelle's Saucy Rig, my own rig, and of course TSM 2.0. Thank you to all the people who have commented on all the characters through the years and given me inspiration to continue by quest. I will be uploading shortly a continuation of an animation that began many months ago. Thank you Robert Holmen and Chris Daily for pushing me forward and out of my comfort zone. I have learned a great deal about AM and about myself through this process of creating. Happy 26th anniversary to me!!

I don't think I posted a link to this yet, but hey, better late than never.

So i lied. Here is Sir Harold

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 is the final "Particle Fire" project from the C++ tutorial that a few of us have been doing. I have modified it so that you can draw a trail of fiery sparkles with your mouse as it runs. Unzip this ZIP to a folder on your drive somewhere and double click on Sparklies.exe to launch. Sparklies.zip Left-drag to draw sparkly particles with your mouse!

I wish everyone a Fine New Year and I look forward to seeing you all in 2025!

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

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?

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

Figured I'd post some of the modeling I'm doing with @Pizza Time (who doesn't like pizza???) I'll be glad to post the models here but I'm giving them to PT first. In the meantime I'll share some turn arounds and perhaps add some detail about what I did... why I did it and... maybe even why you shouldn't do it that way! (Disclaimer: I don't know any of these characters names so the names I supply very likely will be random) First up:

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"...

Hi all ! I am new to Hash animation master I make a joypad very simple and what do you think of that ?

Recent YouTube wanderings led me to some videos about 2001, the making of the Star Gate sequence, and so on, which got me thinking… 2001 is among my all-time favorite movies. It is film qua film, not merely a novel thrown up on the screen. I saw 2001 at the Cinerama Theater in LA in 1968, with my college comrade and long-time friend, the late Robert Blalack, who received the VFX Oscar for Star Wars (1977). To say that we were mind-blown would be the understatement of understatements. These days, movie editing programs and software packages usually have some form of the slit-scan effect in their bags of tricks. But why use them when I might be able to re-create a virtual version of the Douglas Trumbull set-up in A:M? Down the rabbit hole I went with internet research on 2001, Trumbull, and slit-scan techniques. Trumbull set-up (details vary depending on source): Camera with open shutter on 15’ track. Slit-scan structure to support 4’ tall slit (I have not found width of slit documented anywhere) and Artwork moving behind slit; slit is just off-center (Trumbull has said there were 2 slits, one for the left pass, one for the right pass). Artwork greater than 4’ tall and as wide as you want to make it — many feet. Camera moves down track from 15’ away to 2” (or so) toward Slit/Artwork over a period of 1 minute while Artwork is moved approx. 8” horizontally; Trumbull mentions that the camera was panned slightly during this move. The result is one frame of exposed film, either the left half or right half of frame, depending. Rinse and repeat. First proof of concept in A:M: I made a simple model, a panel with a slit in it, to scale, and an artwork panel set just behind the slit. In the Cho, I placed the Camera 15’ away from the Slit-screen/Artwork model. I keyframed the camera to move toward the model while moving the artwork behind the slit. After rendering a series of frames, I composited the frames into a single frame and could see that I was getting something like the desired image stretch/smear of the slit-scan technique. So the approach sort of worked, but the method was tedious. How to “hold the shutter open” for a single frame during the camera move? Then I remembered the MUFOOF (Multiple Frames in Only One Frame) technique posted by Xtaz in 2005. As the Camera cannot be moved toward the Artwork within the MUFOOF action, I realized I would need to move the Slit-screen/Artwork model toward the Camera. I made an action to do that, did test renders, and got strange results. So I made an action that ran the set-up backward, moving the Slit-screen/Artwork model from 2” in front of the Camera to 15’ away, and got good, predictable results. Also, the Artwork cannot be moved within the MUFOOF action and have its new location available for the next frame. A second action is needed to move the Artwork between frames. I did many test renders of the backward MUFOOF Slit-screen/Artwork model move with Artwork moves between MUFOOF frames, while tweaking the Multi-Pass and Motion Blur values, and got some beautiful results. An example, using a 2 slit model: The light trails move, scintillate, but the dynamic acceleration characteristic of the Star Gate sequence was missing. The final ah-ha moment was realizing I could move the Slit-Screen model element across the Artwork as the model travels away from the Camera. That worked. Here is a wireframe of the set-up: Once I had a working slit-scan system, I wanted to see what actual 2001 artwork would produce. That artwork is long gone. But a couple of clever people have managed to deconstruct/reconstruct it through some coding wizardry. My 2001 Artwork was extracted from YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meEhkceeA94 and website https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/2001/ which reconstructed the original graphics by taking strips from each frame and placing them side by side. An example still from a render using the reconstructed artwork, left side of frame only: As my set-up has the slit on the left side of the model and the artwork moves from left to right and the Slit-screen/Artwork model moves away from the Camera, the rendered sequence moves away from the viewer unlike the actual Star Gate sequence. No matter. Modern movie editing software supports flipping sequences horizontally, vertically, and end-for-end. Here is the link to a short version of the Star Gate sequence as done in A:M, rendered at 720p and up-res’ed to 1080p, including a Ligeti-esque soundtrack: https://youtu.be/P4kflu1okxE Two issues with Multi-Pass that do not exist with real film emulsion: Brightness of image diminishes from outside edges inward as passes progress; I used high intensity values (2000 - 4000%) for the Keylight to compensate which causes a somewhat blown-out result; kind of OK because the overall effect in 2001 is blown-out. Banding from over-lapping passes; no complete remedy that I know of. Think of it as a feature, not a bug. High contrast artwork mitigates the issue somewhat. Here are the files: slit-scan-backward-indy-2001-artwork-60sec-01.chosingle-slit-screen-2001artwork-system01.mdldouble-slit-screen-backward-system-60sec.actdouble-slit-screen-backward-2001-artwork.act I am working on another slit-scan experiment using Mandelbrot Set artwork created by another college comrade who was also along for the 2001 ride back in 1968. I will post that item in the near future. Best to all.

The "Pinot Vista Tasting Lounge" where outr band has been playing every Wednesday (for 3 years) is giving us our own "Label". Yamhil County, Oregon, has become a tourist destination due to the fact that it is now "Wine Country" Now people can take home a souvenir. A bottle of "Twisted Knickers Private Reserve" Pinor Noir. Here, have a bottle. . .

Sure thing.

Here it is! This is 10 yrs. of my life. (so THIS is why Pixar needs 300 people to make a film) Thank you robcat, fuchur & other AM forum gurus that helped me!

A quick and dirty test of the transparency map/soft-edged slit idea shows promise. Needs refinement, but better and better. Good thinking, Robert.

newworldexplode3d.mov mp4 version: newworldexplode3d.mp4 redid the animation and slowed is down a little need some comments of what you like or what you think needs tweaking or any questions you may have be glad to answer PRJ: newworldexplode3.zip

That's a very impressive set of characters you've created, Steve. And it doesn't even include the cavemen and knights and goblins!

Ha!

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

Some weird shapes i made with the Duplicator Wizard. I had never experimented with the "Tumble" parameters before. DuplicatorShapes004.prj

Yeah, animate it back and forth a bit and add a creak and it would be most disturbing! 😮

From 0:00 -1:20, anything that's the character Minecraft Dan (the backgrounds are Minecraft), 1:20 to 1:40 is entirely Minecraft and everything after 1:40 is made in A:M (except the speech bubbles)

Pretty nice and looks like a good continuity. Well done.

Before we venture off to FractalLand, here is a complete re-render and re-edit of the 2001 slit scan movie using the transparency map approach suggested by Robert. The distinct banding is mostly or completely eliminated. Where banding does appear, it looks like it is part of the effect, not a hard-edged standing wave. https://youtu.be/dujQGB-2EXw 2001-soft-edge-slit-scan-composite.mov

A modern render of this Showdown entry, now with lighting, atmosphere and sound...