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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

basesuite.mat Zena.mdl

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.

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 I have been looking for this and the website is no longer active, can someone point us to where I can buy a licence and download the program.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

Space Walk Time

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

I am starting my website! It is about conceptual pneumatic "Hyperloop" designs. I have an intersection in motion drawn from the Flownuts Hyperloop Intersection and Puff2 models. Those can be found in a post called 'Models to Share' on this Forum. The conceptual 'hypertrack' is 15' inside diameter. The 'hyperpod' or 'hypercart' is meant to fit tight in the track tubes and sized to carry a semi trailer. The website is Flownuts.com Password: hash The website is still "Under Construction" but I plan to keep adding things to it. The concept of Flownuts is to be nothing short of the biggest corporation ever stemming from the transportation industry. Here's the look of the "HyperCart" It's meant to hold a semi trailer that is going to load and unload at high speed...The animation has not been started, but it will show: 1. The approach of a train of HyperCarts linked together coming out of the Tube 2. Carts disconnecting 3. Doors opening, cargo unloading and loading new, doors closing 4. Re-connect to carts and re-enter Tube When the cart gets to it's final Transport destination, it can drive on it's own to it's specific location...like a semi truck! With a Tube inside diameter of 15', the Cart outside diameter is 14', giving a 6" gap. The gap will have a flap to catch air for speed. Carts will connect together for long distance transport. Over long distances, Carts with heavier loads (water, oil, etc.) are in front, followed by products, followed by passengers at the back. The most ambitious project is to haul water from Alaska to the Baja Peninsula to develop the peninsula (condos), while dropping water off to Lake Mead. More will go on the website. I'm getting a little better using Wordpress.

My thoughts: 1) If you don't try, you'll never know. If trying isn't going to financially ruin you, then there's no reason not to try. 2) There seems to be an insatiable demand for actual quality children's content. I don't think you can go wrong going after that market. 3) AI throws a wrinkle into things, but the things that I've seen done with AI all seem to have a very similar look. Either they have that hyper-realistic look (think of those alternate imaginings of movies set in different time periods that you see on YouTube, like a 1950s Star Wars on Cinemascope, that kind of thing) or they have a more cartoon-like Pixar sort of look. But I don't think you'll ever see anything *truly* unique out of AI, since it can only produce things that look like what it has been trained on. My gut instinct is that outside of certain narrow use-cases, it won't be the panacea everyone is making it out to be. That said, I could easily be wrong, the type of stuff that AI was producing just 3 years ago was fairly laughable, compared to what you're seeing now. But I still don't think it will be able to come up with anything truly unique. 4) As far as publishing your work, YouTube might be the best way to go as there is a pretty big kid's market there. However, in order to get promoted by the algorithm you'll need to produce shorts on a weekly basis, which is a pretty tall order.

@gazzamataz It's always great to see you. From time to time over the years I've seen projects here in the A:M Forum that really capture my curiosity and not just from a general perspective but from one that I guess I would call 'commericial'. In most of these I think... this is a really intriguing concept. Where things get a bit more fluid is where I think, "is this commercial enough?" and "How could this be simplified/polished". I should say that your project reminds me of some of the classics like "HR Puff n' Stuff" which really capture the imagination (and definitely did when I saw the show as a kid. Music has it's songs that are 'ear worms' that we find ourselves humming or thinking of frequently. When thinking of HR Puff 'n Stuff some of the design elements are like this. I think of Cling and Clang as supporting characters but almost all of the characters have an odd appeal that captures the attention. Your 'Bella the Bear' has some of this 'odd intrique' and you've put a lot of effort into the concept over the years. As you've suggested the look and feel is definitely vintage early 2000 CGI which in its own way has some appeal but for most probably lends its self more to curiosity than commericial viability. So to the question at hand which is: ```should I revisit my project once more to see if I get anywhere with it or is the market for children’s characters and stories so saturated I should just tinker with my project for the fun of it?``` I do think you should revisit the project but I would suggest for the moment tinkering with a 'for the fun of it' focus. You already know Bella and Friends could use a refresh in order to test if the concept can be made more viably commercial. While you don't care 'Bella' to be something you don't want it to be it would be a good exercise to consider what a commercial marketing house that took on the project might do to make the concept more marketable. I don't know how familiar you are with Eastman and Laird's experience with 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' but their story is something of a legend. There comic book characters and concepts where purchased and adapted to 'kid friendly' animation and the world took that and ran with it. Some of that success was rather problematic... and lots of changes to characters and concepts happened. All of this to suggest that you firstly and foremostly need to make yourself happy. (While still having enough money to eat and have a roof over your head of course!) You might need to let go of your characters a little (but not to the point where you can't always do your own take as you see fit... in other words: reserve some rights to personal use). If tomorrow someone offered you a truckload of money to license 'Bella the Bear' and they ran with it... where would they take the concept? While having fun... within your limits of production capability... and while waiting for lightning to strike, insert yourself as that someone with the truckload of money and... run with it. I would start with the title concept "Bella the Bear". Bella is a bear. There's where I would start.

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

If you haven't seen it elsewhere, this is the famous 1935 memo from Walt Disney to the studio drawing instructor, Don Graham. In this he lets loose on many ideas he has to better the quality of work. Even though he's no longer drawing anything at this point, he is ahead of most of his staff on form and force and motion and acting. Drawing shouldn't just be about representing something accurately, it should make it into something more.

The "tongue sandwich" is a classic cartoon gag but I had never seen a real tongue sandwich until I went to New York City and my New York City friend Dean took me to the world famous 2nd Ave Deli where I ordered... the tongue sandwich! For Dean's recent birthday I made this remembrance of the occasion... It was good but it was probably my first and last tongue sandwich. I looked up the current price of a tongue sandwich at the 2nd Ave Deli... $27.95! Oy!

Ahhh the tongue sandwich...the only sandwich that can taste you back!

Searching for a MadHatter.

Another test of Transfer_AW weighting on my old Capone head. TAW59_000.mp4

lawl . . . all the greatest techno / trance record covers of that time . . . Bryce + Poser yep novelty at best and the god awful rendering speed line by line by line

love your work man 🤘 That's beautiful

I think we had ( Art School ) Ray Dream first, then Moved to Infini D . . . then Lightwave, ( wasnt a big fan ), some of our lecturers were employed by companies and universities using Softimage on SGI gear I was like man can we go to your work and play to which they replied, only if you want to make 3D with command prompts - eeecch!! I thought the isometric graph interface would be good transitioning from graph paper drawings for Ray Dream . . . but it was not and it was slooooowwwww on the schools Macs . . . I picked up AM when I started my first job in advertising, we had to produce some ads and infini d wasnt cutting it, one of the guys at our company told us about Dylan Perry from then Momentum, he made a call and Dylan dropped past with AM 96 / 98 I think, gave us a 15 minute quick start guide . . . I produced 2 x 30 second TVC's like in a couple of hours, the modelling was exactly how it ought to be, the rendering, rigging was so intuative . . . rendering, rigging, the works ! best app ever, ran fast on macs and pcs but it did crash a lot back then ha ha . . . so did you eve use Bryce 3D or Poser lol

Ray Dream Designer / Studio 😂 . . I remember that ! Infini-D too

More great-looking stuff, Michael! I especially like that fibre-optic fountain thing. I wish i knew as much about lighting today as you already knew in 1999!

The one-legged jump! A new render of my animation for the fifth assignment at AnimationMentor, 20 years ago this week. The assignment was to do one long jump and at least two short ones. Now with sound effects i made myself! (animated in Animation:Master, of course)

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

I’m doing an animation for our local community theater. While Sir Nigel is narrating, Granny here will be slowly (like Tim Conway vs Harvey Corman) crossing the street with her walker and will enter the theater and go to the dressing room. (When she comes out she will be Lambrina. I had to “Build” Granny and rigged her with the 2008 light rig. The Lock IK is ‘on’ on both hand and forearm bones (and attached to parent). Both hands are “Translate to” constrained to the ‘Walker” bone, but when I move the walker bone, the hands move with the walker but pull away from the forearms. I have probably gone wrong in several different directions, but I’m clueless as to when and where. Would appreciate any help offered. Thanks, Myron Walker Granny.mdl

I did a quick once-over. It looks like the rig works, but I didn't do any weighting. There probably is something wrong somewhere in this model....the modeling definitely needs a lot of work. I tweaked a couple of things to make the bone positioning faster but it still needs quite a bit. Walker Granny_update_with_bones_and_constraints.mdl

I experimented with the Thom (2001_Skeleton) model. Thom_0000-0240.mp4 GrannyWalker_Test1.prj

How do I make a image file using Hash? is it even possible to make it? Below are the files I'm trying to use to make a image file with. When I screen shot the Render scene looks terrible. any tips would be helpful! Special thanks to Michael Brennan for helping me with the models pose.avi Slippy Toad.mdl Falco Lambrade.mdl Fox MCloud.mdl Peppy Hair.mdl pose.cho rob.mdl

Usually I do a walk around of my models but the piggy-back setup allowed me to do a climb over and between. piggyback_walkthru_h264.mp4

Well my latest rolling stock release has taken more time than usual since the cargo required way more work than the railroad car. Before interstate highways and stackable containers, rail "intermodal" transportation was defined as driving transport trailers onto railroad flatcars to "piggy-back" their loads from city to city. Railroads started by towing the trailers up long ramps onto a slightly modified standard flatcar and anchoring the trailers with chains. Soon modified flatcars were given integral fold down ramps so multiple trailers could be driven onto a long series of coupled cars. Before trailers started to grow in length, they could fit one standard or two shorter trailers per typical flatcar. I justified the creation of two trailers since they could also be used to tow around my backlot once I get around to building the tractor truck. Since trucks didn't have as much horsepower as today, trailers were much shorter. Fortunately short trailers are easier to model because they don't need side doors. But all that painted on signage meant that creating the decals took almost as long as the modeling. To make the anchoring process faster and more secure, one flatcar manufacturer invented a retractable trailer hitch. One man with a pneumatic wrench could lower or raise the hitch and lock the trailer in place. This was one of the more difficult models I've tackled as there were very few reference photographs of them available on the net. And what was available were lo-res, isometric views. I basically had one good hi-res image that had a human close-by for dimensional reference but only showed about 75% of the hitch. So some of it is guess work. I may have over-compensated with the beat-up materials and dirt decals. However, I think the old, dirty diamond pattern steel plating that I showed off a few weeks ago looks even better installed.

Livestock used to be shipped via railcar using stock (or cattle) cars. They were essentially box cars whose walls were replaced with wooden louvers. The wooden louvers did less damage to their hides for better quality leather. They also provided ventilation but if you were nearby a stock car as it went by (even if it was empty) the odour was unmistakable. stock_car_walkby_02.mp4

Walking from the factory out into the parking lot. tank_car_walk_around.mp4

"The Case of the Missing Hare" (1952) Three different backgrounds in one shot...