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Hi Guys, Been experimenting with rendering some gem and glass like objects in A:M and decided to try my hand at rendering some quartz crystals. Have a few more things I'd like to add and experiment with in the scene so figure I'll keep adding here as a WIP when I get around to it. ( have to get back to my Snoopy post as well ) A few post tweaks were added in Photoshop like exposure and blurring.

UPDATE: PROBLEM RESOLVED. Jason, Thanks for finally getting back to me. Replaced the lic file and everything seems to be working just fine.

At the last Live Answer Time I had trouble getting a satisfactory bouncy ball with Bullet soft body dynamics Here is a more successful attempt with a quadish-topology ball with more patches and the patches of uniform size. From left to right the balls have "stiffness" of 0.01, 0.1 and 1 All4Ball005b weight comparison.prj StiffCompareB000.mp4

After reading the latest Martin's Minutes about "Charlie Brown Books" I remembered that I modeled a Snoopy vs Red Baron a few years back using Lightwave and was curious to try the Lightwave importer with A:M. After re examining the model I decided to model him from scratch in A:M. I just get a kick out of the elegance of spline patches vs subdivision modeling it seems like you can say more with less. Here is some progress of the model so far... still working on the hands and feet and will be modeling a scarf next.

Are you thinking of animating the dogfight?

The July 11 2020 LAT is now posted.

Hi, Olivier! A:M is much faster today, largely because we have faster CPUs and more available RAM and A:M has been optimized in recent versions to take advantage of the advances in these. The benchmark scene that took 20 minutes to render on the computer I had in 2009 takes only 2 minutes on the computer I have now, which is still about four years old. Also, NetRender is now included in A:M so you can take advantage of multiple cores on one computer or across your home network when you are rendering more than one frame. A:M does not devote more than one core to a single frame nor does it use GPU-computation. Not yet anyway. A:M will be slower at rendering than some other programs. That is not a deal-breaker for me because A:M is better for me at modeling and animating. Do i want to give up the better modeling and animating environment i get with A:M just to have faster rendering? No! (en français!) Rendering is something the computer can do while I'm doing something else. Modeling and animating is something I have to do at the computer no matter what program I use so it is better to use the program that is better at that. That is why i use A:M. If you have more questions, do ask!

I'm back on top of email today.. But if I missed you PM me here and I will get it.

The first type of boxcar I built was the older style where the handbrake wheel is mounted horizontally above the roof line. In order to maximize the number of boxcars, I decided to cheat and put a different railroad line and specs on each side of a single car. This scheme only breaks down when looking at the end of a single car where you see the two different numbers. However once the two cars are connected together and their ends are somewhat obscured I now have two boxcars for the price of one model.