Rodney

Thanks everyone. I had a very nice birthday. I think we've started a new tradition this year... on my birthday I buy things for everyone in the family... It's rather amazing how that works.

Does anyone know where A:M stores the Custom Colors from a Model's Surface Properties? Thanks!

Thanks guys, I'm having a great day thus far.

If the hair doesn't add something specific to the final product it may be best to use something else. Specifically what I'm talking about here is that if you look at the thumbnails of both images in the first post there isn't much difference. Would there be much difference if the bear were animated? I don't think so. It may be worth the effort to add hair for close up/hero shots but in this case an alternative might work just as well. My first thought would be to investigate a material such as that used on Keekat. There also use to be a Velvet (or Felt?) material that creates a nice furry look. One version of Keekat had that as well. And... with Keekat the sense of hair (at all resolutions) is further enhanced by the judicious use of geometry (chest hair, facial hair, etc.). Of course since you are experimenting... experiment on! Hair can be used for many things that will be useful.

Nicely executed Simon! Happy New Year!

Happy Birthday to the following people: (Zeeesh. Some of you are REALLY old!) itsjustme(101), NancyGormezano(101), hashlister(11), ptiversen(57), steveb(7), robertalove(76), cfree68f(7), bubba(68), Mechadelphia(100), Sonic84(30), Bruce Del Porte(59), noah brewer(36), kuep(105), Moden(6), Epoch(106), stinkyu111(44), Kusakabe.Q(104), mouseman(100), DanCBradbury(106), PlinyTheElder(57), alano(106), Pygmy(106), asphalt maker(104), freecandyman(28), TheSpleen(54), headofrealestate(48), Code D(104), TD3D(6), Beach Bum Larry(101) Note: I assume these appear because no birthday is set in your forum profile. Happy 2014!

Mark, Thanks for the reminder of those resources. They are outstanding!

Gah... I got it to partially work but as a transparency. I'm headed out the door so can't finish it up at the moment. I'll be back later tonight.

Steve, I'm going to go back to your original post because you said some things that help to understand your goals: One of the best approaches to learning A:M is to work through the manual "The Art of Animation:Master (TaoA:M)". It has short exercises designed to get you up to speed quickly and comfortable with with the interface, modeling, rigging and animation workflow. In my experience those who have worked through the manual (even those who don't do every exercise) are the most successful. Then their hardest challenge becomes what to do with what they've learned. TaoA:M consists of video tutorials and the manual (hardcover or PDF) if you don't have the book readily available you should! There is also the Technical Reference to refer to: ToaA:M Video Tutorials The Art of Animation:Master and The Technical Reference Some folks find the manual too easy and some find it too hard. Most find it supplies a nice way to quickly digest otherwise complicated subjects. You mentioned an interest in modeling and the most useful method I can suggest to learn modeling is to open up some models and explore them. Tweak them. Modify them. Break them. You'll gain valuable insight into how other folks model.

You should be able to just turn the background off in Flash and draw over a transparent background. Any rotoscope you'd use would then be another layer on top of the background but under your drawing layer. Note that a roto can be on top of your drawing layer if it is set to not being pickable or editable. As I recall, converting to .MOV will remove transparency as that format does not store Alpha Channels. AVI does but that probably won't help you here. Trying to save time often wastes time. If you are in a pinch and there is a sequence of images you need converted to have a transparent background perhaps you can post a link to the files and someone (like me) can remove the background for you. If you go this route zip up any sequential files so they can be downloaded in one file. Added: To troubleshoot the setup you have in A:M perhaps you could share the project. It may be something simple such as the key color not being key'd correctly so it only works on the first frame of the animation.

Nice test! A problem with using key color is that any shift to another color will cause the transparency not to work. A question though... Are you using a .MOV file or sequence of images? I believe you'll have more success with an image sequence. Added: If keying out a background that you are creating yourself it can be useful to create the background as a solid color such as pink... or some other color that isn't close to anything else in the image. Even better though... You should be able to create a transparency (Alpha Channel) background via Flash. Again, you might have to save out as a sequence of images. I can't think of a time where it would be better to create a false background that will be removed when you can remove it from the very beginning.

One of the reasons we don't see a lot of A:M specific information for lighting is that lighting and rendering concepts largely apply across the board. If for instance you know how to light a scene in the real world it's easier to adapt those approaches to the digital world. Concepts of lighting in other software can be adapted as well. As there is an internet full of information available on rendering and lighting those areas tend to be set aside in favor of those areas that are not the same accross platforms and software; primary spline technology and how that can be best put to use. While there are endless resources in the lighting and rendering arena, the go to book on lighting and rendering is still Jeremy Brin's 'Digital Lighting and Rendering'. Keep an eye out for it and you can find some copies on the cheap, especially the earlier editions. Jeremy has some short and sweet articles on lighting and rendering that are must reads: http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2165641 Here are most of the articles your find via that link: Top Ten Tips for More Convincing Lighting and Rendering *Hot off the presses! (13 Dec 2013) Lighting Environments and Architecture in Animation (26 Nov 2013) How to Create Realistic 3D Shadows (18 Aug 2006) Lighting Your Imagery (Aug 2001) These articles are short... which makes them even more useful. Note that this last one has a tip that transformed my understanding of lighting and rendering and that is to... 'Start in Darkness'. While it may be useful to setup and test with default lighting in any given program you really want to get rid of the defaults and create your own for your final rendering. Having said that, A:M does provide a nice starting place with a three light setup. My advise however would be when going for the final image delete those default lights and start in darkness. Then start to consider where the 'real' light and heat and emotion is coming from in your scene's specific environment. Another tip worth noting when adjusting lights is, "When you begin adjusting a light, the first step is to solo the light." Turn off all the lights except the one you are adjusting and see how it is effecting your scene. In some cases you may find the light you are adjusting isn't contributing as you thought and in some cases can even be deleted. A third tip which I don't recall seeing from Jeremy Brin is to consider shading all models in neutral grey while testing to avoid having the surfaces of objects trick you into thinking you are seeing effects from the lighting when it is the effect of the surface (often not yet optimized for rendering) instead.

...and with v18 Snapshot we've gained a nice new layout and analytic tool.

Discovering more... I'm finding I need to deliberately click in the window prior to taking a snapshot or else I will (more often than not) get a snapshot of the previous settings. In other news: I love that the snapshot captures the guidelines too. Tres... cool!

But... this isn't to say that the Snapshot Tool is controlled only by the settings in Tools/Options. Adjusting the view via A:M's interface also drives changes to the Snapshot tool. For instance, toggling through Muscle Mode and Skeletal Mode produces predictable results. Todo: Go back and test the disconnect I saw in the earlier attempt to snap shots of the shaded view.

Okay... immediately after posting I've been discovering things anew. The snapshot appears to follow the settings in the Tools/Options Panel rather than the real time/right clicking Render selected (shortcut key) view. The settings maintained in Tools/Options, such as turning off Grid and selecting the view on the Modeling or Action tab, are what drives the results of the snapshot tool.

For those of you with some experience with this feature perhaps you can elaborate on the snapshot feature a little more so I can better incorporate it into my workflow. First, let me say that I am fascinated by how this snapshot feature can do more than a standard Print Screen of the current screen. I do wonder however if I am missing something so let me postulate the following and see if it matches with what you know: - Snapping a Shot will grab a wireframe or shaded wireframe image of the current window (what you get will depend on what View settings currently being used (Wireframe/Shaded Wireframe) - Control Snapping a Shot will pull up the dialogue to allow higher image resolution and specify location for the file to be saved. - If we want an actual shaded view then we should use the keyboard Print Screen or Alt Print Screen function (This seems to work at odds with the first so I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong on my end) - The snapshot feature saves a snapshot with Alpha Channel intact. (Now that is very impressive and I need to leverage that soon!) I guess what throws me off a little is that I'm not getting snap shot images that match what I'm seeing in my working window. What I seem to be missing is how to get a shaded snapshot without wireframe. What say you all? Edit: Hmmm, I changed models and now am getting a shaded view. More experimentation...

And what's amazing there is that Brian created most of his highly acclaimed works long before any modern day rendering came into existence.

That would only be one part of the solution. Faster rendering is mostly a hardware issue. In my view, the goal at this point is primarily to make the process 'artist friendly' and I should add 'director friendly' too. Hair to this point has largely been a technical dance that only a few highly trained and knowledgeable folks could wrangle. Where the money for research is currently, is where they are pushing hair toward physical animation that behaves as real hair would. At that point it just gets directed and tweaked by the artist and director. If the style itself is wrong then alter the physical environment to suit. In A:M's case this isn't as big a deal because the artist is usually the director too. But the big companies with corporate looks cannot have hair behaving in one way for a two second shot and another way for the next two seconds, and another for a third, etc. So this is largely an issue of control. The director says, "The hair needs to be more curly and flop to the side like this(motions back and forth)." The animator then sets up the scene and it works. The physical part of the equation is to create space (reality) for diverse voices to communicate. The part without the solution still seems to be that of controlling hair in a predictable way (in this case apparently with inverse kinematics). As always my view is considerably naive. If I could read the math I might have a clue.

A problem with many renderers (Yafray included) is that very few animation sequences are ever rendered with them because they aren't designed for such. They are generally designed to optimally render still imagery. Is this a shortfall of a particular renderer (perhaps) but more likely it is a constraint put in place by the user. There is sometimes an issue with some renderers in that almost all images look the same (they bury the users' style under their own) Here is a sampling of a few folks who were once new to A:M. No slight on any A:M User not represented intended!!! They all discovered they could render still imagery and animation too: Marcos Rezende (Xtaz): Stian Ervik Wahlvaag (agep): Malcom Zinzan: Eric Camden: Noah Brewer: Dark Jedi: Marcel Bricman (ZPiDER): As Martin Hash once said, "There are a million things Animation:Master cannot do. No wait, now there are a million and one things A:M cannot do." Don't let that stop you.

From one of the authors (Florence Bertails-Descoubes): I'm thinking this translates (naively) to: Efficiently recreate curved and variable styles of hair... and um... vines. Starting place: . Here's a paper from that author that details 'the problem' they are trying to resolve, namely that of issues with maintaining curvature (and specifically piecewise affine curvature) when using inverse kinematics: http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/65/89/96/PDF/s...lothoids-EG.pdf She has some more of her research/papers posted here: http://bipop.inrialpes.fr/~bertails/publis.html While there is a whole lot to read there at that last link... it's very interesting stuff.

As Robert has mentioned folks do use other renderers and have since long before I started frequenting the forum. The usage of other renderers tends to ebb and flow depending on the popularity of the renderer and how proprietary the pipeline/workflow. Those who solved the major issues in the past tended to keep the pipeline quiet because of how that impacts budgets. While an external render may not be plug and play almost any renderer can be shoehorned into A:M workflow. If you look through the forum you'll find posts where folks have exported and rendered to just about all renderers Is there any particular renderer you are targeting? Knowing that will let those who have a similar interest know you have a 'need to know'. One of the most recent external pipelines that caught my attention was that of Soulcage Department who often lights and renders shots created in A:M in other software. I'm not sure if we have any Renderman experts hanging out but knowledge in that arena is always going to be useful. One of A:M's goals has long been to keep the render process accessible to folks who don't want or need to master volumes of technical data. But for those with the interest... But perhaps you don't need all that? If your needs are more basic, don't forget that A:M now comes standard with it's own external network renderer... Netrender. With Netrender, we can cue up batches of renderings on one computer or over a network. There are some guides and such for netrendering on the PC and Mac (or both) in the Netrender forum.

This isn't a Modeling Tutorial but in this short video Robert demonstrates how to Model detail without actually modeling the detail: d4uRDzDMEXE

Speaking of thinking ahead while Modeling... Here's Robert's (very brief) tutorial on "Thinking Ahead When Modeling"

Here's a tutorial by Robert on Modeling a pop tab on the top of an aluminum can: Modeling a pop tab of an aluminum can The core of what Robert covers isn't modeling per se but rather how to approach modeling by thinking ahead.