Rodney

The primary reason to use PNG is... to display the images with transparency on the internet. Otherwise you'll find TGA to be more robust. Once rendered to TGA it's a pretty simple matter to zap those out to PNG as well. People have such confusion with the various formats that I've considered trying to put together some form of demonstration about image formats but I'm not sure even that will resolve the dilemma. For my own part I am moving toward this: TGA (The tried and true rendering format) EXR (The way of the future) PNG (For internet use) Where possible I am hoping to forego all 'image formats' entirely and move to reviewing scenes in A:M using realtime spline tech alone. Movie files (all formats are optional and some more robust than other for specific targeted viewers) but .MOV is the best for use in the forum. This is complicated by the fact that Apple has moved away from the format and doesn't support it for 64bit) Way back when I made a suggestion that A:M always render to the same files every time but the reference I used was too obscure and people are so locked in to the current paradigm of rendering they got confused. I'm even more convinced than ever that A:M should (behind the scenes) always render to the same format (probably EXR first, then (in parallel) to PNG for a small thumbnail preview, then convert the EXRs to TGA... then branch out to other formats based on user specified input. The render panel would show all options in one view and the user would toggle on the ones they wanted and the user could override the default rendering order. If left alone A:M would render to every format in every size with every option (i.e. maximum waste but lots of product produced). In other words, the A:M renderer would never (completely) stop rendering as it would always have something in the rendering cue and if it were to ever run out of things to do it would begin renderering based on what you most commonly use. There is a lot more to it than this but we can't get beyond the initial steps necessary to even move in that direction.

When I first encountered SVN this is where I thought it was heading... toward a realtime database of production assets. I believe Martin did too but there wasn't enough interest (beyond TWO) to sustain it. So we been having to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

If you can't get it to connect after that, launch an email to jason@hash.com He'll be able to check to see if your activation code went through on their end.

I'm not smart enough to get A:M data into it but I'm sure there are some folks out there that are. Dreamworks Animation recently released one of their proprietary tools: http://www.openvdb.org I found this while researching a project management program that I'm hoping will work well with A:M.

Do you mean login to the Community window inside Animation:Master, where the chat room is? If so, you should be able to create a new login and access the community login with that. If that isn't it... I don't know where you are trying to login.

But... seriously... you should download v17.0a. If you just purchased on the 24th of August all you need to do is download, install and activate it. v16 is good too though.

Congratulations! There are quite a few ways to get rid of the blue sky. The primary two are: - Turn Alpha Channel setting to 'On' in the Render Panels Buffer setting. (Use a format that can store Alpha Channels though like PNG, TGA, EXR) - Change the color of the Background in the Camera settings A few other methods: - Create a box or sphere and scale that up so your rendered scene is inside the object. Texture that object by adding surface color, patch images, materials, decals etc. - Place objects between the background and the camera that obscures the sky (a good method for cityscapes etc.)** - Use a Rotoscope image on the camera Of course you could use a combination of all of these as well. My preference is to use Alpha Channels because that transparency allows compositing the images later. **Closely related to this one would be adjusting the camera angle so that there is no sky (i.e. a down shot at a group of characters from a high vantage point)

Maybe we can work on getting you better access to the internet?

Hmmm.... something is not quite working there but I can't quite figure out what it is. While I'm looking into it I'll suggest that it seems to me that her head bobbing up and down like that while running at such a fast pace seems wrong. It might move a lot at the launch but after that her head... and eyes... should lock in on the way ahead of her. She is going somewhere quickly and this implies an intent to get there fast and/or making sure she is aware of any obstacles in front of her. Not sure... not sure... not sure... A few of the poses suggest 'jump' ala Trinity from 'Matrix'. Added: Not the best video reference but full of random running at various speeds: And second video: This last one has some nice slow mo analysis. At 4:20 some text crawls up the screen and echo's Robert's suggestion to lead with the hips. Shortly thereafter there is talk about vertical movement (head bobbing) and they talk about 4 inches in movement... but note that the this is the head moving up and down, not tilting forward and back. At approx. 8:20 the video starts talking about Stride Angle and it's relationship to Bounce (head bobbing and vertical movement of the body). At approx. 11:45 there are some olympic runners that come close to hitting the stride of your character and her upper body is held very stably throughout the run. My suggestion would be to place a Null ahead of the character and have the character look at that Null (you don't have to constraint the head or eyes there but you could do that as well). Your girl's run is obviously more exaggerated that most of these real world examples but... Conjecture: The faster the run the more stable the upper body will tend to be to maintain balance and to prepare the runner to occupy the space(s) they will be moving into.

No, you don't need to uninstall anything. You are still getting the dialogue to enter the activation code showing right? Wait a sec... Removing your master0.lic file from v16 folder... why are you doing that??? v16 has nothing to do with a v17 installation. (The master0.lic file can be copied to the new directory but it doesn't have to... I never do... you should be able to just activate the new installation with your code) So, now I'm confused. Look and see if you've got a v17 folder (in either C:\Program Files for 64bit or C:\Program Files (x86) for 32bit). Installation should be a five minute process so this has gotten way too complicated. Let's get you back to square one. The error message you got 'Bad Data Return' is indicative of something interfering with the internet connection with the activation server. This has been confirmed several times by others to be due to anti-virus software intercepting the connection. IMO considering how your antivirus software might be stopping the connection would be a good place to look. Also, make sure you aren't running A:M while installing. For troubleshooting purposes I would close down all other programs too until A:M is installed then reload them. Usually you don't have to do this but sometime programs (like anti-virus) do a bit too good a job protecting us.

Which website did you go to? Was it this? Hash Inc only sells the current version. They don't sell old versions. If you purchased from someone other than Hash Inc I'm not sure what to tell you. If you recently purchased A:M you can download the latest version and activate it with your activation code. If purchasing a CD... the very nature of a CD suggests that what is printed on it can't be the very latest version... for the latest and greatest you have to download and install the latest release. This has always been the case even way back in earlier times... purchase v8? v11? v12? etc. ...download the most recent release, install it and off you go! At this exact moment (assuming you purchased through Hash Inc) that means you've got access to v17a: v17a Release Information When updates are released you can download and install them as well: Release Information (all versions) I'm sorry you think you have access to only v16 but... the good news is that if you purchased through Hash Inc recently you've subscribed to v17.0a... so get to downloading!

That is too Cool Rodger!

Hmmm.... that is odd. If all else fails you might try a 'reset'. I'm not sure what the problem is but perhaps as a workaround you can just drag and drop the image into A:M? (Try dragging into the Chor... once the image is created in the PWS you can delete that Chor)

Using A:M's 'Snap to Grid' in conjunction with "Snap to Surface" will get this done and with a high degree of precision. Grids used with 'Snap to Grid' can be anywhere between .001cm and 10000cm if I am remembering correctly. Changing grid sizes on the fly while modeling is a great way to control precision placement of CPs. In this way, we can get two surfaces really close together without touching one another. Using A:M's 'Snap to Grid' in conjunction with "Snap to Surface" or any of a host of other modeling features will get this done and with a high degree of precision. Grids used with 'Snap to Grid' can be anywhere between .001cm and 10000cm if I am remembering correctly. Changing grid sizes on the fly while modeling is a great way to control precision placement of CPs. In this way, we can get two surfaces really close together without touching one another. Added: Grabbing a group of CPs and moving them doesn't conform to snap-to-grid and I'm not sure if this is by design or error. It seems to me that when 'Snap to Grid' is enabled everything should snap to the grid. There appears to be some tolerance issues in snapping to grid but I need to investigate. Moving with arrow keys always seems to snap the groups CPs to grid while moving with the mouse does not. Edit: It's primary scaling that breaks free of snap to grid. Perhaps the reason is that scaling and snapping to a grid would work against each other?

You'll be the ultimate render wrangler when this is finished.

And boy does that render fast! I need to use that more often.

Here's a topic from last year on the subject: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=39487 Added: This isn't really game sprites but I thought I'd run a test to see what upscaling with anti-aliasing and then downsampling afterword would produce. I'm liking the clean look of lines.

Consolidate is suppose to recreate your current folder structure so that when unzipped the files go back where they belong. I'm not sure what to make of any empty folders if they are not in some way related to your current directory structure. If I understand what you are saying... That is not creating a folder of where they were but rather it IS a folder of where they ARE. Consolidation does not remove any files it merely copies them, and their location into an archival file. Upon consolidate you then have your original files and the archive. I can't speak to any extra folders except to say that A:M attempt to recreate the structure of where your files are residing as instructions for the archive so that when the files are extracted they go to the place specified.

We can't Embed any external files such as Images and Audio. Embedding is limited to A:M files that are text. Consolidation on the other hand was created to overcome this issue of external files not being collected and shared. Consolidation collects all the various external assets and combines them with the Project, which may or may not have files embedded in them. It should work but there may be some aspects of zipping up files on a Mac that don't allow consolidation. It sounds like an A:M Reportable thing however if someone can confirm that audio files don't Consolidate. Should we assume that Macs don't zip files but rather use Stuffit or some equivalent? Ref: A:M Reports: [bug]6237[/bug] : 32bit WAV Files Not Accepted

Looking sweet! I'm liking that shoulder movement.

This is a given in the benchmark itself as the device or format used is simply the one you want to benchmark. In this way we compare apples to apples and not apples to bowling balls or more likely if we aren't paying attention to the variables, johnathan apples picked at the prime of their season versus golden delicious apples picked far too early in their season. So the answer is 'yes', you want to identify what device and format is being used in the benchmark. Ideally this would be a set standard and only need to be expressly identified if/when that standard was deviated from. As a for instance, in my previous benchmark it would have been good to specify I was rendering to PNG but with no Alpha Channel. Rendering is something I'd love to spend some time researching because I think there are massive savings to be had or... in a perfect world... the concept of 'rendering' itself would become somewhat obsolete. That is to say that rendering would be obsolete in the sense that the user would no longer know that 'rendering' was occurring... or if known wouldn't particular care. That is the revolutionary promise of technology and why we use computers; to eradicate, or at least radically reinvent and revolutionize our understanding of time and space. I'd like to hear more of what you think about this. Who knows, perhaps we can discover ways in which it isn't strictly theoretical. As I see that Benchmark 1.0, it strives to work with what is already given yet do this while accounting for considerable, even unwieldy, variation. This benchmark is primarily of use to the one conducting the benchmark and as such is not (ideally) global in nature. Each person would have to conduct the benchmark themselves and compare to their own benchmarking consistently... and not always look over at the other fellow's achievments. Benchmark envy is to be avoided if you are to maximize use of what you have already. This is not to say that a good benchmark cannot inform the global interpretation of information but by itself it cannot account for the vast complexities of unknown variation. What sharing personal benchmarks does then is allow us to mark, and therefore to benchmark against the relative changes in other systems and consider that in light of our own system. In this way we can recognize the approaches that best benefit on the global scale and effect a similar change at the local level. It should be noted that the benchmark is not software/hardware agnostic but is highly dependent upon knowing the original configuration or if the original is not known well striving to maintain that original configuration. This is at odds with what most benchmarks attempt to do. They actually encourage variation when the goal is to reduce variation! The more that is known about the original the more accurate the benchmark will reflect measures of change. However, that does not suggest the original cannot be in a constant state of change itself. It is assume to be changing but as long as the configuration doesn't change in any significant way limited variation is maintained. This is like adding a component to a computer and then testing it, then adding yet another component and testing again. With each new test a new level of qualitative and quantitative information is retained. But even here, the poor data is not seen as waste... but as very useful information! To better account for variation then the person conducting the benchmark simple tracks 'things' as they are introduced, removed or changed. For instance, if more memory is added to a computer that new variable that can be expected to shorten product cycles in the benchmark. Failure to see time shortened after increasing memory might therefore clue us in to the fact that the system being tested was already operating on maximum memory and increasing memory, without some other change, will not be advantageous. We then know to move our observation and testing to some other critical node in the system. Production is like this. We might think that one element of a production is failing and with all good intentions we set out to correct the deficiency. But without adequate information we are at least as likely (better than a 50/50 chance) to do more bad than good in the exchange. We just might not know the difference until it is too late. Next up I'd like to discuss Baselines: In general a baseline's objectives are: - Determine current status (is the system operating optimally) - Compare the current status to standard performance guidelines (what is operating sub-optimally or exceeding expectations) - Set thresholds/breaking points for when the status exceeds guidelines (if for no other reason than to notify the system that the guidelines need to be expanded or modified.

The last major effort to have python programmatically working within A:M was Petr Sorfa's python plugin (v9 timeframe). I wasn't very familiar with python so so my use of theplugin was mostly just running his scripts and seeing what showed up. Petr Sorfa Python Plugin (Old plugin and information)

I know we can export Lights to a python script but... Can we reimport that script back into A:M or is this for external usage only? (If not I know the workaround... perhaps more direct route... is to simply save the Chor setup and import that back into A:M. I do note however that editing the script to create lights is easily readable via the python script) The same appears to be true for exporting Choreographies to python scripts.

BUMP (Because this is a cool topic and many have never seen it)

Hi Simon, It looks like you are heading in the right direction. Here are a couple things that I would focus on: While I assume there is an intended disorienting feeling going on in this scene it's not immediately apparent what we are seeing. The windshield wipers clue us in that we are seeing out the front of a car window. This might be a great place to use A:M's ability to overlay the foreground over the background. In other words, you are dealing with three main levels/layers already within this scene so you might as well take advantage of them. Level 1: Inside the car Level 2: The threshold (window) Because of where the title text is this is where the initial focus will be. Level 3: The (unknown) road beyond By separating these into those three elements and working on each with the goal to draw attention to the title will make for utter clarity despite the chaos in the scene. Level three is where I think you can bring the most to this because even a few foggy elements moving in the scene will further suggest that this is a car moving through a dark and stormy night. Perhaps it is at Level 3 that the title text should be? As it is right now the title is a bit too hard to read. It's a bit hard to just this shot out of context but that is my first impression. You've got a great setup here now concentrate on the clarity in how it reads. Added: You don't have to actually composite layers in order to have these three levels in your scene but it might help in making it easier to work with.