Rodney

My first guess would be that the elements that are not rendering where dropped into the Chor at some other frame than the one you are rendering. To test that theory you could: - Check to see what frame(s) you are rendering - Check to see if that (missing) model isn't present/active on those frames. My second guess is that the model is present but (accidentally) animated in such a way that it has moved out of position on the desired frame(s).

Yes, most definitely! I think I'd add just a little secondary action on the part of the boy riding the horse to sell the effect of the horse's movement. It wouldn't have to be much. Just enough to convey that the boy is reacting to the movement of the horse. Note that this is basically the principle of squash and stretch but it's enough for the bones of the boy to simply react. I like! Yes, looks dangerous! At first I was thinking that a lower angle looking upward might be better but in thinking more... no... I don't think so. It has been said before that humorous scene setups often work best if squared off (or horizontal) with the camera so you've found a good angle for that. Perhaps best of all you've left plenty of space for the horse to pause and react to the situation. I"m tempted to suggest a little camera movement (similar to your other video "horse5") so that the delay will be further emphasized. The camera could be pulled in closer at the beginning and zoom out even as the horse is galloping off the cliff. The camera then begins to track/follow the horse again after the horse has changed direction and motivates back toward the path. Fun stuff. More please!

Outstanding! Well done Robert... love the narrative parts of the entries as well as the interviews with the winners. Congratulations to everyone... especially the winners! Well deserved recognition!

Wow. And to think... I knew you BEFORE you were famous! Congratulations!

RE: Matcap It would be wild conjecture on my part to guess but yes, as for now the plugins must be copied forward. That conjecture would relate to the licensing of any plugin bearing the name 'matcap' which might be trademarked or such. This isn't to say that A:M can't have something termed 'matcap' in the interface but distribution of such might not be clear. A (perhaps) similar situation exists with FFMPEG... which I'm hoping to submit a feature request to A:M Reports to have included in A:M. FFMPEG can be added to other programs but many companies don't care to distribute it because of licensing considerations. Users can however download and add the programs/plugins themselves as that licensing and distribution is granted to individuals. Companies may need to clear legal hurdles prior to incorporating such in their own programs. In the case of FFMPEG, the interface would have a place to point to the FFMPEG directory after the user downloaded that program separately. This resolves any issue related to distribution.

Something that should certainly assist with the project will be satellite views from above. Case in point... the exact location of the pond in question that at the beginning of the story didn't exist at that location. Arrow points to location of tree mound at base of dam.

Now THAT is the way to do it. Good on ya! AND... thanks for the well wishes everyone. You all make coming to the forum well worth the trip every day just to see what you've all been creating. As of today you guys and gals are stuck with me for another year. Sub purchased and activated. Yay! I do have some projects waiting in the wings that I want to work on and I think I will use this 'subscription cycle' as a means to work toward getting some of that fleshed out at least to the point of where I can determine whether or not they might be for public consumption (as opposed to just satisfying my personal curiosity). This particular project is primarily a hand drawn endeavor but I want to use A:M extensively for set and environment as well as prop creation (for consistency etc.). Other projects are many and varied but I'm quite curious if I can pull it off There is something... a thing... that I probably could use some advice on creating that I would imagine will require the use of Sweeper but I'm not entirely sure what the ideal approach will be. Think... a huge pile of trees and branches forming a dark and foreboding mound with a cave-like entry near the front and center. This might be a useful test for the new Bullet Physics feature in A:M after a bunch of branches are created. There is also the Treeez Wizard that might get at least part of the job done. This image isn't large and foreboding enough but is the closest I could find with a quick google search: http://www.livingwild.org/livingwild/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/wood-rats-nest.jpg In reality this mound of branches and limbs was what was cleared off of the top of a hill and pushed over the banks of a dam while creating a pond. All of the trees that were once covering the plane at the top are down at the bottom of the dam blocking the former path up the hill. At any rate, I don't think I want to draw this same environment over and over again from several different angles so it seems a likely candidate for 3D. The entire setting of the story will likely be created in 3D as well if for no other reason than for reference. Since the location is real I might do an on site survey but while a lot of the surrounding area might not have changed much I doubt the mound of trees is still there... it's been over 30 years! If you've read this far... thanks for sticking with me.

That little notification window thingy is now appearing to suggest I have a few more days on my current subscription and it's always a good time to reflect on where I've been in the past year and where I might focus my attention in the future. It's been a great journey thus far and yet I remain confident the best is still ahead concerning the potential for creativity with Animation:Master. What a great 'little' program A:M continues to be. Lots of shiny stuff out there but even after all these years nothing compares. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I'm at that cross roads of recommitting to another year of A:M I still don't have a solid plan to produce 'X' and at times that makes me ponder. Once upon a time I stated that I would 'arrive' in 2020 and that should sober me up a little as that particular milestone isn't far away. It seemed so very far away back then. One day at a time. A:M is certainly up to the challenge. Disclaimer: I hereby reserve the right to arrive at the end of 2020 as that theoretically will give me 364 more days.

Yes indeed, I was lazy enough to request a Duplicate option and Steffen was gracious enough to implement it. It should work with Models, Cameras and Lights. There are some object types such as Layers where the Duplicate option appears but it doesn't process the Layer for duplication. Duplicate does not work with multiple items selected (the duplicate option should be grayed out). One of the primary reasons for the request was I felt we needed to be able to exactly duplicate some things such as Cameras and Lights which then could be altered slightly from the original in useful ways. For instance, I had several projects where I wanted different lighting effects from the same location but at different times in the sequence. Turning them on/off as required worked well but it wasn't always easy to isolate a few small settings... duplicate allowed for this. Another example might be that of duplicating a Camera in the exact same position but having the first set to render out to png and the second (duplicate) set to render to jpg. Another option, would be to have a duplicated camera 'filming' the exact same scene but with a tighter focus on specific elements in a scene. Or perhaps have one camera render lines, a duplicate camera record colors/shapes and then composite the two renderings later after post processing of the separately rendered streams... this works quite well in achieving different styles from the same renderings without having to re-render them again in A:M. The duplication of Cameras also works well with other features added to v19 such as moving back and forward between shots via Undo/Redo methodologies. Credit were credit is due: It was Robert (Holmen) via Live Answer Time who pointed out that we could easily duplicate objects in other ways but prior to that I guess I hadn't made proper use of that approach and I'm glad I didn't know that because now we have a useful 'Duplicate' option. Duplicate is but one of many small but very useful changes to v19 that make A:M even more of a joy to work in. Disclaimer: I haven't leveraged the use of duplicate Camera setups with Netrender and I really should be doing that. Offline all we might have to do is rename a Camera and Netrender would think it was still rendering using the same camera. Netrender shouldn't care as long as the name of the 'active' camera hasn't changed.

Yay! A very welcome edition.

NIce one Serg!

That is a great demonstration of how it's done.

Yes indeed. Very nice.

I just tested Robert's project in the HAMR viewer (it still works on Win10) and... The project does work but the viewer does not immediately refresh which for most would equate to 'doesn't work'. I resaved the project as a v17 project file and it works a little better although still considerable lag in display refresh. If resaving (or recreating) yet again via a release closer to that of HAMR (better than 15 years ago!) I'll guess might play smoothly. Edit: I'll have to retest this because I'm currently having display refresh issues with quite a few different programs so that issue might not relate to the HAMR viewer at all. Update: Still delays with the HAMR viewer but... no delays in A:M itself which is of course the important thing here.

The A:M Films site has been fairly mothballed for some time now so it isn't too surprising the site is further broken. Perhaps as a community we can look into what other options are available although those might be more unofficial. In the meantime... There are some other locations (primarily youtube) where product created with Animation:Master can be found although submitting new work has historically always been something of a bottleneck. I believe Martin Hash himself may have uploaded the collection at Hash CG History: : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClx0zURG5-KTOzQewFRpASg/videos

Yikes. That is both good and bad. Bugs or otherwise, what you've got here on display is quite impressive. Love the economy of spline too!

I think I'd follow the suggestion to animate the individual entities separately and then swap them for another combined model when they act as one entity. The cool thing being that by dropping all of the separate models into a Choreography we can then save the combination out as a new consolidated model. The one thing to watch out for (as I recall) would be bones and such that have the same names... at one point we had to avoid that... and perhaps may still need to name those differently. The benefit to this approach is that repositioning and reorienting the separate models in a Chor is easy. Once they are in place them save out the new consolidated model. Other approaches are valid too such as dropping all of the models into an empty model as Action Objects but there are sometimes gotchas and such that might not work well with Action Objects. BTW Nice models... and fun project!

My memory is that there is something wrong with the original blob.tga image. Beyond that my memory rapidly fades...

That is a very thorough video. Thanks Robert!. I learned something there... and I thought I knew everything there was to know about that area of A:M. I don't think I've ever used the image properties 'Speed' value.

I'll guess that by 'drivers' what is meant is 'relationships'. Do the models you save that gain a driver file have poses or something else that creates a permanent 'relationship'? Since poses are the only real 'action'-type data attached to otherwise static models that would be my guess.

Congratulations Mark. That's a well deserved spotlight on your work.

Sorry to say... A:M's boolean cutters are the type that are only implemented at render time.** Therefore they don't actually alter any physical geometry (it only looks like it is altered). There are some things that can and do export well such as displacement maps. **If we consider the infinite resolution of surfaces (patches) made with minimal splines with boolean cutting methodology this is really the only way that can work. This doesn't preclude exporting objects created in A:M out and using other programs to execute physical changes via solid modeling but there the resulting mesh will no longer have the benefits of A:M's minimal splines and patches defining the surfaces. The shapes themselves (both those that will be cut and those that will do the cutting) will export just fine of course. In the other program you then just define which objects are the solids and which are the cutters.

Meshlab is opensource. (I think the program Ken refers to is under a different name?) In addition to the downloadable release Meshlabs has an online javascript implementation: http://www.meshlabjs.net/ It might take awhile to learn it's various options but there are a lot of them to include making meshes water tight etc. For the Meshlab site see: http://www.meshlab.net

Hi Mike, I won't be of much help here as but the short answer is 'Yes'. There is some voodoo magic we have to do to make sure we can see the CPs in order to select them and I think it might be best to create a Pose in order to activate things appropriately. Basically we can edit/animate/monitor any CP that is part of a Relationship and one of the easiest ways I know to create that Relationship is via a Pose. Regarding the voodoo settings... Make sure you have 'Show Advanced Properties' and 'Show Property Triangle' checked on the Global settings tab under Tools/Options. This will allow you to drill down to the Spline and CP level in the Channel Editor and Timeline views. A few other useful things will be to toggle on the 'Show Manipulator Properties' icon so that when we select a CP the CP number will display easily for us to use. The second thing here then might be to use a Filter Search with that CP number as the text to find so that it can easily be found (as the listing of CPs likely wont be sorted numerically... it is sorted by splines assignment. A third thing then might be to Pin the CP in your Timeline so that when you select something else it will stay there in the timeline for you to view. You can forego using the Timeline if you use the PWS Channel Editor. Of course, all of this will be clear as mud so please feel free to ask questions and I'll try to be more specific. And a final caveat...! There may be an easier way to do this via Smartskin but it's been so long since I've used smartskin that I need to brush up on that myself! Bottom line: Yes, it should be possible.

Aye mateys.... I miss those guys. In a perfect world, someone would see the potential in 'The Wannabe Pirates' and offer you so much money to franchise them that you could not refuse. Of course, then we'd all be sad that we couldn't afford all the cool toys. etc.