Rodney

...and Hash Inc has a 30 day money back guarantee. If you are just thinking this is all too good to be true join the crowd. I searched around for at least 4 years before purchasing A:M, then lurked on the mailing list for another 4. Both big mistakes. Needless to say, I paid a significant price for that procrastination. If I'd followed my instinct and purchased A:M in '94 I'd have many more years of experience behind me now.

Final render doesn't use the graphics card so yes, animation will all look of the same quality. You'll want to make sure that your texturers are all working on monitors that have similar calibrations or else you may get some strobing but that's not something A:M can do much about... or wait... perhaps it can. v14 now comes with a Gamma adjustment utility in the render panel so you can all sync that too. A definite plus. If you are rendering real time there may be some differences in quality. Render time is the real difference you'll see. Looks like Colin has addressed some of the hardware excelleration. Experts?

For those following along here is some more information regarding Actions and Choreography Actions that you may find of use:

Ooops. I thought I responded a long time ago to your last. Apologies for the delay. Post your exercises in the TaoA:M forum area. It use to be under 'New Users' but has since been separated which I think it a great idea. The Art of Animation:Master Forum If you ever lose track of it look for it under the Users Forum. Martin Hash refers to the A:M Community as the chat program within A:M. For me the A:M Community will always be the people. Now if those people want to chat they'll find that under the View menu; View>Community From there establish a login and just join in the chat. Trust me... there is no requirement to chat to be entered into the raffle. I do recommend you join in and ask questions here in the forum... share your experience... help others as you learn. Now THAT is entering into the Community.

I was in the Technical Reference looking up some other information and ran across this on actions. Some examples of reusable actions you might consider animating in an Action rather than the Chor: There are more of course but that's some pretty good insight into the where and when of it.

There is minimal information in the Tech Ref on the 'Constant' driver as its pretty straightforward; changing a driver to Constant will imput one value for that parameter over the life of the animation. This is opposed to "Time Based" which allows us to increase or decrease values over the course of the action. If you dig a little more information surfaces in the Tech Ref. The following doesn't show up in simple searches: One easy way to see the Constant driver (so you know what to look for) would be to: Create a New Project Create a New Choreography Right Click on the Camera and import a new Rotoscope Right Click on the Image or Transparency under the Rotoscope You'll see two options; Constant and Time Based. Note that it may not work in all instances *if* you don't change it to Time Based and then back to Constant. You'll find there are a lot of settings where you'll want to perform this simple toggle on/toggle off in order to activate the option. Activation is important not only so you can use the driver (or keyframe) but also so that when using Filters A:M will recognize that it is activated and identify it via the filter. Filters are related in a way to our exploration (especially for management and organziation of projects) so more on Filters later?

Thanks for the response. Animate Mode... lets tackle that one first. There's an image of what the Animate icon looks like at the top of the page here: Tech Ref: Animate Mode

I'm not fully understanding the questions here but I'll take a stab at them... Yes. Yes. Here you could either delete the keyframes on that particular frame or paste in another set of keyframes. It sounds like the animation workflow you are working at would best be served by approaching from the Pose to Pose perspective (as opposed to Straight Ahead). In Pose to Pose animation you might set a pair of keyframes definining one pose and then move ahead to the next pose where you set another pair of keyframes. Generally you'll want to keep these pairs at least 4 frames apart so that the pose will register with the eye of the viewer. There are some video tutorials linked here in the forum that might describe this process pretty well and there are video tutorials you can purchase from Anzovin, Bizzle and others.

I think you've just done all you need to do for the moment. The only thing you could do to improve your odds is complete TaoA:M and/or keep other people from posting in this topic. As of right now (should no one else enter) you'd be the winner. For you lurkers out there this is prime time to 'decloak' and introduce yourself to the A:M Community.

William, CES sounds like an exciting event. I've never made it to one of those yet. Make yourself at home here. I'm sure others from CES will be joining us soon. The TaoA:M forum is a great place to get started. There's no better way to learn more quickly and more thoroughly the tools at your disposal. Just jump in and you'll be telling your stories in no time. ...and don't forget to sign up for The 2007 New Users Forum Raffle!!

Glad you didn't ask any TOUGH questions! Regarding Choreography versus separate Actions here's my take. If you are animating repeating or cyclic actions you should create these in their own separate Action. Animating in the Chor will add to these actions. I've found I prefer this method but then again I'm not an accomplished animator. Animating in the Chor is what I do anytime I'm NOT working with a repeating or cyclic action. I'm discovering this isn't always the best route though and have started initial animation of characters and objects in their own animation so I always have a basic action to fall back on. There is a video tutorial called "Walk and Wave" that you need to review. You'll find it at the bottom of Hash Inc's video tutorial page: http://www.hash.com/vm/ Hope that scratches the surface. More accomplished animators can definitely get us pointed in the right way.

Nice! I see the shadow popping you mentioned. One of the Cons of compositing versus rendering as a complete scene is that you have more elements to control independently. The Pro is that those elements can be adjusted independently. *This is an important note for new users* Learn to love frame 0. In many cases you'll want to be on frame 0 when adjusting things to keep them from being animated. If you make a mistake you may need to go back and adjust/delete frame 0 keys. Two other related methods to keep from animating things you don't want to: - Change the animation driver to 'Constant' (versus time based etc) for things that won't change in a scene - Toggle on/off the Animate icon which will prevent keyframes from being created. If you decided you wanted another car to pass in front instead of that one how long would it take you to implement that change? (A guess will do... I'm not suggesting you rerender to find out.)

Each year for the past few years the New Users Forum has ran a raffle. This year there is no \'New Users\' Forum per se and the raffle is changing a little. The goals of the raffle are threefold: 1) Encourage New Users to join in the community 2) Encourage completion of the exercises in the manual (The Art of Animation:Master) 3) Get into Animation:Master! My plan is to run three raffles. You can win more than one but how likely is that? First raffle will be a $50 gift certificate at the Hash Inc online store. (My recommendation... a SIGGRAPH video!) Eligiblity requirements: - Must be a 2007 subscriber (Oz characters on the CD) - Post in this topic so I can add you to the raffle Addendum: - TaoA:M alumni get two raffle tickets apiece (TaoA:M certification has benefits!) Date of first raffle: 15 Feb 07* Interested? Only a few more days until the first 2007 raffle! *Date adjust. Read info below.

Hmmmm... What happens if you just hide the building (in the model) and leave the windows?

Unless using a model with Pose Sliders already created you'll have to create some yourself. Right Click in the Model window and select New>Pose Sliders. Select either ON/OFF or percentage depending on what you want in your Pose (I recommend percentage for experimentation). From there an action will open where you can create the various poses for your slider. This is all well documented in your manual; The Art of Animation:Master. Work through that online and others will join in and assist you through the rough spots.

*A word of advice to newbies concerning green screens* So interesting is the process of green screening that new users often can be found turning their backgrounds to green (or other color) in an attempt to replicate the 'real world' process. What they fail to realize is that they are adding an unnecessary step (several actually) into the process and complicating their work. Within A:M its better to use Alpha Channels which in effect are green screens identified and processed for you. Look at it this way, why add in a background that you intend to just take back out later? Better to leave it out in the first place if you can. Where green screens are used most effectively is in video footage taken from the real world. Live action and even stop motion animation filmed on a stage or set can benefit from the use of green screens. The screens (green, red whatever) are used to isolate objects from their background so that the objects can easily be extracted and used separately. Without isolating the background prior to filming the process of extracting elements would be much more difficult and laborious. Is there no use for green screens in A:M then? One possible use might be for when images created in other programs are being used. In most cases it would be better to use the program it was created in to isolate the image but all programs are not created equally. Some just can't do the job. The process of isolating elements with these *external images* would be to use one solid color not used in the elements desired to be retained and then use A:M's ability to identify a Key Color in an image as transparent. So if outlining a black and white image in red all the red could be made instantly transparent while everything black and white would be retained. Its important to note that you want this color to be as uniform as possible. This means that lighting of the objects must be considered too. With available masking tools in most graphics software this tedious process simply isn't practical anymore but can be used as an example of what time is being saved/lost in the process. If all images used in a production are required to be isolated in this way production becomes costly in terms of labor, processing time and in error checking and correction. If all the indivicual elements of a planned composite originate in A:M then our task is easy. Rendering elements out with Alpha Channels automagically isolates them for use in the final image. So save green screens for live action footage and save yourself a lot of time. I'm not suggesting this is new information to most who will read this but hopefully it'll save the occassional new user some time.

Phil/Caroline, Its been great seeing you both progress through experimentation. There is no better way to have the information sink in that to dive in and do it. I'm looking forward to your next update. Have fun at work! (I need a vacation)

There are some that have had success moving files (models etc.) back and forth between programs but it sure looks like more effort than what its worth to me. In my estimation the best way to share between these programs is by combining/compositing images. Others will have to answer specifics here too but A:M has Rigid Body Dynamics, Expressions, Newton Physics and more. Cloth simulation and Particle Hair... they are there. You certainly can do special effects in A:M. Particle sprites, Blobbies, multipass effects and more. In some cases you might want to purchase a program designed for specific special effects but A:M provides tools to get the job done as well. Keep in mind that Animation:Master is first and foremost a program for Character Animation. It can do a whole lot more of course... I still discover new things every day... but Character Animation is at the core.

I should say also that once you've rendered your images out is an unfortunate time to realize the sequence doesn't work. All is not lost however. There are utilities (both Mac and PC) that can be used to rename large numbers of images rather quickly. I like Irfanview (XNView is a similar program). These are pretty extensive graphics conversion freeware utilities but there are utilities that do nothing but rename too.

Sure can. If you render your files out to a filenname as follows: image.tga A:M will number the renders thusly: image1.tga image2.tga image3.tga image4.tga image5.tga image6.tga image7.tga image8.tga image9.tga image10.tga ... Notice any difference in pattern in any of those numbers? Right. image10.tga is going to be problematic. Computationally, images will be sequenced thusly: image1.tga image10.tga image2.tga ... The way to avoid this is to pad the filename with trailing zeros. Like this: image00.tga A:M then will render the first and tenth frames thusly: image01.tga image10.tga So then what about three digit numericals? image09.tga image99.tga image100.tga We experience the old padding problem again, right? I've gotten in the habit of always adding three zeros (minimum) to most sequential renders even though I usually don't need that many. Its just habit. sequence000.tga This three zero padding will allow for 1000 images so may not be enough for larger compilations but will more than satisfy most rendering needs. (Note: This will accommodate filenames from 000 to 999 so 000 is your 1st frame) So try padding your filename with zeros and see what you can see.

My daughter Julia said, "I don't like it." so I think you can say its a success! I was hoping your character wouldn't do or say anything too scary as I'd be blamed for nightmares the rest of my life. That was very impressive especially considering you've only been using A:M for as long as you have. Good job!

Sirius, In my time being an Animation:Master user (since 1998) there has been exactly one person that I can say just couldn't use A:M. This was someone that was so use to the interface of his other program he couldn't get comfortable with the new interface and workflow of A:M. Now get this... He readily admitted that A:M's interface was more intuitive, more accessible and easier to learn. He just couldn't get use to the differences and had to choose between the two. He wanted to use A:M but just couldn't. He send his copy of A:M back to Hash Inc and sent me a personal apology. Personally I think he'll be back (he said he'd keep in touch) but just imagine the time and money he might have saved if he had been able to make the transition. I'm in shock everytime I hear of someone paying $7000 for a program that has the same (and even sometimes less) capability than Animation:Master. I think of all the other things I wouldn't have been able to buy; tutorials, books etc. and am even happier with my purchasing decision. Its become pretty much the norm to say all 3D computer are equal these days. There is a lot of truth in that but if they are so equal... why such a price difference? I've gotta tell you I'm not sure I really need to know the answer to that question. Its enough for me to know that A:M is the best deal going at ANY price. So... you mean to tell me I can get 70 years worth of A:M upgrades for the initial cost of that 1 other program??? That alone makes the decision of purchasing (and upgrading) easy for me. Are you kiddin' me!!?! Bruce mentioned the principles of animation and that's an important consideration. If you are learning animation A:M is an even better deal for you. So... "Anyone can use it"? Yeah... anyone except that poor guy I mentioned.

Nice start Caroline! As art direction comes down and it is determined new elements need to be added to the scene it can be adjusted too. As has been mentioned shadows and reflections need to be considered. With A:M's ability to change models under the shortcut in a choreography you could change characters, add new elements passing in the foreground, add new windows and doors, graffiti, titles... and have then all animated too. As Yves has mentioned it'd be best in most cases to have all the elements determined and arranged beforehand but sometimes that might not be possible. If someone is working on the background models for instance (as its more complicated and will take longer) a proxy model can be substituted in the interim. Another place where this process is useful is in combining Live Action with CG. A combination of imagery with Alpha Channels and Front Projection Targets would be ideal and allow maximum flexibility in post production. Imagine an ad where Thom is walking past various monuments or the Great Wonders of the World. If planned right the background and even foreground elements could be swapped out easily while Thom just keeps on walkin' along. Another benefit? You can then take all these various elements and use them in other programs (Photoshop, CorelDraw, the list is endless...) to create derivative works. Or if necessary it could be rendered separately and placed in the foreground. A complication to this is whether shadows from any object might fall on Thom as he walked behind it. If that'd be the case then it'd be best to render then in the same pass.

Recommend you contact Hash Inc and plead your case with them. Your friend may be more eligible for an upgrade than you at the moment however. (Closing this topic as there isn't much more to say than "contact Hash Inc".)

Dhar, I'm not sure why that one would take excessive time to render. There are a lot of variables in there. If you still have the project file we could disect that as part of our exploration. Caroline, ...and here I feared we were going so slow we might lose everyone's interest! From time to time we'll post a recap (perhaps in the form of a PDF article?) to summarize what we think we've learned. Its important the information sinks as much as possible as once stuck we won't have to revisit the basics and can move on to more creative endeavors. I find the process of exploration to be as much fun as the creative side but then I'm easily entertained. There are so many related branches in this particular tree that the discussion might likely never end. Our goal here would be to at least satisify everyone's curiousity about Alpha Channels and hint at the ways we can use them.