Rodney

Just returned from seeing the film. Disney is at the top of their game. It's pretty impressive how layered the film is character and story-wise and I didn't even attempt to consider the layering of detail on the models and sets themselves which is what we've come to expect from Disney. I just went along for the ride and enjoyed the story as it played out. The whole aspect of the mystery to be solved played out well... something we don't get to see often (especially in animated films) and rarely done well even in live action. This will be a great movie to study in depth when released on DVD.

I believe this was mentioned but the crash usually occurs when a named group is drag/dropped upwards and very rarely downwards. So the interim workaround would be to avoid drag/dropping upward. As a result this might require two drag/drops rather than one to get named groups placed appropriately. Also, this bug doesn't require folders to be present. It's interesting to note that there are related issues with folders. As for being able to duplicate... if I drag/drop upward the chances of running into the bug increase considerably. Edit: Of course when I just tried to duplicate the problem in v18p I couldn't get the problem to appear at all. Go figure. Edit 2: Of note, I just got the crash to occur when drag/dropping named groups downward in an Action. I don't know if I've ever tried to reorder named Groups in an Action before.

Hoping to see it Monday. As for Disney rigging... I've been trying for some time to find out more about the dRig that Disney has been using but information is scarce. There are quite a few technical papers on various aspects of Disney's rigging and simulation but they haven't released to the wild much about the dRig. Here's the basic paper: LINK When I first saw Greg Smith listed as being involved with the dRig (and various other papers) I couldn't help but wonder if that wasn't the Greg Smith that hung with us here for awhile with various theories of modeling and rigging. That's a pretty common name... so quite unlikely but... can't help but wonder. If it is the same guy, that might be ironic justice for the cold shoulder he got from a lot of folks who thought they knew better'n him 'bout rigging. I guess what I'm saying is that if these guys aren't one and the same... they should be! His main focus for tutorials was 'common body' modeling and animation which would fit right in with articulating a variety of characters on a grand scale. P.S. It's hard to get good search results based on "drig" and "Greg Smith"! He did/does go by another name as well here and elsewhere online and the age differences might suggest that one could be the other's son. Added: Regardless of who he is I see that the Greg Smith associated with dRig is in fact involved in 'Zootopia'. Greg is/was Head of Characters and Technical Animation on the film.

More stuff I need to explore!

Looking very good! I really like the way this is going. No crits here (besides the very obvious fact that the guy is sitting in the passenger seat and driving down the wrong side of the street). hehe .

Lots of nice fixes in this one. Thanks!

Pretty cool John! (or is that hot?)

Nice site Nancy! Yes, STLs work well too. Although I usually have to scale them up more than OBJs found on the internet... often by as much as 10000% because they are so small. Here's a bust of Al Einstein grabbed from the site you just linked with a marble material dropped onto it from the materials library. I tweaked lighting and material a little to get a fake translucency and colored marble. Edit: Those mapcaps worked great Nancy! Beautiful stuff!

Should we assume by FBX export you mean basic FBX exporting to a static model or fully functioning FBX models with material, animation etc. etc. Or could some of that wait until v20. When rubbing a lamp and wishing for stuff we must needs to be pretty specific or else we be getting something we doo no wan.

Here's a quick example of texturing poly Props in A:M with materials. I decided to start with a Spherical to separate flesh from hat and then went with gradients thereafter. I thought a good way to get quickly to different color on the tassel might be to use specularity and that worked rather well (going with the gold hat). I decided to go with global axis for the material as I thought that might be easier to edit via Chor as I was having to deal with the wrong orientation of the model in Modeling Window and didn't want to have to deal with that. Reorienting Nerfi in the Chor allowed me to tweak the material in a more reasonable orientation. The density of the Prop definitely slowed down refresh rates. A better job would take the time to get that more exacting line between hat and forehead... and account for that finer piece of cloth(?) between hat and forehead. If I was Bill Young I'd have a clue as to what I am doing with nested materials! That guy was a material painting machine. Edit: Something I didn't think to do which I should have thought of was using multiple materials and then adjusting their location/translation first before moving toward refinement. That appears to work rather well too. I haven't tested to make sure multiple mats save appropriately with props... looking into that now. *Update* And they do!

While it'd take some work, the entire bust could be textured (as if painted) via gradient materials. I presume the primary mat gradient would be flesh and hat. I'll guess it'd take at least 8 additional nested gradients to account for the eyes, ears, nose/cheeks and mouth. The hat mat would be fairly straightforward until accounting for that tassel, although a rotated mat gradient might be able to grab it to properly separate from the base of the hat. The alternative would be to take it into another program and add the image maps, then once saved reimport into A:M wit those maps. I'd say a good candidate for that might be Sculptris.

I can confirm what Gerald said as well. I've been using A:M with Win 10 since the earliest moment that Win 10 was released. That's how much I was ready to move on from Win 8! Win 8 and 8.1 worked great with A:M but I wasn't a fan of the interface changes.

Test test. Replies to this topic should work now.

Adam Goldman (originally) said: I just wanted to share a recent quickie I did for the annual 72 hour horror fest this last October. I had to do it pretty quickly and used a few of the items off of the A:M DVD but tweaked them. Perhaps you can recognize one or two? xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zASqIMuhv4 This post has replaced an earlier post by Adam Goldman that was having problems displaying properly. Sorry Adam! Not sure what went wrong but it appears that it was related to the code used to embed youtube video in your post.

If you are asking me. Yup. I'm sure I don't mean .X. From their blog: It may be worth noting that (most of) the code for Lumberyard is open. I'm not sure if this open-ness extends to the FBX importer but I must assume that it does. And the best time to learn is very often during initial stages of release, in that way knowledge increases incrementally but I dare say exponentially as new changes are accounted for (i.e. through contrast and comparison) with what is already known.

Very impressive. Suspenseful too! As always I love your approach of blending the styles of cg with stopmotion and puppetry to the point where it's hard to tell what is beneath your artistic brush. As for the story itself... woah! yikes! And...sure am glad I'm not a signal man. That's a lot of responsibility!

That would be big news. I know of no current plans for anyone to offer an FBX plugin for A:M. That doesn't mean folks aren't researching it or developing tools of that sort, just that no one has informed me of such. The FBX plugin in Lumberyard is (according to their website) slated to be updated soon. They have a roadmap of sorts that specifies where their focus lies as they move forward. I mention the FBX format because in some programs that's the general way OBJ and other formats are imported... through that same general pipeline/approach. An example of this would be Fusion's FBX import node which is the conduit for getting OBJ files into the program... even though that wouldn't be obvious from the name of the nod/importer itself. You just point the FBX importer to the OBJ file and it figures out the difference between file formats behind the scenes. Currently, OBJ to FBX is one of the more viable options to get A:M resources into external programs.

I don't know enough to suggest how useful this may be to those who are interested in the gaming aspect of 3D but it's newsworthy so... In short, Amazon has recently released their Lumberyard gaming engine for free. It's based on Cryengine (and will diverge further as times goes on But let's let others more knowledgeable delve into the details: https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/lumberyard-free-is-the-new-black/ I saw that the FBX plugin is expected to be updated in short order and that may provide a path for A:M Users to move assets toward Lumberyard, moreso than what is currently available. If you are into game development it should be of interest if for no other reason that to know what tools are available. The site: http://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard/ Some related words: Regarding requirements:

Glad to see you delve into lipsync John. Fun stuff! I don't always respond or post work I create inspired by your tinkering but your tinkerings always have me exploring. A lot of the banners that show up in the forum came from experimenting with some odd thing inspired by one of your posts. Attached is an example (sorry no lipsync!) that derived from your last few (particle and flock based) posts. Keep on tinkering!

Nicely done Simon. That works quite well. One consideration... a consideration that adds to your workload if not considered from the initial stage... is to consider using 3D shapes rather than single patch planes to provide a sense of depth to the objects in the scene. This usually isn't an issue as the depth is hidden by other objects/shapes. It's when the objects are taken apart (or put together as in your timelapse) where we see how thin the surfaces are (i.e. patches are infinitely thin!) The example in your video would be mostly of the walls as they are put into place. Those sides which face the camera are shown to be quite thin. One 'trick' to adding a sense of depth to rendered shots that lack thickness is to use a sharpen filter which (basically) adds a slight emboss effect... adding the illusion of some additional depth. A:M has such a filter so you might be able to get some of that rather simply by rendering with that GPU filter turned on in the render panel. I ran a small test of your last .mov adding a similar effect in external program and it did provide a little more sense of depth. So if not wanting to add additional modeling that might be a good approach to adding thickness. Of course, I am not suggesting that you build virtually the same as you would in the real world (with planks/boxes instead of patches) but a few of those in the right places would go far toward completing the look of 'real' objects/buildings taking shape. Now, if you are going for the look of those commercials where structures appear as if made out of paper or thin construction material then.... disregard all previous! Even then however, a little sense of depth can be advantageous. And again, if not built into the models themselves that can often be gained by using a post process sharpen filter. As for the timelapse building revealing itself... that's looking great!

That was great!

As is that fire breathing dragon!

The animations are related to mascots/CD characters as Fuchur points out. The ones I recall: PInk girl/Diane (walking) Dennis the Dog - Raf Anzovin Troll - Billy Eggington's character with heavy axe Petey and Jaydee - there are at least 5 variations (chasing/running after each other, sumo standoff, punching each other, head burn and pouncing/stomping on Jaydee... or is that Petey?) Perk (walking) - Dusan Kastelic's troll Gordon Bellows and Briar Rose (running) - Stephen Milligen's characters Red Dragon (breathing fire) - Momentum Animation's character Troll - Ken Heslip's character breaking through brick wall (ala Steffen Gross's Newton Physics) Yeti (walking) - Kevin Waldron's character (I believe he created the similar Wookie as well... but the Wookie isn't a render animation) Hmmmm... perhaps I'm missing one here... or maybe not. Trolls are well represented! I know the render animations are part of A:M history and such but perhaps we could update them in the future. I've attached a few of the above listed render cycles here as many are not seen often.

Now thaz what I'm talkin' bout! Shadows make that look much better.

Looking good thus far. It's a little hard to say more without seeing more, so I guess this is where I say, "Wireframe please!"