Rodney

It may be worth noting that regardless of the FPS... a second is still a second. That may seem a silly thing to say but with all things considered until the content of that second is either extended or shortened it can be hard to perceive what has been added or taken away. This relates to the findings of traditional animators who on more than one occasion found animation on twos to 'play' better. That is to say the repetition of a frame rather than a replacement of that frame to suggest movement of some object or shape within that frame. As an example; one might gain a 50FPS rate by simply duplicating each frame from a 24 or 25 frame sequence. (as you've mentioned in your first post... that of 50FPS being double that of the PAL frame rate. I suppose the question to ask might be, "What is changing from frame to frame that benefits from or requires the faster frame rate"? This relates to the observation traditional animators had with panning backgrounds and character walk cycles. They found that animating on twos resulted in noticeable slippage as the background moved. If attempting to move the background at the slower pace of twos the effect was a stutter/strobe which was very noticeable. So, animators began to form a rule of sorts that where a character interacted with a background animation would be drawn on ones. If no contact was present the shots could be animated on twos. How does this approach translate to higher frame rates? I'm not entirely sure but I'd guess that many of the same general rules/theories apply. Of course it does help that by their very nature computers animate everything on ones... BUT... that doesn't mean actions/activity within the shot isn't technically still on twos... threes.. whatever. How fast is the object moving? How much is the object changing? How long does the action need to be held (or put into a moving hold) in order for the audience to 'see' what is there? In Richard William's book 'The Animator's Survival Kit' he talks about a young animator that tried to animate a character yawning. He drew all the poses correctly but the timing... that rate of presenting frames... was ZIPPPP! entirely too short and didn't get better with his attempts to fix the animation. The underlying reason was that he was trying to present the animation in too short a time frame. So, a final set of questions might be; what will be animated in those frames and given that information how long will that whole shot/sequence then be required to be? I would think that of interspersing odd frames (subliminal message types stuff) and using subtlety/similar shape/themes (illusory visuals) the latter would yield the more effective results. A classic example of a problem with subliminal messages is that they may be too subliminal; ex: the gorilla walking amongst a bunch of people playing basketball that no one in the audience perceives.

I'm not sure about playback options but we can definitely set our projects to 50FPS in A:M. Just Right Click on the Project container in the Project Workspace (at the very top) and set the FPS to the desired framerate.

Hey Al! Many of your questions can be answered with a 'Yes, but...' which relates to the many differences between polygon approaches and spline patch modeling and animation. As you've grasped there are a lot of things you can do via import of OBJ (and as Nemyax adds... converting from other models) but there's not much of a better way to resolve those than to dive in and see what works best. Much will depend on what you plan to place in your scenes (as static objects) and what you expect to animate (or articulate). Here's a rough attempt to answer your queries: 1) A:M has several tools that allow movement of Control Points on a surface. If the surface is in a cardinal direction this will be considerably more straightforward as keys can be held down in order to move any CP, shape or object in a given direction along a spline. Sliding CPs along a spline in any arbitrary direction... hmmmm... I think we can do that but I haven't used it in my workflow. In the past few years there have been several tools added that allow projection of CPs onto surfaces (or send them to specific locations) that may also fit the bill. As far as my workflow I'd say use of the 4 key to move a CP along a spline is likely the most common. 2) A:M has some very basic tools for this (such as the Cut Plane plugin) but the lack of density in most spline models which is usually of benefit can work against us in that regard. As such it can be hard to maintain curvature of a given spline. One approach to cutting models would be to use another program to do the cutting and then import that into A:M for placement or further refinement. 3) The Dopesheet still works for lipsync (and as has always been the case) can drive any poses. The dictionary can be amended/edited as desired. 4) I tend to work in low rez so I'm not the best to answer this one but in general you can render to as high a rez as your system/RAM will allow. I will add that Netrender... which was separate software in the $500 range when you were using A:M... is now packaged with A:M so you can launch a variety of renders in various formats and have them all render simultaneously. 5) This 'retopology' tool is know as 'Snap to Surface' and can be used to place CPs/splines onto the surface of any prop or patch model. A Prop being in this case being any imported OBJ, STL, 3DS... and a few others). 6) I don't see any issues there but will defer to others with NVidia cards. 7) Yes, I'm sure there will be but the good news is that we'll work through them together one gotcha at a time. You've been missed. It'll be great to have you back!

Nerdwriter has a piece on 'Nighthawks' that was just released. And of course it immediately made me think of Rodger's work here. xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?t=5&v=7j5pUtRcNX4

I'd love to investigate using OBS for live streaming but confess that it's beyond me at this moment. I'm not sure if that is more for lack of interest or just because I'm lazy. I suspect that latter because I do have some interest.

Bottom line up front: Everyone needs some type of video capture software. There are a lot of screen capture programs and utilities out there and each one has it'd pros and cons. There are so many in fact that I've debated running something of a comparison in order to highlight some of the options. But... since such a comparison will take considerable time and a lot of information is already available via a quick google... for now I'll just point to yet another of the options. Atomi Active Presenter is a program that I don't recall highlighting and it is one of the more powerful ones out there because in addition to screen/video capture it also has some basic video editing capability that isn't seen in other free capturing software. In my estimation it fits in just below Camtasia with regard to capabilities and in some areas outperforms there also. The caveat is that to get to those additional features users have to opt for 'standard' or 'professional' editions ($199 and $299 respectively). The primary differences between free and paid versions is export capability where video presentations can be immediately exported to a variety of document formats (PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, etc). The free version of Active Presenter is more than useful and for those without video capture capability it will be well worth looking into. If you are looking for a good video capture software definitely check it out: http://atomisystems.com/ http://atomisystems.com/activepresenter/features-comparison/ Of course with any software that has tiered releases (i.e. hobble-ware) it can be frustrating to look at grayed icons for features that aren't activated in your particular tier. Active Presenter is very useful without these additional features but if such things frustrate or aggravate it may be best to move on to other options. Other options? Here's one I haven't covered before: https://getsharex.com/

I see that Open Broadcaster Software was recently updated (as of 23 Sep). https://obsproject.com/ I downloaded and installed and it appears to work as good if not slightly better than the previous release. One of the things that is nice about OBS is how programmable it is and the basic idea of 'scenes' is handy for when you want to invoke a specific type of recording or even switch back and forth between. Disclaimer: As I primarily use Camtasia for screen recording I haven't delved very deeply into OBS and have only used the basic screen recording functions in order to determine how useful the program will be for those without a dedicated screen recording program.

I agree I'm liking the results of the linear workflow.

Very nice. Congratulations! I need to see a projection mapping like this in the real.

My unofficial thoughts... It wouldn't make much sense as a effort for v18. Also keep in mind that with the advent of subscription the concept of versioning is much more fluid. Logically, any change that cleans up code to the extent of removing latency XP code is going to be a major release.

I just watched this again. Wonderful stuff!

If you aren't following the Animated Spirit blog... you might want to add it to your list of resources. There have been quite a few useful and interesting posts there since James Chiang first launched the blog back in June. James is a 17 year veteran of animation. In the latest post James analyses a shot from Pixar's 'Ratatouille' where he delves into how the audience is directed right to the place you want them as well as what that means relative to characters /elements in the shot. There's too much to summarize here so go see for yourself. Amongst other topics James emphasizes that "Forces begin internally" and that "Understanding forces is the key to believable animation". Read more and see examples here: http://www.animatedspirit.com/shot-analysis-lead-follow/ One of the things I like the most about the blog is that by subscribing new posts are sent direct via email which makes for timely reading without even visiting the blog itself.

Sorry for the delay Mark. I've asked my daughter to take a couple shots of me. She's all into photography so I figured I'd put here to work. Well, yes and no. This will technically be my first Largento caricature but... you may recall the last time you recreated my likeness you turned me into a zombie! (I'm told that's a good thing)

If you look at the variety of render styles that have been used before in A:M you'll see that (for most people) external renderers aren't necessary. Perhaps you can point us to an image of the style you want to achieve? If you haven't visited there yet, here's a link to the A:M Stills Gallery.

...And here I thought that line looked really cool. Question: Does the white line follow a spline ? I wonder if you changed the background color from gray to red or green what might show up on the render. I would tend to make the background color the main color of the majority of surface... just in case some UV assignment picks that up. Also, do you have any other image/stamps applied or is it just the one decal image? In other words, if you are layering images/decals and one is at a percentage... or set to transparency... or cookie cut. Is is possible a spline is peaked there along that line but just not at the ends? If the splines aren't continuous (which is often the case with OBJ models) that might be what you are seeing. I'm leaning a bit toward this one as it sure looks like a peaked/noncontinuous spline. Finally, what is the color of the model itself? Is it possible the color of the model is showing through?

Oh yeah... working great here. Thanks! Edit: I should have explicitly stated that both 64bit and 32bit are working great.

If you hafta ask... It sounds like you downloaded and installed the right thing.

Robert, Did you download and install from the official release or from previous download? (or alternatively from Jason's posted owncloud file) The 32bit is definitely trying to initiate a classroom/network license connection for me. I don't see how that would happen short of using a different installer. As of this moment I appear to be the only one with this classroom licensing issue on v1832bit_N.

Sorry, I think a typo crept in there. M and N or too similar! Yes, both 64bit and 32bit versions of v18M are reportedly working fine (and working fine on my system too). The issue there was that the version M files could not be found on the ftp site, which is now resolved: I reported both releases of M working in the other topic: Ref: https://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=47314 The two outstanding issues appear to be: v1832bit_M Issue: classroom license/network connection dialog v1864bit_M Issue: selection of splines/objects not maintained Report#6629 has been filed by David Simmons that likely relates to this second (64bit) issue but is observed with selection/manipulation of Bones. He states in his report he is operating Win8.1. Tore confirmed that he couldn't use v18M because he couldn't select/move anything. As far as I can tell these issues are observed on Win10 systems and not yet confirmed as occurring on any other. Steffen thinks the selection issue might be due to change in compilers.

I'm closing this topic as the v18m issue (of having it available via FTP) is resolved. For v18N issues see other topic.

Same Classroom License error here for v1832bit_M. I downloaded and installed twice from your owncloud link just to make sure I wasn't messing up the download somehow. I then installed to a clean directory each time. No dice. If anyone else has installed v1832bit_N successfully... without the classroom license dialog popping up... please let us know. If everyone else is operational that would suggest something on my end. In the meantime I must assume those who purchase A:M for their classrooms (network license) should rightly expect to see this dialog.

To further confuse (and possibly help resolve) matters... I note that the file designated N at ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/old/AM_64BIT_n.exe appears to install version M (and from what I can tell actually is M). If that is the case then the file can just be renamed as "AM_64bit_m.exe" and (at least with that file) all will be well.

Don't sweat it Steffen. v18n can wait until you return from your vacation. We primarily just need to make sure folks don't upgrade to a broken v18n without a means to retro back to v18m (which currently is not possible unless they've previously downloaded v18m because it cannot be found on the ftp site). Bottom line: Enjoy your vacation.

Sorry, I forgot we can't upload .exe files. See contents of attached zip file (above).

Here's the 64bit installer. I'll remove this attachment once the ftp is updated. This is a major bug that prevents v18n from being operational. Having no fallback to the previous version is a major problem. Update: v18m files have been named and linked properly so this post's attachment has been removed.