Rodney

Gah! I'm on pins and needles!

I missed this news back in January... Algorithmic, the company behind Substance Painter and other related tools has apparently been purchased by Adobe. https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/adobe-acquires-allegorithmic-substance-joins-creative-cloud/ I'm occasionally thought it'd be nice to have Substance Painter but wasn't interested in the price of admission. Gaining these tools via the Adobe CC subscription that I already have though... hmmmm. Adobe has been trying to move further into the 3D realm and it looks like they are doing just that with this purchase. Related to A:M, the ability to paint even OBJ files with Substance materials is intriguing.

too lazy to do woody woodpecker so...

Looking very good. Nice work!

At a guess I'd say that before we (and perhaps that would primarily be Will Pickering) used a hack to display gif animation (and other formats) via standard html/php but now IPBoards support gif animation etc. natively. Now we just need to find a way to hack FFMPEG into the A:M Pipeline so that we can render/convert to MP4, Webm, GIF (With Transparency!) etc. Disclaimer: Because of licensing FFMPEG can't be fully integrated and distributed with A:M but it could have 'hooks' into FFMPEG's command line so that specific outputs could be targeted. Bottom line: A:M could really use some animation/video formats.

An alternative to the standard chor paths... We can also use any spline from any model in the chor as your path. Create a new (empty) model and drag/drop that into the chor. Draw a spline and edit that path as desired in the Chor. A reason I prefer modeled paths is that they can be considerably more complex than standard Chor paths. Under the hood Chor paths are just specialized models with limited parameters.

Wow. That's quite a list. Thanks much!

Jason said: Nice. I like it.

I will make a few assumptions here based on another assumption that might not be as likely and see where that lands... Initial assumption As much content from the A:M Extras CD, the A:M Extras DVD and the current A:M Exchange collection would be included as possible in this product. The largest files would be altered in order to allow maximize the amount of new content. Videos and tutorials would be identified and earmarked for either a second DVD a different venue (such as youtube) or... The Extras distribution might be offered via USB or solid state drive. The drive might be a bit too expensive for... everyone... so, unless it comes with the purchase of A:M seems an unlikely approach. It sure would make my day to have A:M arrive in the mail preloaded on an SSD with 1TB of awesome data. Hey, if we are gonna dream we might as well dream big.

Nice one Serg!

Ken, Your skills in modeling are well established so that sounds like a winner to me. We can do the initial groundwork and see where that takes us. I'm very likely going to be away from my working copy of A:M for awhile in the very near future.. still deciding on whether to purchase a new laptop and additional A:M subscription while I'm away from my main computer. This might be an ideal time to collect that raw data together in presentable form. It also might allow time to ponder and review what things we can do just shy of using A::M itself such as creating a means to organize, share and promote assets. All those things can be done on an older laptop. Where it comes to To Do lists I'd say there two primary tracks: 1. Content 2. Distribution

I believe the general consensus was that CD/DVD might need to give way to something more immediate, direct... online. That's about as far as that exploration went. Is there enough interest? Two confirmed thus far and counting... Thanks for your interest and in contributing!

Breaking the glasses was easy enough with soft bullet. Getting it to settled down... still working on that.

This isn't 'soft' bullet but thought I'd post it here as it started as a soft but then I adapted it to solid.

Thanks Robert. I needed that!

I haven't read all of the responses but when I saw 4GB RAM that caught my attention. That pretty much cancels out any benefits gained elsewhere. I wouldn't want a computer with less than 8GB and would prefer 16GB... the more RAM the better-er-er-er. I've never understood the issues with Intel graphics as they've worked better and more consistently for me than higher dollar cards. It's a good foundational card that every application should be able to run well on. It's not cutting edge or fancy but it gets the job done. An additional note on RAM: Be careful about systems that state they have x amount of RAM as not all RAM is treated equally and the advertised RAM may not in fact be what is needed. I'll let the experts weigh in and explain more about that.

Thanks for putting your videos online Justin. There's great content in there that others need to see. I passed the link on to some folks that aren't into 3D/CG but so many of the points you hit apply across the board whether to 3D, cutout or even traditional hand drawn animation.

It's great to see this on youtube. Nice!

Welcome to Animation:Master Han!

Robert, I wonder if the issue you are having with the Dup Wizard relates to the SDK update and requirement for recompiling of plugins?

Thanks Jason! Now fixed! The direct link to the e version was likely the temporary fix to push Windows users back to the e release... due to broken decals etc... so the next time you copy/paste for the future releases all should be well with the simple copy/paste.

It looks to me like the links to the windows installers point to the older v19e version. In the past I'd just correct the link but I don't seem to have that editing power. Even though the initial installer says v19f1 the about dialog after installation suggests it is actually v19g: v19g 64bit: ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/AM_64BIT.exe v19g 32bit: ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/AM_32BIT.exe Added: Yay! Decaling works again!

hmmm..... You could adjust the Displacement percentage from 0 to 1. 0 will present the color(s) of the material 1 will decactivate the color(s) by activating the displacement but so minimal that it cannot be noticed. Gah! Disregard. It doesn't allow the Groups to show through. You may be experiencing why I tend to prefer Patch Images over materials and decals.

Here's something of a proof of concept with the Red channel of a material in one model driving the red channel of a Group in another mode. Not quite what you are after but might hint an a solution. MaterialDrivenGroupColor.prj

Perhaps some form of expression? ..|..|..|GroupAll|Shortcut to graydient|Gradient|Attribute.Surface.Diffuse Color.Red