Rodney

I can't do much with this one as it's currently available only on the Mac and Linux platforms but perhaps of interest to some folks... http://bufsoftware.com/ Specifically, they have just released Bview which can be used to compare, color correct and annotate video among other things. This software (Bview) is the first release of an entire suite of software being retooled and offered to the public after VFX production house Rhythm and Hues went bankrupt.

I'm liking how the sharpen effect adds a little additional beveling... It might be wise for me to turn off shadows for the main pass so that the sharpen effect doesn't sharpen those.

I've been enjoying some of the newer GPU post effects and I hope folks have been pressing into those. These are a few renders using the Sharpen effect from testing some alternative 'toon' looks (without using toon).

I like the idea of modeling insects. (Ludo could even model one as Thor) Here's the real underlying question though... how do we get from talking about having these contests and actually having them. We need a system that launches these things quickly so people can get busy and join in. So a related question might be, 'does it have to be a contest?' Can someone just post a topic and say, "Have at thee foul foe.. I will now model an insect and I know for a fact you shall not model one better than me!" (Say that in a Marcos (Xtaz) Rezende winner take all voice!) Contests do have some things attached to them that typical challenges do not... prizes for instance. Bragging rights. Fame. Immortality. Perhaps winners of topic challenges could be eligible for later/formal voting? Perhaps the winners of the challenges could be determined by a simple forum poll? How can we make this work?

It's all download now. Although I suppose the download could be copied onto a CD. I'm not sure how Hash Inc distros to schools so you might want to check directly with them. The way I parse it it's all subscription... one lasts forever (sans updates after the first year) and the other lasts for a calendar year.

Crazy stuff Nancy! Fascinating styles! Just when I start to think 'that one is my favorite' I see something in another to like even more. (Right now I'm keen on that last one but that's because it's the last one I looked at)

Yes, 'Steamboat Willie' was the third in the series after 'Plane Crazy' and 'The Barn Dance' and it should be noted that they would have appeared with the live theater orchestration available in each theater in those days. It's important to remember that 'silent film' was rarely silent as it was accompanied by live orchestration and I'm sure some 'performances' were better than others. The part that Disney (and competitors) were latching onto was that the audience would enjoy their product more if sound and film could be better served together. Another 'witness' to the chronology would be Carl Stalling who joined Disney in 1929 (after 'Steamboat WIllie') and immediately went to work putting sound into Disney's shorts *and* the product of Walt and Carl's consideration of whether the animation (drawings) or the music should come first. 'Silly Symphonies' was an example of the latter where music predominated while the Mickey Mouse shorts focused on imagery first. Of interest, the Silly Symphonies prompted new tools for animation such as 'bar sheets' while the shorts helped transform the artwork used identify site gags into full fledged storyboards. These new tools were needed badly because the success Disney suddenly found himself enjoying was driving exponential growth. The biggest obstacle Disney appears to have faced at the time was his 'partners' who thought they could have the same success without Walt. In the next year after 'Steamboat Willie' his partners would move on leaving only 'Walt Disney' in the playbill credits. Mintz, Powers, Iwerks... most folks won't recognize those names but folks certainly recognize 'Disney'. For those more into classic Warner Brothers cartoons than Disney it is worth noting that Carl Stalling was a major contributor there too. I don't know how accurate it is but 'Steamboat Willie' is said to have been in production from July to September of 1928 at a budget of just short of $5,000. That is said to be roughly the equivalent of $70K in today's dollars.

Don't be too quick to give those away... you may want to use A:M with Blender later. Nemyax even created a handy export program to get models out of Blender into A:M (into A:M's format that is). Sleep well.

You are going to love A:M! Welcome aboard. There are some pdf files you'll want to keep handy The first is 'The Art of Animation:Master' that takes you through a series of tutorials. The second is a technical reference for when you want to dive deeper into technical settings. Both are located here: http://www.hash.com/training-13-en I would recommend diving into some of the many videos that are available. For instance there are videos that accompany 'The Art of Animation:Master' manual. Those are very basic but will get you up to speed quickly. My recommendation would be to run through those quickly and if you get stuck ask question here in the forum. This forum is the best way to get your questions answered and folks often make custom videos addressing your specific needs too. There are a lot of additional videos demonstrating use of A:M. Just point out the specific area of specific interest and away you go. I know very little about exporting to external renderers... although I have used Renderman etc. in tests with .OBJ exports. A:M's renderer is more than adequate for most of my work. A:M comes with Netrender which we can use to launch and render projects in the background. I use that on larger projects. I have other recommendations for you as a 2D guy but will save those for later so you can focus on getting up to speed with A:M. There are a ton of free applications you can use with A:M but I can think of only one that I think you absolutely need. My number one suggestion would be BlackMagic Fusion which is an external node based compositor... $900 for studio version... standard program... free. I've found it to be a near perfect fit with A:M. But save that for a rainy day and concentrate on A:M.

Keeping nine year old software rather than spend $79 to get the current release of A:M? You were doing okay until that suggestion Nemyax. It's amazing what people will do to make their lives harder. When moving into Blender one question that might need to be answered is, "are you a programmer?" If the answer to that question is 'yes' then a focus on blender might make more sense.

Hey stéphane, Welcome to the forum! I'll take a stab at answering. (I've tried to use Blender on occassion. I'd really like to use it to augment A:M but it's just too painful. I'm sure that has a lot to do with 'first learned best remembered'. Blender is getting better though. Recommendation: since Blender is free use both A:M and Blender as needed.) Yes and no. It might as well be a yes though because with A:M you'll want to use splines. Some people don't but I don't envy them. Yes, .LWO, .OBJ, .3DS, .X and some other formats which I forget. Via the formats mentioned above yes. I'm not aware of other renderers that natively render A:M's file formats. Most definitely. Although the user interface is mostly the same. I'm attaching a change log if you want to see the major changes that have occurred since v13. There are other changes not recorded in the change log such as better integration of some plugins and external plugins aren't included at all. For instance most of the importers/exporters have all been updated since v12 because of a major change in A:M's file formatting to bring it more in line with XML. A lot of third party plugins released won't be in the change log either and the majority of those are free. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. change log.txt

Nicely done Dan! I've tended to prefer image based hair over particle hair although I use hair/particles a lot these days (mostly for cartoony hair) and I now tend to run a test first to see if it'll be the best approach for that situation. I absolutely need to be using 64bit to get at that extra memory though if I even entertain the idea of particle hair. Each has it's place and this (Dan's example) is a great one for image based hair.

I thought that was a different client.

Nicely done Matt!

Hmmm... it seem to be working with your transparency map here for both decals and patch images. Perhaps it's related to your hair image? test.mov

Yes, but how to avoid that? I'm somewhat answering my own question here by trying out some things to force a different workflow.

I am curious about others workflow with regard to Render Lock. Do most folks just use the Q shortcut key to evoke the standard Render Mode instead? At issue is that anything that invokes the raytracer causes a lag that prevents returning control to the UI. Render Lock definitely invokes the (long form) raytracer.

Well, the keeping open of hundreds of programs could technically be classified as user error so there is that. I would say that an 80% solution to all the 'stablilty' probems I would directly attribute to A:M still relate to user error in that I forget to save just prior to rendering (or something similar). I've thought that if I could narrow the variables down a bit more I might submit a feature request or two which might be as follows: - Upon initiating final render; have A:M prompt for files to be saved if they haven't been saved prior to rendering. In other words, if any files in the project are 'dirty'... that is to say that they haven't been saved... then the dialog wouldn't appear and A:M would move on to rendering. This would be a welcomed feature in that once we launch a render we are committed to rendering and if something goes wrong at this point we've lost everything that hasn't been saved. - This, the Sad Fish error ™, wasn't related to final rendering but more likely to having the Render Lock icon toggled on. This is where some R&D on my part might prove beneficial because forgetting to toggle that off (by a simple hit of the Escape key in most cases) has led to many a pitfall... to include changing settings only to discover those settings haven't changed because Render Lock was on. This too could be classified as 'user error' because it relates to a specific workflow that I use consistently. If however, most A:M Users use a similar workflow they also may be running afoul of these errors. Bottom line: if you frequently make changes to settings only to find them later to be unchanged it may be related to Render Lock being engaged. I acknowledge that a backup or saving of files is the ideal but preventing the crash in the first place would be even more ideal. The two things I could do to solve my own problem would be: 1. Restart my computer more often (as this would force me to close a whole lot of programs that are needlessly using memory) 2. Use the 64bit version of A:M more frequently (as the 64bit release can utilize more memory).

It's always a good idea to save your files... that and close all the hundreds of other programs you've forgotten to close... you know... to free up memory. I think this guy was anticipating what was about to happen to him so I took a screen shot of the only thing left of him when things went south. So, don't forget to save your work! P.S. I'm still waiting for Windows to notify me of the solution.

Yoda: Always two there are. A master and an apprentice. Obiwan: Yes, but which is the apprentice.

Will makes an excellent point and having such a primal name as Papa Bear Studios is surely a plus. I don't see anything amiss with the brand name. It's always going to be the content that matters. As such you may want to chart out how your other creative endeavors will fit under the Papa Bear umbrella. It's the diversification of the content produced by Papa Bear Studios that will ultimately define the brand. The only other name that comes to mind for a brand name (for you) would be 'fae alba' and I have no earthly idea what that means... but I think that is a potential brand name that further encapsulates content produced by Papa Bear Studios. Fae alba might be used for your production house or distribution? Hmmm, assuming I'm not way off the mark... root origin-wise... 'fae alba' would seem (to me) to be a 'realm of flowers' or 'garden of flowers' which fits fairly well with the notion of distributing quality content. It hearkens to a paradise of plenty where all the original stories begin. So let that be my feedback. fae alba (as the production house/distributor) Papa Bear Studios for the branding of content The screen might show: a fae alba production in association with Papa Bear Studios Title and music And if someone else funds the production or distributes those names would be added (substitute cuts for the fades if the content is mostly comedy)

Too late for that... you've already seen my first test (and second, third and fourth). At present I'd say the direct route to Renderman is above my patience level. This coming from someone that loved typing in DOS commands and creating batch files back in the good 'ol day. For those taking notes, in the short term I'd say a shorter and more successful route to Renderman would be to go through the non-commercial version of Nuke, which I've only experimented with enough to know it works at a basic level. Export your assets out of A:M as OBJ... import into Nuke... texture and light... render out via Renderman (there's a Renderman node for that). The problem on my side is that I have little need (outside of satisfying curiosity) for an external renderer. This isn't to say I have no interest though. I've even been using Netrender these days. A:M has a great renderer. I should have added: The most difficult part of setting up Renderman to render A:M models is converting your models/scenes to .rib format.

Thanks for that Nancy, you've actually had some success where I didn't before. I'll add that we can get some cropping and zoom effects on those tiled images/sequences by using floating point (decimal) entries in the repeat settings. The sweet spot for most images will be just before the image is repeated. Negative numbers can also be used to invert the image/tiles. If an origin point could be added to the settings that would open up a whole lot more possibilities (animated sprite sheets etc.). Short of that however a similar result can be obtained by using a different frame from an image sequence (via timing setting) to control the origin. In other words, the sequence would be animated to alter where the upper left corner of the image is located. Setting the timing to the correct frame would establish that origin on the decal/patch image, and the repeat setting would then be used to refine further or to duplicate. As for animating a decal... you should check out Marcos (Xtaz) Rezende's tutorial on using smartskin/poses to animate decals. Edit: Hmmm... Marcos's tutorial appears to be attached to the post but comes up as unavailable.

I was going to point out a few highlights but realized that I'd pretty much have to itemize the entire 50 minutes... easier just to watch the whole thing. One of the most passionate points from Mark is not to give up ownership (but to license a property). Of course as with all 'rules' there are exceptions to this rule and in the Q&A session at the end one of those is discussed... namely, where you have no emotional attachment in the property. I fit into that category with a lot of my creative endeavors mostly because I know they would have to continue to change considerably in order to be commercially viable. Unrelated, Mark once posted a comment/correction to a thought I posted on my blog. He stated that Walt Disney's 'Steamboat Willie' was without a doubt originally designed for sychronized sound. In other words, he claims the short film was designed from the start with 'recorded sound' in mind. I believe the facts to be a bit more complicated than that but... Mark is the expert and I would have to supply proof the short film was in fact initially designed otherwise (i.e. if it was initially designed with theater orchestration in mind which seems highly probable). My belief is that 'Steamboat Willie' was a property Walt Disney had on the drawing board that was easily retooled to take advantage of new technology which Disney saw on the horizon. All I have to do is the hard work of providing historical evidence in support of an alternative. As exhibit A I might suggest that at the time of 'Steamboat WIllies' origin very few theaters were equipped to play recorded sound. Exhibit B would likely be how Walt and his crew used their family members to gauge their degree of success when experimenting with (small band) live orchestration just out of sight in the next room. Exhibit C might be the timeline where Walt and Roy invested in recorded sound even going so far as to provide the technology to competitors. Other exhibits to follow as necessary and to enhance the historical context. 'Steamboat Willie' was definitely designed with synchronized sound in mind but I have a hard time buying the chronology that it was designed with recorded sound in mind.

Mark Mayerson (of Mayerson on Animation blog-fame) has a video "Don't Pitch a Buyer, Pitch the Audience!" that is making the rounds that covers a good bit of territory of topics of interest to creators. The video is just short of one hour in length but will be well worth your time. xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQQmmbvmGc It's a great summary on topics that have been gaining ground, especially as more creative types vie for the attention (and money) to support their projects.