Rodney

Nice test!

There are multiple ways to apply the HDRI image and 'light probe'is but one of those. (I thought Stian did include some light probe image assets in his zip files but it's been awhile since I investigated those)

I'm late to the party... That's really nice!.

I believe historically, when using SSS, black areas have been a sign of inverted normals on patches. I also recall that someone (Yyves) once said that SSS and AO worked at odds with each other. If you post an image of the results you are seeing that should tell the tale.

Here's a follow up... Hiro's re-introduction to Baymax: This one runs about 2 minutes and makes for a great little piece to study. Of interest: The elements of timing related to pace. Note that Baymax's pace is slow and treated as (literally) monotone (with occasional points/beats of emphasis). The primary change to his pacing is where he receives external feedback (which sends him into a programmed response... repeatedly) Hiro's pacing is considerably faster (with a subsequently faster cycle of action/reaction) Where Baymax is seen to be highly predicable Hiro is equally unpredictable. And yet... very interestingly... in this short clip they are both seen to deal with the same issue of being confined in a very small space. There is considerably more than that layered into the mix but... yeah.... the pacing...

Inspirational stuff Dan! I started out playing with screen/rectangle shapes but then went on to play with other shapes. I suppose it's mostly necessary to use a rectangle to simulate a screen but perhaps more and more (with virtual reality glasses being all the rage) we may see other effects as well. In the attached it should become obvious what shape I've used to mask the particles and A:M logo. If it's less obvious... this me adjusting my view of realtime particles playing in the HAMR viewer. Benefit: Realtime rendering can be seen immediately. In general, the idea is to mask what needs to be masked to focus the audience's attention on what you want them to see. Then the work becomes that of creating and executing those masks successfully. masking.mp4

How much time is that in dog years? 15 minutes is an eternity in animation. Someone break out your calculator.. how many 10 second tales could be told in 15 minutes... And there's the thing. What is a 15 minute tale if it isn't just a series of shorter 'takes' strung together in a plausible sequence.

Animation aside... it's somewhat thrilling to think that stories can be told in such a short time frame... and (rather importantly) without dialogue. Ten seconds doesn't give you time for anything that isn't essential to the telling. And yet the format scales to other time frames quite well. 1. Introduction/Setup 2. Presentation/Action 3. Conclusion/Reaction Now... there are some economical factors to consider. In the above 10 second short there is no background whatsoever. This serves several goals: 1. Support the primary focus. (There is nothing in the blank space of the background to distract the audiences attention) 2. Enhance the primary focus (the negative shape created by the white background emphasizes the foreground/primary space) 3. Clarify the primary focus. (the color white further de-emphasizes the importance of the background area) Now, with no distractions you are free to present the action/activity. Note that just because there is a white background that doesn't mean the environment isn't there. In this short the characters are grounded via their shadows onto the white background (a background that isn't really there) A danger in creating short stories is that often they can require just as many assets be built as their longer form story would require. For instance, a tale told in 'the burning mountains of Abyyss' where lava flows and smoke rises and thunderous poundings of the ancient dwarves are heard. The tale may only take 10 seconds but that mountain and the effects would also have to appear *unless* set asides for the moment. It might be enough to hint at the environment with color and shade rather than unnecessary detail. An exception to this might be where the desire is to have the audience rewatch the short over and over again looking for new and interesting details. But even there the detail shouldn't detract from the primary reading of the story but should compliment it is useful ways. It should be noted that in this particular short there is significant 'slight of hand'. The boy doesn't tie the balloon. Neither does Baymax. This activity is suggested by plausible movement and repetition. And there are very definite key poses that must be struck in order to tell this tale. Presentation: Objects that look like a balloon are held out in perfect silhouette. (caveat: if the shape of the object does not immediately register as 'balloon' to the audiene that definition will soon be demonstrated... and a potential deficit transformed into a benefit) Repetition: The telling of a joke is often improved through repetition... but the telling of the joke even more greatly enhanced through the use of variation on repetition. Unexpected Outcome: The 'Aha Moment' often occurs when someone can say, "I should have seen that one coming." This is often set up by establishing a rule and then deviating from that rule. In this case the anticipatory element is the expected repetition. The implication being "I'll demonstrate first... then you follow my lead." Physicality: A good story considers the physical structure of environment/character/personality. Is it heavy or light, hard or soft, hot or cold, happy or sad, etc.? If a character is made out of pliable plastic... so much the better. Now we can exploit the difference to provide a contrast between characters. General principle: It is probably not wise to build all the sets required for a 90 minute film to complete a 10 second animation. It may be sufficient to simply hint at them or do away with them altogether.

How long should your next animated story be? You can tell more than a few stories in 10 seconds or less... So before you invest in your next story as a 90 minute epic animated feature film perhaps you may want to tell one a bit shorter... more economically... ...perhaps even in 10 seconds or less.

Hey, I'm old school... and midwestern. As such I prefer 'gutters'. 'Eave trough' is too rich for my blood.

Very nice David! I've been in rooms like that before. (although definitely not as clean and not nearly as awesome) At work we have a contracted crew devoted to waxing floors and they'd love it if they could strip the floors to such a degree as that. Their job is little appreciated and... never done.

Netrender now comes with A:M but doesn't come with unlimited render nodes. (someone correct me if wrong... I think it comes with 4?) Additional render nodes can be purchased via the Hash store. Netrender can distribute rendering jobs either across a network or on the same computer (using the computer's cores). There is a forum section that goes into more detail about setup and operation: Link: Netrender forum P.S. It's great to see you again Walter!

I'm not a programmer so can only explore what success might look like. After posting I was trying to imagine what that success might indeed look like and the thought of 'smart splines' or a mode that allows for the coloration of splines came to mind. The idea being to use the color red to suggest splines that the computer isn't sure if it has optimal continuity. This would give the user a visual clue as to where to look to improve spline continuity. There are several problems with your take on simplicity but I'm not smart enough to identify or address them all. The question does present itself in that out of the available options none present an optimal spline continuity (both the image in the middle and on the right are non-optimal for the purpose of Control Point connectivity... it may or may not be the case that they are of a proper spline continuity but the patches/CPs represented are both suboptimal. At a guess I'd say that rather than reroute continuity it would be better to terminate each of those splines. Programatically the UI could then have a method that graphically display the location of the beginning and ending of every spline. (Similar to your suggestion of red/blue for inbound/outbound) But this is what complicates the simplicity you suggest in that your case is not restricted to only those possible splines. For instance, each of those spline segments could be individual splines with no continuity. And for your purpose, that might be the better approach to take (i.e. treat each spline segment as if it has no adjacent continuity). You could then 'paint in' or trace (retolologize?) the desired continuity. I'm probably just not seeing any benefit of creating those bad patches. I can see a lot of negative though... poor alignment/placement of decal imagery, display artifacts, etc.

Where exactly are you trying to import the MDD file? The only place I'm aware we can import MDD files/data into A:M is in an Action.

If you are programming one I'm sure it'll be most appreciated. The reason folks wouldn't ask for one is that (as you state) to a human the problem on the right would be obvious. A computer however would have to know which of many possible combinations it needs to use in order to guess right. It'd be somewhat like looking up at the stars at night and attributing zodiac imagery to the stars by connecting the dots. The odds of those connections being 'correct' being... astronomical. A programmatic (and graphical) approach might be to display one or more of the available options for connectivity and the user would then choose their preferred continuity. I would guess that several other methods for determining flow would work as well. For instance, if a spline was known to move consistently in a plane with minimal deviation in orientation it should not suddenly guess that the next spline segment suddenly shoot off in a new perpendicular orientation from that original orientation. If all splines ran equally north/south and east/west that would be largely sufficient to maintain a similar continuity. Unfortunately (or fortunately) splines don't always conform to the same orientation. To a program that hasn't been programmed with the capacity to identify the error or determine wrong continuity from right.

Here's a quick video example of that last methodology: Replacing Splines.mp4

I can see why one might want to go from the right example to the left but not from the left to the right. But to answer your question I can think of a couple different approaches although they all rely on removing/altering splines. The first method would be to select the splines that are inappropriately connected and hit the comma key to select the entire spline. Hitting delete after that will then allow you to lay in a new more appropriate spline. An alternative to this would be to 'divide and conquer' by selecting the spline nearest the point of contention and then hit the Y key to insert a Control Point half way down that spline. After inserting the new CP then hit the K key to 'kill' the undesireable part of the spline. Do this for each of the four directions that will need to be repaired/reassigned and then stitch them back together appropriately. There are surely other ways... such as resampling the spline* but I can't think of a method that changes the continuity of a spline without changing the continuity of the spline. *When using ResampleSpline wizard the idea would be to resample the spline but use the same (or similar) number of CPs in the spline. Effectively what you'd be doing is recreating the model with proper spline continuity. Which leads me to yet another approach which would be the 'copy/paste' method. In that you would select all but the specific Control Points you wish to change and then Copy/Paste either into the same Model or into a new Model. Then close off the hole in the resulting mesh with the proper spline continuity.

Okay, I admit I don't have a clue as to how you splined those last three together. Maybe some camera projection? I suspect that Nancy might have assisted with the second and there are hints that Rodger Reynolds assisted with the third...

Ha! I see what he did. For the background models he just scaled and duplicated the big hammer!

As further proof that I am on to John's shenanigans I invoked some modern day technology to reverse engineer his Mt. Denali photo which resulted in the revelation of duplicated texuture patterns and decal image sliding across patches. I note that he didn't post video as this would very likely have given away his technique. I must admit that this latest rendering with the hammer is quite stunning as well. I can easily see how the textures were applied to the hammer but the amount of detail in the smaller models... especially the flowers with all that colorful lighting... impressive work John! But... sorry... you ain't foolin' nobody! mt wires 000.mov

I don't buy it. Show us a wireframe render!

It looks like the base and the fishing pole are intersecting in such a way as to confuse the objects. At a guess I'd say there is something about the fishing pole (perhaps hooks/internal patches) that is causing problems.

Matt, This isn't an option for Mark but Adobe Edge Animate is a great way to go for interactivity and compatibility across platforms/browsers. For those that have the access it's well worth investigating. What I find particularly nice about it is the Timeline that echos After Effects/Flash which makes putting projects together more like using a video editor or at times even A:M. The latest release also adds some improved workflow for inserting/embedding/converting movies. I did a test overlaying text on video and found that to work quite well. There are also some additional Edge related programs for testing/emulating various devices but I haven't had much need for those yet. For those with CC/2014, if an HTML5 based solution is desired Edge Animate is a nice option. I would think that the primary benefit to using .SWF over HTML is having everything encapsulated in one file versus several.

I was just talking with Paul (fae alba) Harris the other day and we were wondering what you'd been up to with 'Woke Up Dead'. You must have heard us talking about you! Keep on rough draftin'

Way to represent!