Rodney

Here's a slightly modified version from a camera view. In order to be remotely useful I'd say a second transparency map would need to be added to account for more depth and the water splashing off the character and the rock. Converting the walls to a box and filling that box with animated material to simulate the waterfall might produce a more volumetric effect in this specific case.

But isn't there? Can't everyone just scratch lines on paper (or pixels) and draw? I'm not talking about reproducing the Mona Lisa here... that might be adjudged to be more akin to producing art. I'm talking about communicating ideas through drawings. Alternatively, we'll have to do this through words (which in written form are just culturally accepted codified drawings).

It's not every day we get to recommend multiplane effects (and much of that is taken for granted) but if the project calls for it you could try an all A:M approach where you would replace your green walls with multiple walls of varying transparency with the desired imagery on it. Then your character or object would appear to emerge from that 'real' space created within the walls.

William, I should have thought to say that your method of a moving mask/wall may be just as useful as these other techniques. Assuming you have access to After Effects or other automasking program that might in fact be the best approach. I wouldn't want to remove each mask individually so the other techniques would work in those cases that require more manual labor. A benefit of using the moving wall would be that you could layer in additional effects as well. For instance, if you kept your wall a solid color you could add particle effects with that color as well. Then when you remove that mask the remainder of the imagery would show through. I always hesitate to recommend creating a mask when it is unnecessary (i.e. if the background can just be removed via an alpha channel) but there are certainly times when creating the mask will work well. Example attached: (note that I colored the wall black in the first pass to demonstrate the particle masking). Layering in effect.mov

Nicest bowl of modeled fruit I've seen in ages. Come to think of it... perhaps one of the nicest.

Ah, but that's why when placed together with other words they begin to form context.

Nice! Are keeping them as OBJ files/Props? I assume you might want to animate them eventually. I suppose in a pinch one could animate the OBJ files in A:M via a stopmotion methodology, swap in/swap out or turn on/turn off in order to gain the effect of movement with different iterations of the same object.

Both setups take almost exactly the same time although with Material Effects you have more options (so exploring those might take more time) As mentioned, assuming your model is not all of one unibody mesh entirely enclosed by splines you might have some problems with stray artifacts with boolean cutters. In many ways they are the same thing.... in fact I wouldn't be surprised to discover that underneath it all they are the same thing with different approaches in the UI. The benefit of Boolean Cutters might be the nesting of bones/booleans. I'm not sure how that might be accomplished with Material Effectors outside of using them as Action Objects. If your object is not a closed mesh I believe I'd opt for the Material Effect.

I truncated my last response because after some consideration I didn't think it worth pointing out my disagreement with the following: The dilemma of course being that this entire topic relies upon the meaning of the root words being entirely the opposite of 'completely different' (i.e. that the two words are of common origin). Interesting. So how does one proceed without offending, especially where no one is particularly invested the underlying subject matter. Perhaps best to table topic for another time? Should we take the time to outline the origins of the words 'draught' and 'draw'? I am willing to do this in furtherance of the topic but not at the expense of offending anyone. It's an interesting dilemma with a tinge of irony; Will offered a correction regarding the generally accepted authorship of the verse I paraphrased (or quoted at if you prefer) from Proverbs to which I readily received correction. I am curious if the same general acceptance might extent to the known common origin of the words 'draught' and 'draw'. If one is to accept that the sense of the words 'draught' and 'draw' is 'completely different' there is little purpose in this topic. As an example; let me suggest that the principles of animation labeled 'Appeal' and 'Solid Drawing' can be more clearly seen to be different sides of the same coin where one correctly senses the meaning of the underlying words. The first attracts the attention of the reader/viewer/audience while the latter visually grounds the concept into some sense of (generally acceptable) reality. Why is this important? Because artists and animators (as we are currently demonstrating) commonly misunderstand the sense and meaning of one of their favorite words; 'draw'.

There are two primary approaches that I can think of: 1) Bypass the need for clipping entirely by compositing the whole shot in A:M 2) Use Boolean cutter(s) to clip the object Both methods have their strengths and weaknesses. The first one being that you might not be able to composite in A:M (we would have to know more about your specific situation). For boolean cutters the objects should be 'water-tight' so that individual patches aren't inadvertently clipped by the camera angle. Other approaches that might work: hiding the back part of the object or using material effectors to clip through the object. For accuracy's sake I'd likely prefer the latter. Edit: Attached is a test of the material effector approach. Note that everything that is black is (or could be) an alpha channel. I used a bare bones material (only setting was 100% transparency and the effector was set to be a box. Combining materials with varying levels of transparency might give a nice effect... and setting some internal thickness to the object would help as well. mat effector.mov

Thanks for the correction William. I'm always glad to be corrected by bible believers who know their stuff. Regarding the origin and similarities of the words 'draught' and 'draw' though I would say naught.

Here's a HAMR view of the water ripple test I recently put together. The two primary things demo'd here are the wireframe mode that shows how the ripples were simply animated and the automatic subdivision generated on the fly to tesselate the quads into tris for the purpose of displaying the animation on a monitor as processed by modern day graphics cards. Of note: The file itself is only a few kilobytes whereas the resulting representation of the sesson (via mp4 movie) is over 5MB. HAMR testing.mp4

Here's a proof of concept/setup of a bobber creating ripples in water. I didn't attempt to animate any angle on the impact so the force is moving straight down. I went with the straightforward method of animating the mesh but displacement might be a more effective way to control everything. The initial ripple could use more exaggeration... waterripple.mov

It's been awhile since I picked up my copy of her book and I confess that I've never read through it. If I would have had it at an earlier age perhaps it would have altered my approach considerably When I was a kid I bought in to the idea that 'real artists' didn't use reference but drew forth their creativity from their imagination! And thus I entered into the world of iconic imagery and symbols (I later titled some of my doodle books 'symbiotics' and 'iconoci'; the latter implying there is more than one way to read and interpret things. Having gone all cerebral here, I sense that similarly the text of Betty Edwards' book tends to scare people away; "Oh, we need to think about drawing... that sounds like too much work to me!" As a kid I certainly didn't want to make something I enjoyed so much take on the form of some scientific cerebral approach to creativity. So rather than work hard I settled for abstracting reality through cartoonery; it need not be judged as too unrealistic if it wasn't meant to be realistic in the first place. One doesn't need a how to book to draw anything. Just place the things in front of you (or in your mind) that begin to describe what you want to see. Don't know quite what you want? Cut out pictures from a catalog... grab images from Google... mish and mash and change things up until they begin to resemble what you need them to be. Don't have the right model or imagery? Put a temporary proxy there instead. Don't have a proxy? Put a word or description in its place. We cannot effectively draw upon what cannot be seen. And this is true for imaginary things as well. We must begin by picking a known point of reference and extrapolate the details from there. A benefit to being an animator is that we become familiar with seeing moving/changing imagery. The ability to visualize (and discard at will) massive amounts of imagery is a very useful methodology.

More often than not creative types find themselves locked in a self contained cycle of non-creativity at one point or another. One of the most significant of locks they place on the imagination is that of the eternal self fulfilling prophesy of 'I can't draw.' Let's cut to the chase. To draw is to pull something up or toward you (although if something or someone else is drawing in an opposing direction it might also be said to be drawn away or down) One need not place lines on a piece of paper with graphite, pen or other instrument capable of producing a visible line but some form of line must be placed in order to reveal the structure of a visual idea. One form of drawing is to bring forth lines that form letters which in turn form words and phrases. As the Psalmist said, "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." It will reflect and illuminate as it shines forth light. And our eyes will be instinctively drawn to that imagery. We live in a time where our senses are continuously and purposefully drawn toward this idea or that concept. And as we see something shiny and new it draws us in and we extrapolate, expand and redraw anew upon those. Subconsciously we take it all in but consciously we often stop there in our creative tracks. For we find that we cannot draw out our new thing from where we perceive it to be hiding. What can we do then to find it? Where does it live? What does it look like? Is it tall or short? Is it black or white? Is it colorful? Sad or happy? What does it resemble the most? What does it least look like? What other thing in this world can we use as a measuring stick to describe it? What can we use to formulate our plan and to aid others in their attempt to find it? Everyone that has ever been successful has drawn from the reality around them. Drawing lines of what to include and what to leave out. Those with a talent for it, adding a pinch of a favored ingredient while tossing in a dash or dosage of another extract. If we cannot draw from what we see plainly in front of us when our eyes are open how can we hope to successfully draw from our imagination?

The demos allow you to move the lights around in real time and select from a variety of HDR images to IBL the model.... not that I would really any of that animation. The promise of Physical Base Rendering (PBR) is to remove guesswork and needless repetition out of the process of lighting setup. I don't know enough about the demo to say at this point. I'd guess as documentation flows from SIGGRAPH more will be known. Hard to predict the future is. It could happen tomorrow (rather unlikely) but a conservative guess (from me) would be well before v25.

That is rather the point here. The demo is not real time rendering so much as interactive physical based lighting. Lighting that can be (easily?) changed. But if the application doesn't load I guess it wont qualify much as interactive either. An HTML5 webpage shut down your system? Are you serious?

Here's another demo with a different model: https://labs.sketchfab.com/siggraph2014/viewer.html?model=android

Rendering to file that is... Increasingly real time rendering is going mainstream and in consumer markets long render times won't be acceptable. Just in time for SIGGRAPH 2014, Physical Based Rendering is being demo'd without plugins via HTML5. https://labs.sketchfab.com/siggraph2014/viewer.html?model=devastator It's a far cry from fully rendered real time animation but it's getting there.

Fun stuff! I know this hasn't turned out as you'd hoped but it's really great to see these. As I'm not really all that familiar with the original movie I can't comment on that part.

The only times I recall not being able to render to AVI it was due to a missing codec. To test this you can change the codec setting to 'uncompressed' and if it renders then that is a good clue the problem is related to installed codecs. Another option would be to just go ahead and download a variety of video codecs. I can't recall the site off hand but there are several that have all-in-one collections of codecs.

In another topic Nemyax pointed out something I hadn't really considered in depth... namely that in its category A:M has no competition. That is a bit sobering and its both a good and a bad thing; good in the sense that A:M still outperforms all comers even after all these years and that having competition keep sharpening the edge. For those that missed that topic I'm specifically talking about A:M's unique approach to splines and patch. Likewise, (collectively) we should have no issue with A:M being targeted to amateurs and kids. If more amateurs and kids picked up A:M a whole new generation of talented A:M users would soon appear. Recognizing that others have moved on also isn't a bad thing. By their own testimonies many of those talented folks would still be using A:M if they could. And for what its most of the folks who created the works on display still use A:M. A few might not often. At least one has fallen on hard times and doesn't use any animation software at all (he doesn't even have a computer). Several don't post as often as they use to. Others we haven't heard from in awhile so it's hard to tell. While I understand the desire to see A:M succeed I really don't get the whole 'A:M has to look more professional than it does now' thing. Why do folks need to feel validated for the purchase they've made when they could just create really cool things with A:M? This post invisiible because it doesn't need to be said.

Fuchur's new website is a nice progression from where the old site left off. Much improved I must say! Tore's design suggestions present more of a radical upgrade path for a future web presence as incorporating the new elements would require other updates (replacing logos in manuals etc.). I recall when the previous round of suggestions were made and Gerald rose to the challenge and updated the website to its former state. That was a significant improvement as well. We've certainly come a long way.

There is a reason recording devices of any type are not allowed in sensitive locations. But stuff like this suggests that even Maxwell Smart and Agent 99 wouldn't be able to securely communicate inside their cone of silence. The joke there of course being that they couldn't even hear themselves while in the cone of silence.

This reminds me of a few far fetched story ideas I wanted to use in a project many years ago. In those projects I intentionally targeted things that were 'impossible' because the technology added an element of mystery, fantasy, science and fiction and suggested a sense of the futuristic as a point of departure within an otherwise present day context. The trick being to tie the impossible tech into reality just enough to keep it from being entirely unbelievable with the gist of the resolution of the plot being something of a Rube Goldberg approach to problem solving; "How did the hero solve the mystery?" Why, Everyone knows he's a master of forms of science and technology very few people have mastered of course! It would seem that those ideas are as far fetched as this tech (and moreso) but the crazy thing is that I'm sure most folks would consider sound recovery from silent imagery just as impossible. And this doesn't even begin to approach what can (theoretically) be done when sound is also captured at the time of recorded imagery and then compared and contrasted with the imagery. And what of lip reading... and other tech that can be brought to bear to recreate what no one knew was there in the first place. In related tech, it wasn't that long ago that someone sought to recreate the sounds from the early 1900s captured in a room where clay was being formed on a lathing wheel. Yet another related piece of tech being that of recording light itself in slow motion as it bounces off of surfaces to reveal things not in direct view (shades of Bladerunner). Are you safe whispering to a confidant in a room full of people jabbering with loud music playing? Well, that might depend on what else is captured in the video. Whatever you do don't stand too close to that plant... and avoid eating potato chips out of a bag as you do!