Robert Nona

Thank you everyone for the advice, that answers my questions, time to get stuck in to hash now and keep on learning, thanks again.

First of all I just want to say hello, second I would like to apologise for the length of this post, I am a new AM user and have had the software for a month now, I find it to be a great piece of 3D software, however I have encountered a few problems along the way and would like to ask for some advice on a few issues. Thank you in advance for any help given. I am using HASH AM 2007 OZ CD V13r on a Compaq Presario SR1937uk, Pentium D 3.2ghz, 2gb ram, GeForce 7600 GT, Windows XP Home ed SP2 1.Matterials as bump maps: When I use materials as a bump map, the bump map only renders if I use Multi-Pass, if I render without Multi-pass the bump simply is not applied, is this normal behaviour? 2.Materials as other maps: Is it possible to apply a material to an attribute other than Colour or Bump, such as Diffuse/Transparency/Specular such as you can when using Decals? 3.Snap to Rulers: In the modelling window you can snap to grid, is it possible to snap to a ruler instead? 4.Roughness: Could someone please explain what the roughness attribute in the surface dialog box is for, what is the difference between roughness and bump maps because they seem very similar, is there a specific use for Roughness? 5.Bend/Twist/Taper: I have used polygon modellers in the past and while I understand that due to AM using splines a lot of tools from these programs are not needed I do miss having tools such as bend, twist and Taper, is there any way to replicate such tools using the AM tool set, I have tried using the Distortion Mode and have managed to taper an object using this but the effect is uniform, is there a way to apply falloff to the distortion tool? 6.Merlin: When using AM an icon for Merlin appears in the task bar, when I activate it a little wizard appears but then he does absolutely nothing he just sits there, what is Merlin for? 7.Context Help: I have tried to use the context sensitive help (Shift+F1) but regardless of what icon or panel I click on the help file always opens on the same page "Welcome to The Animation Master Technical Reference" how do I make this feature work correctly? 8.Appearance: I downloaded the Tech Videos from the HASH web site and noticed that the look of AM is different in some of the Videos, it uses tabs for the different panels, see enclosed JPEG. How can I enable this feature? 9.Displacement Maps: Is there a way to freeze a models geometry once you have applied a displacement map to it, so that the software doesn’t have to keep applying the map in real-time? 10.Lofting: Is it possible to loft in AM, I don’t mean how the duplicator wizard works by using the same cross section on each segment, but rather to define two or more different cross sections and have the software blend them together to create a smooth transition, a square blending into a circle for example. 11.Extruder Plug-in: Could someone please explain how to use the Extruder plug-in, I cant seem to make it work properly, I have used the Sweeper plug-in and this works fine, but when I use Extruder no mater how I align the cross section and the Path it always smears the cross section along the path rather than extruding it. 12. SVN Version Control: In the options dialog box there is a tab for SVN Version control, what is this used for? 13.Undo: While using AM I have noticed some odd behaviour when using undo, occasionally if I have just stitched two or more splines together and then change my mind, when I undo, the splines split but not to how they were originally, the points are now connected differently, why is this? Thanks for reading this, sorry for all the questions and thank you for any advice.