PaulX

That looks like a still from Disney's Peter Pan? Great job and I'd be interested in seeing the finished result.

Just a 'work in progress' view of the opening scene of an animation I hope I will one day finish and posting updates here may help with the motivation in achieving that goal. Nothing in the picture is finished, much still needs decals, textures, etc and more models need to be created. There will be an old 1930's style truck, more rocks, some grass and the gumtree will have more branches. The main character is currently under construction and when finished I'll upload a pic. The story is of a lonely preteen boy who dreams of rockets and having a friend his age and who lives on an isolated farm in 'outback' Australia with his Red Army veteran Grandpa.

Here's a good one. I'm building a model of a house that has a corrugated iron roof. Part of the roof is orientated say north/south and the other east/west. I applied to the entire roof decals that mimic corrugated iron sheets and in 'shaded' mode all the stamps (approx 50 in number) are visible. I then open a choreography and import the model, set the camera, lighting, etc and do a quick render (Q + click in the window) and find the stamps on the east/west section have disappeared. The only difference between the two main sections of roof is that the east/west section being made of three adjoining surfaces angled differently, I had to hide two while applying decals so as not to have sheets of corrugated iron 'bent' around a corner but rather cut to shape as it would be in reality. Feeling this process of hiding and un-hiding surfaces may be the problem I cleared all decals and then applied a single one to the east/west section without hiding any part of the model and, it was visible both in shaded mode and quick render. My next step will be to break up the east/west part of the roof into three separate sections, the north/south is two separate sections, and try again but it's interesting that what is visible in shaded mode can disappear when rendered.

Nicely modelled but I agree with a few others here that the characters and the male one in particular, could be offend.

For those who want a professional looking script, ScriptMaker is a pretty good tool even if it annoyingly attempts to send you to its creator's site everytime you close it. But thats the price one pays for the free version. The storyboard tool, SLang, is also worth checking out. http://www.freefilmsoftware.co.uk/

I believe it would be impossible to learn it all and increasingly the basic choice will be between traditional art and story-telling skills and the computer/technical.

Thanks. Same issues with the v15 library models. Not a problem, I'll try some extra memory and see what happens and if the same then I suppose it will have to be a faster computer. BTW Higginsdj, nice telescope!

Thanks, I used the clown from v8.5. I suppose I really need to know whether the cpu is fast enough and if it is then this looks like a job for number-one son next time he visits Dad - he is studying computer science (?) and just rolls his eyes at Dad's incompetence - believes I should stick to pencil, paint and paper lol Video card, etc, well that's getting a little technical for an artist but I will try more memory

Downloaded v15 to replace my old v8.5 and found I can't use it because it is slow on my machine. For example, if I click and drag the bounding box of a character in choreography mode the move happens a few seconds after I released the mouse button. So, just as a check and before inflicting unfair injury upon my computer's innocence gland, I reloaded v8.5 and did the following; I set up a scene involving a character standing in front of a photograph and did a quick render with both versions. Time to render with v8.5 is 31.44 and v15 is 51.0, or near twenty seconds longer all things been equal. It would appear then that v15 is near twice as resource greedy as v8.5. A search of the Hash website revealed that the system requirements for v14 recommend a 500 mhz cpu and I would assume v15 would not be dramatically different. While arguably far from impressive by today's standards, I do have 1000 mhz at my disposal and so would imagine the software could run in a usable manner. So before I go into a trance, wipe the HD and re-install everything or worse, such as buy a new machine I could hardly afford right now, is 1000 mhz enough to run v15 without having to wait seconds for the software to respond to the wire frame of a character being moved from point A to point B? Would it help if I bolted in more RAM? I have 500 megs. And I did shut down everything I could think of and even went as far as removing the virus scan thingo from the computer to free up resources and, gave greater priority to AM but all that made little if any difference.

Thanks guys and had a look at Nancy's work in the stills gallery - pretty impressive! Cheers

Not sure if this helps finding a solution to your problem but if you can't upload then how about you simply describe what you are trying to achieve as in - "I'm trying to make a movie in which a CG character dances in front of a crowd" or "I'm trying to make a movie of a CG monster standing behind my little sister and strangling her" In the mean time and I'm no specialist so others please correct me if wrong, but in the first case you would create the animation in AM setting the background colour of the camera to blue or green, then import the footage into a film editing program where the green or blue is 'keyed out' to allow the live footge to be seen behind your animated character. I use 'Wax' to composite - as this process is called - images and it can be download for free from http://www.debugmode.com/wax/ If you are doing the 'monster strangling sister' thing then as the other guy said, transform the live footage into a series of stills - tga or other supported files - and then follow the instructions in the AM manual on how to merge live action and CG using 'front projection', etc Cheers and good luck

Hello all, I recently found my old A.M. 8.5 CD and manual and after much hesitation because I remember A.M. as being somewhat addictive, decided the give it a final whirl in the computer before making a donation to a Salvation Army charity sale. Mistake and here I am again but it struck me that AM might be used to create visual works combining traditional art and CG. About me includes that I am a 'middle-aged white male', I live down-under in Australia in the hills west of Sydney, I earn a living painting murals and have a degree in communications recently obtained having nothing much to do these past few years. Look forward to sharing my born-again experience with all.