photoman

Oh the DWG file... AutoCAD at its finest... I personally hate them (I work with vectorworks) b/c they are such a pain to import into other software. (Out of scale, layers inaccurate etc.) A little rant, photoman

I dont really know... But materials take more cpu time as in Decals take more ram and virtual memory.

Set the material to have 100% bumb or so in the Material properties box. I personally use multiple decals for textures most of the time (Killer proj size though....) Hope it helps.. Photoman

From personal experiance with game modding (Halo PC) with A:M. It is possible to do.... but hard. Example: Easy if you just do a tweak here and there but hard if you redo a character mainly b/c of texturing and flattening the modeling. Photoman

As a mac guy you may be trying to install a OS 9.x version of A:M. I am personally not sure if AM v9 is for OSX. Other thing is that some software that is written for the Power PC mac processor has glitches and sometimeas just won't work on Intel chips. I would recommend just getting a new supscription anyway because of newer features and will work better with your Vaio. Performance wise that should be great. The minimum requirements for A:M is like 450mhz with 256mb ram ! Hope it helps! -Photoman Edit: Grammatical mistakes.

A:M does have a .3ds plugin but like Robcat said the rigs won't be imported.

Hmmm... Out on a limb here but did you add a blur post effect to the camera? The pic look fine to me though. [Offtopic] Go Mac Users!!!! [/offtopic] -Photoman

Havent updated for a while now. Reasons being that I am done for the most part. When I get the footage I will then keyframe the camera and set the lighting. SO..... more when it comes.

No pun intended right? (title)... about the suspended problem, could be that you need gravity or some other force or dynamics? I dont have a AM ver with fluids so this is more of a guess.

Update! iDisk finally fixed itself and I have the correct copies of my project along with the resources and renders. I tried fiddeling with volumetrics to get this: Still needs some "tweeking" Maybe adjust it lower and move with wind (dynamics) for the animation. Here is a alternate view of the scene I did for fun. Shows the use of A:M hair pretty well I guess. (3x3 pass, depth of field) 47 min. A:M didnt want to render a targa sequence for some reason (Crashed 3 times in a row) so I rendered it as a jpeg. I also just got some new plugins to help place the "weeds" over the scene better. Same thing with the cacti. More coming. I am going to get some good timelapse storm videos soon.

Update! No official work done on the animation but I did scan in a couple of the original sketches: First sketch that I did before I started anything. Part1 of storyboard. Mind the legibility of the handwriting. Part2. The basic idea the storyboard shows is that of this being a logo animation for my films... I may also do something else with this scene but I have no idea what else to do... Ideas anyone? LITL = Look Into The Light More coming -Photoman

Update! Did come home ... Not much work done (Partially due to .Mac turning into MobileMe screwing up and me know having 3 different proj files...) Had to go back to a backup proj and worked to get this: Lotsa notes on my phone (Up to 10 now) which means more work for me. I did sketch a story board for the animation sequence but my scanner is at work so its not here . Also after reading John Bigboote and Fuchur's post I decided to rename the Project to "Nowhere Road". More coming. -Photoman

Thanks for the crit! I am currently on vacation right and have just gotten the use of my friends laptop and I don't have A:M with me. I have made mental notes and some notes on my phone on ideas to make my project better. 1. Redo sign's lighting 2. Space out objects(cactus's and weeds) for a better sense of perspective. 3. Redo "monuments" in background. 4. Find video of lightning storm for sky. (Anyone know where I can find video of a lightning storm??) Thanks again for the crits and more when I get back. -Photoman

Hmm... I will make the lights more bright on the next renders... Odd though they look normal to me... I must have a different color profile or something.

Heres one of my works in progress: Heres a quick one I made. VERY simple: Hope it helps. -Photoman

My screen may have a different gamma setting, Im ona 24" iMac. Update! Here are some stills: The cactus. I know the texture is horrible but it is going to silloutted against the sky. The main shot. Retextured the road to look more old and beat. Way fast render of 2:40 4pass 1024x768. Here is the updated camera shot for the clip: run1_desert.mov -Photoman

Update! Re-textured ground with maps instead of shader, created billboard/sign: Used Eric2575 tutorial method to texture the sign part and dirt. The rest are darktrees. 9:23 render with 4pass Main shot so far. Working on re-texturing the big "monuments" in the background and the cactus. The stars/sky is going to be worked on too. -photoman

Update! Mostly adjusted the textures. Created the background pic from a material with 2 gradients and a starmap. Still needs alot of work to do. I plan to do a short (10 sec) clip using this set in it kinda like this: desert_perpestive.mov Its going to be slower. The perspective effect I am going for uses a wide focal length (24mm) and go to 70mm while still keeping the same angle of view (i.e. moving the camera to do this) More soonish. -Photoman

I've been doing a lot of work with grass recently and the methods I use vary a lot between each scene. I learned the basics from Fuchurs tutorial on Hair particles. Try a forum search for it. -Photoman

Update. Worked yesterday, didn't get much work but the prohect is almost done. I added the oaktree to it. Took out the dirt texture to render faster b/c I was in a hurry. More soon. -Photoman

A bit bored this morning went onto google images and got inspired to make a pic after seeing a couple of Ansel Adams. Here it is: Took about 5min to render with 4passes at 1200x1800. The dirt is a Darktree The road is a off (Texture wise and Model wise). Used AM Hair for cactus spikes and tumble weeds. PLEASE CRITIQUE! I want to make it better if I can. Tips on the road would greatly help! Thanks -Photoman

Update. First thanks everybody for the tips they really do help. I did a ton of render test on the grass. The diffuse map I put on it seems t darken to a brown rather than a gold so I have to fiddle with that. I edited the telephone pole some more too by moving some of the steps. I got the lighting down which includes 5 sun type lights. 1 at warm yellow/white at 85% and the other 4 at cool blue at 10 - 25% to get the bounce light. Here is the lighting. The grass looks grainy b/c its a small 750x400 render. It will look more clean at the final render. Here is a moody lighting at twilight-ish. Light color and direction is off looks cool though. I may update the landscape by adding more hills for more depth and grandeur like AniMattor recomended and I will add some big oak trees to it too. More soon. -Photoman

Heres the quickie pic I made 1.5 hours with preview renders (9 min each x 3 = About 1 hour without renders) 3000x1600 4 pass with particles, fog, shadows, reflections. 48 minutes. Lol I love the treez plugin :Dl. The bark is a darktree. -Photoman

Havent gotten much done. I started doing test renders to get the grass right and lighting when I decided to add a tree. Made the tree on a seperate project (To load faster) and exported it. BUT when I tried opening my main project file A:M would just load and not do anythin at all. Since I have it where A:M will open the last proj it loops like that so A:M doesnt work.... Fixed it by changing the the defualt opening projh by editing the settings ini file.... So instead of opening it (Fear of freezes) I decided to do a quickie random scene wehich is rendering right now. But I am afraid my main proj is corupted. but whatev

Update! Managed to fix my render problems(lol hair density was at 4 and width was at 1" instead of 0.1"). I tinkered with lighting and other things... Thinking about doing a skydome with IBL but that seems like a lot of work . Besides that I did a bunch of little tweaks here and there (adjusted placement fixed on parts of models and deleted all extra cp's that weren't used or in view). Here is the final shot without the grass. The dirt texture is the Terracotta texture that comes with A:M. Added fog (That needs to be adjusted). Thinking about doing depth of field. 42 min at 1 pass with Fog, Particles, and shadows at 3000 x 1600 Here is a render with the grass. Still needs alot of tweaks and for some reason the colors are off (Maybe lighting). Also I turned off the Dirt texture to save render time. If you have any tips or notice anything wrong please reply Thanks -Photoman