[Skycast now available as a free download]

Nice. I actually owned it, but I never got around to using it - tend to focus on toon renders. I guess I'll take it for a spin again

[Decals with clay]

decal percentage is animatable so you can put it on a pose, hit on for no decals, off for them back or viceversa

[looping video in rotoscope or layer?]

Excellent, I got it looping in rotoscope nicely, it's more convenient in roto because there's no need to mess with aligning it to the camera or removing lighting effects

 

The avi I was using must've disagreed with AM somehow because the frame property didn't appear until I switched to another one.

 

Also I did not know that post extrapolation trick, it will come in very handy

 

Thanks!!

[looping video in rotoscope or layer?]

Keyframing the Image>Frame property in a Layer seems to be the way to go. It works here in V13.

 

 

If you had a video that was 10 frames long you'd keyframe 0 at frame 0, 9 at frame 9 and 0 at frame 10 , the set the post extrapolation to "repeat"

 

make sure the keyframes are set to linear interpolation, not spline.

 

 

 

Rotoscopes don't seem to have that property available.

 

Weird, my v13 doesn't have frames available under the image menu in layers and I checked I have advanced properties enabled this time... v15's layers are being temperamental (As in "not appearing at all even in renders" one of the many reasons I'm sticking with 13)

 

Last resort, edit as clip together that repeats the vid as many times as you need for your shot.

 

 

I guess I'll resort to that

[looping video in rotoscope or layer?]

Simple question, I want to pan over an existing looping video placed in chor as a rotoscope or layer, how do I get AM to loop it? Right now it plays once and gets temperamental if I try to set different lengths or key frame numbers.

 

v15 seems to have more options for this than v13 and 13 seems to crop a frame or two from rotos but either version will do for what I want. Any hints?

 

okay dropping the same video as a second rotoscope gives me another repeat but then there's no smoothness to the position keyframes...

 

I'm probably missing some obvious "loop animation" button, right?

[A:M 15e decal corruption]

I had this same problem but then it seemed to clear out on it's own, weird.

[Using a distortion box to create different characters]

I do this, I even animate colour in the group and material properties inposes to change the character's look even more, unfortunately the poses zero out to pure white rather than the original colour so you can animate Bruce Banner turning into the hulk but then when Hulk calms down he becomes an albino

[Gradients folder on AM 15.0e WEB]

Yeah that's what I did for some reason it's empty. You can also make your own fairly easily clicking on the colour bar, but I imagine it'll be very confusing for new users to have no preset gradients.

[Animating a decal.]

You could use a projection or environment map and animate it, it doesn't work quite the same as a decal but you can animate it.

 

Here's an example using a projection map with transparency, if it weren't transparent it would render as bands moving along the surface of the body - nsfw due to nudity

[Cut or delete spline keyframes in a chor window without taking bone keys?]

This just worked for me...

 

 

turn off all the filters except "Key Muscle" and "Key Model"

select the model bone

hit "Delete Key"

 

 

that deleted spline keyframes but left bone keyframes

 

 

If you want to delete just muscle keys, you have to have only the muscle filter on.

 

Yes that works it looks like in chor mode the key skeletal translations, rotations and scaling buttons apply both in skeletal manipulation mode and muscle mode even though they're greyed out. So switching them off in skeletal mode is necessary before doing keyframe operations in muscle mode

 

Thanks!

[Cut or delete spline keyframes in a chor window without taking bone keys?]

Whenever I cut or delete a muscle/spline keyframe in a chor window AM also deletes any bone keys along with it even if in bones mode I only have single bone selected. It doesn't do this in action windows (It just deletes the spline keys and leaves alone the bones). I notice v13 also behaves this way so I'm assuming there's some setting I've forgotten about? Or is this the intended behaviour?

 

(I can get around it by deleting the keys in the pws timeline but...)

[Real-time display errors]

Okay... looks like the culprit may be the synergy app that I use to share the mouse and keyboard between 2 pcs...

 

That kinda sucks since it's terribly convenient... but at least AM seems to be behaving now.

[Real-time display errors]

I'm having these problems too, it seem to be related to the vista aero theme, as it declares it has switched it off when I start AM15 using the disabled desktop composition

 

What is puzzling is that AM13 behaves extremely well on vista, with a new "feature" I really like in that when you do a screen render you can switch to another window and it continues to render and doesn't forget the screen buffer meaning the render stays there even after switching windows.

 

Dissapointingly v15 goes back to the old "on screen renders are fragile as butterfly wings" status quo.

 

Oh well at least it renders frames in 10 seconds less than v13 on the tests I've done, that's a minute less every 6 frames, not bad.