pixelplucker

How disimalr is the Mac OS and iOS? Isn't much of the code already done, how modular are the components? My thoughts on using HAMR for the playback and eliminating the rendering oration of the program might be possible. When I say a lite version I do mean to create a bare bones 3d modeling and animation. Porting to Android might be a lot of work but the iPad version might be plausible. As far as the Windows based tablets there is no real issue other than space and video. I have been looking at tablets in general and found that the iPad followed by Android devices to be the better of the tablets with price, performance and function and the Windows based tablets to be the worst. The average Win 8 tablet uses the Atom chip and is restricted to 32bit OS coupled with the enormous size of Win 8 that forces people to purchase systems with a minimum of 32 gig and ideally 64 gig compared to iPad and Androids at half that.

How difficult would it be to make an AM app for Android and Mac iOS? I was thinking it could just the core program with a simplified rendering or realtime renderer using HAMR as opposed to rendering to files as full movies due to limited space on mobile devices. But have the file importable to the full AM product.

I believe only time png format might funky in some programs might be from the compression used. I have pretty much disbanded tga and use uncompressed png format for all of my textures. First off I can view them easier in just about any program where as tga does not preview or at least not at a system level. Photoslop in general was always a little finicky with the less popular formats and used to corrupt jpg files if progressive was used instead of baseline standard. Though I don't use PS anymore, you should be able to record your actions to create an alpha easily... Select color range (choose the background color ie green). Select inverse Save selection Note: if the alpha is wrong simply remove the select inverse. Run that in batch mode from the file menu and choose a separate destination folder. I really miss DeBabalizer for that stuff, was by far the best and used Apple Scripts.

Maybe something such as FBX I/O would be the key. If marketed on Steam, there is quite a large group of Indy developers for games and AM lends itself to that market pretty well. There is a lot of competition but all those packages are in the $800+ mark.

Going to the poly.world from AM isn't too bad but the bigger issue is if someone wants to convert the model to a sub d surface. What would be nice it to have matched edges on surfaces which could allow separate groups to act as one much like surfaces in nurbs, maybe expand on the shift click. Trying to make a continuos mesh especially with mechanical models can be tricky. Something as simple as punching out a hole in a cube is harder in AM. I would like to see is a freeze option so bias handles don't move and don't auto adjust. I found it annoying to have to go back over a model and have to straighten them out after I had them fixed just because I moved a cp. Lastly a auto cap option when exporting out stl files for all those that print thier models out.

personally what has kept me with AM is the plain Jane interface. No abstract icons, consistent interface and workflow. The only other 3d package I used that I found as clean was EIAS and Amapi. To make a modern GUI might not be that tough but would it get more customers by looking like others out there? For over a decade I over looked AM because of lack of product recognition in the mass market and it seems more of a trade secret. I would think mass exposure would be first, glitz later.

Thanks!

So is it working yet? Not about to scavenge around to look for dll's and muck up my machine.. everything else is happy.

I get the same error here. I remember seeing AM 18h install the runtime libraries, maybe those are different than the link you have?

Now that is cool, you work with Andrew on this? Malo, I think Steam still offers 3dCoat for $99, something like that. Much less than direct from Pilgway but check and make sure the features are all there or if there are any limitations. I believe it's the whole program.

Thats pretty slick

Not sure if AM really needs to compete on an open market platform since all the tools you need are pretty much in one package. Compatibility becomes an issue when you need to keep up with the i/o of other formats and other programs to complete a job. AM's target audience is the single user who wants to create their own animations and renders. Since there is the ability to bring AM content into various game engines is certainly attractive to some of the audience in the Steam marketplace. Many that use programs such as Blender get discouraged with it's convoluted bloated interface. If I had to use Blender for my work I would start a landscaping business... Someone else had suggested Steam for distribution before me and after looking I totally agreed with them. Getting the name out there is tough, todays marketing isn't all about the product but rather data mining and In-Your-Face ads that annoy most potential customers. Buying magazine ads is useless since magazines are rare and a good portion of the audience don't even read so your limited to the Internet especially since this product is for the most part electronically distributed. More users the more revenue AM has to expand and put in more features and those features will be more in tune with what the users will want.

3d Coat has started distributing on Steam along with many other programs besides just games, ie video editors, 3d paint programs, texture programs, game development packages, music editors etc. They have 75 million users that see a start up page when starting the program that directs them to new, sale etc items. Not sure on how the current copy protection will work with Steams or if it is adapable, something the programmers have to investigate. Steams works by allowing the user to launch apps through their program that talks back to the users account similar to MS Live. Again it is something to investigate.

For me I had used some big pricey software and had glimpses of Hash back in the mid 90's and always was curious and at the time I was weary because the price tag was so low. Typically I was used to paying more for a single plug in for either Max or EI that AM seemed chintzy. Wasn't until I was over on the pc side fully and looking for alternatives to what I was using that i gave AM a try. Hash should seriously look at Steam for distribution. Steams vast audience would explode this forum with new users. Hash may have to redo their copy protection as a new version for Steam only consumers since Steam has it's own and pretty effective protection.

What I was referring to was the way they had one of the terminators come out of the floor and it had the checkered floor on the character as he rose out. In case of the comic that Mat showed they might have been more than just a single projection. Objects do have to line up pretty good but not always perfect and you are pretty limited on the angles the camera can look around because the images are still just flat images. The cube you showed looked like the texture was stuck to it more so than projected on, maybe it was my eyes and maybe the way the texture was moving as the cube was rotated, hard to tell.

Not quite, looks like the decal is stuck to the cube via camera projection. The effect you want is the texture to remain in place so use a roto. That make sense?

Of course Adobe can't just post a flash encoded or Vimeo clip but came up with another plugin to view content. Typical... Horrid company, if hostile take overs weren't possible they would have gone out of business a decade ago.

If I remember right Rob has it dead on, patches at low angles didn't show the map. In EI it didn't matter, the objects were just like a projection screen, there was no uv mapping involved.

If I remember right there wasn't the same implementation of projection mapping where the roto would project on certain objects, think I had some problems with the way to do it in AM and gave up because the results didn't work out. I'll take a look at one of my old projects I tried it with and see what the problems where. Way I did that in EI is I took the projection map image and used that as a background to model against. Shapes just needed to cover the model or areas you wanted to projection map onto then I imported those objects into EI and set the projection map to just them and the same image was used as a background.

Used that a little in my old EI days with camera projection mapping. Basically you could use different objects to catch an image projected on them, even mix it up with multiple maps and multiple projections. Creates a false depth from a flat image. I think it is something they could implement in AM fairly easily. Projection image can be a still or even sequence loaded like a rotoscope and the catching objects or groups would show the still or sequence. The projected image(s) are always facing the camera and only shown the tagged objects.

Do you have another computer or laptop to test it on? See if it is the Cintiq or if it happens to be just with that system. I see the lag, not nearly anything like the Surface Pro 3 though.

I have a really stupid question... Did your Cintiq Always lag or is this just something recent?

Whats the CPU clock speed? Mines not extremely quick it's just a 2.66 but I have a larger monitor and I don't have any lag on the cursor with mouse or pen. I had pen & touch options on at one time but turned them off because they screwed me up especially flicks but the settings didn't seem to make a difference. I can't say it's the Cintiq because I have tablets that are much older and don't have that issue even on slower machines and other than that the Cintiq is just a monitor behind a tablet surface. Does your Cintiq connect via USB? Did you try unplugging all other USB devices to see if that does the trick? Maybe another device is hammering away on the USB controller slowing the input refresh.

Good point with the mouse moving the cursor. Maybe it's the Wacom driver? Wacom is famous for making crappy drivers and outstanding hardware.

Is it the Cintiq doing that? Do you have a drawing tablet you could test with. I have 0 lag on mine but it is a newer model. Some programs are laggy, Illustrator and Adobe products in general don't really take advantage of hardware but your cursor seems slow in general without anything running. I even have my old Intuos hooked to a celeron laptop and that seems quicker. The celeron is only 1.6 gzh with 8 gb of mem on it. If it is a background process then as that program runs it may lag the cursor but wouldn't necessarily be sluggish all the time and you would notice a speed difference as you drag. Good example of that is if you have automatic updates on (part of Microsoft's way of being a Nanny for Nitwits) and if you were drawing the cursor may pause as you work. You could look at your system monitor and see if the cpu is doing anything when the machine is idle. A slow overheated cpu may cause the laggy cursor too. You may have the equivalent of a full size house cat trapped in the heat sink and fans. Also when is the last time you defragged your hard drive? Just tossing some ideas out there.