Glob Studios

Thanks, Rob! I actually figured it out. I had forgotten that flat-shaded surfaces don't receive ray-traced shadows. I had to change my sun to a klieg light and set it up for z-buffer shadows. -Vance

I am having some trouble trying to get this working. When I make the ground not be flat shaded, it receives shadows fine (from a key light and a sun), but the color of the projection is off. When I make the ground be flat shaded, it does not receive shadows, even though "receive shadows" is enabled in its properties. Any hints? Thanks! -Vance

Hi Jason, thanks for all the good work! I wanted to let you know, I'm getting an HTTP 500 Internal Server Error when I try to search the forums, either from the quick search or the advanced search. I don't get an error when I search members or help. Also, every time I try to push a "Like This" button on a post, it tells me "You have reached your quota of positive votes for the day", even though I've never done one successfully. Neither of these is critical, but I thought you'd want to know about them so you can put them on your list. -Vance

Thanks Steve!

Thanks Rob!

I'm doing something a bit different with A:M. I've filmed an actress in front of a green screen, and I'm compositing her into scenes created in A:M. This is the current state of a short prologue to the story. These are videos for the music of the band Gekko Projekt, but the idea is to make them more like a short film telling a story than like a traditional MTV video. I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions you might have. Here's the link. I don't want to go public with it yet, so I've set a password, which is "drpepper" (without the quotes). https://vimeo.com/99576675 -Vance

On #1, it was already my plan to add the spaceship. The camera path is intended to show the spaceship alternately from the right and the left side of the ship. I just wanted to get the environment nailed down first. #2, I would never have thought of, but it's a great idea! Thanks! BTW, I found it very useful to do some adjustment outside of A:M. I added a filter to increase saturation and another to anti-alias the frames. The latter gave it the smooth look.

Thanks, Simon! Having Saturn turn is a good idea, though the NASA videos are long time lapse sequences that exaggerate the motion. But having the clouds move on Saturn, like they would on Earth seems like a good idea. Titan has an orange haze atmosphere lower down, which effectively masks surface features. -Vance

Thanks, Rob; those are good suggestions! -Vance

This is a fairly simple sequence approaching Titan (moon of Saturn). I'm trying to put together some video to go with songs on the prog rock band Gekko Projekt's upcoming CD. Many of the songs involve a science fiction story about being marooned on Titan. Any comments are welcome and appreciated! Titan Test #1 -Vance

Imagination Technologies has come out with a couple of real-time raytrace graphics cards including the Caustic R2500. They are a bit expensive at the moment, but I expect they will come down over time. Is there any interest at Hash in adding support for these in the future? It would provide a great capability for previewing animations. You can read about them here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/she...y-tracing-card/ -Vance

Congratulations on getting V17 out! Any chance of getting a summary of what's new in V17? -Vance

I was recommending to a buddy of mine that he should add motion blur to an animation he had done. It's really easy to do in A:M, but more work in the funky setup he uses. He wanted to understand the benefit, so I did this short demonstration video, which you can see at the link below. Enjoy! High Def Motion Blur Demonstration Video -Vance

My plan is just to hide the glass while I'm working, and then to unhide it for the final render. But I agree that it would be good to get to the bottom of what's going on and figure out how to make it happen (when you want it to) and how to avoid it. -Vance

I've begun work creating a test animation. The Rear Window set is really wonderful, and I expect everyone will enjoy working with it. I did run across one issue, though. I'm using room #1. I found that when I placed objects in the room (including Tom), they did not appear in the shaded view, though the walls did. Everything was there when I rendered. After some experimentation, I determined the issue was the panes of glass (objects behind them did not appear, but objects in front did). I'm not sure why this is happening. At a guess, it may have something to do with normals. In any case, I went into the modeling window for the set and hid the panes of glass (stuff that is hidden in the modeling window is hidden in the choreography), along with everything in the set besides my room. This solved the visibility problems, and made it easier to work with. This may be an approach others want to use. -Vance

I'd like to participate. I'm most interested in Window #1. -Vance

I have a problem with my landing shot I'd like your advice on. For the landscape of Titan, I've applied a pretty low-res bitmap (it's actually the one normally used for the standard Ground object, but with the color shifted to the red), and then to make it look less like a low-res video game, I added a very large amount of roughness (200% with a roughness scale of 50%). It looks pretty good in stills from both far away and in closeup. There are two problems with it. First, I'm getting some jittering of the roughness from frame to frame of the shot near the beginning, and then as you get closer, there appear to be alternating bands of patterns which shift back and forth a couple of times. If you have a good strategy for fixing these problems using roughness, I'd love to hear it, but it may be that I'm pushing it beyond what it was intended for. If roughness is not going to do it, do you have another approach that you think will work better? You can see the latest version of my shot here: Landing Shot It was rendered at 1920x1080 (HD) final quality with 16 passes. I also increased the contrast and saturation of the frames to give it a harsher look. Running 4 processes at a time on V16 NetRender, it took about 12 hours to render 661 frames on an i7 machine at 3.4GHz. It averaged a little over 4 minutes for each batch of 4 frames. I continue to be impressed with how much faster at rendering V16 is than previous versions, especially with NetRender included for 4 simultaneous processes. And on my machine (quad core), I have no trouble doing other things like reading email or browsing the web while 4 processes are banging away at rendering frames. Anyway, thanks in advance for any suggestions you might have. The latest version of the landing shot (link above) incorporates Rich's suggestion to get closer, and has some robots added. -Vance P.S., I see that on Vimeo, for some reason the video plays twice as fast as it should, taking 12 seconds instead of 24. But you still can see what I'm talking about.

That's a good note, Rich. I think you're right, coming closer with the camera would help. I did put up a preview that has a demo version of the music. Escape from the Mines of Titan Preview The shots have all been improved since (including the landing), but it will give some flavor of where I'm going. -Vance

This guy has so much personality in the still, I can't wait to see him move. -Vance

Never played Minecraft, but I love your teaser. Good work! -Vance

Here's another section I have a rough one of. This is a landing of the vehicle shown in the first section. I'd appreciate any comments you might have. -Vance TitanLanding5sm_6.mov

Congratulations! The web comic (which I only started reading recently) is my favorite, and I hope the trailer helps you promote it. You are pioneering what may be the way comics get done in the future. Nice web comic tute a while back in the web comic. -Vance

I would not bother to reinstall A:M. If you did have a malware keylogger program on your system, it would not be in A:M. It would be in some program that runs in the background all the time, so it can monitor all your keystrokes (like the clock), or, more likely, in its own program with a cryptic name that runs in the background all the time. Kaspersky is normally quite good (their detection of malware is among the best), but they blew it here. They are detecting a behavior that keyloggers do, but it turns out lots of legitimate programs also do it. I would be tempted to just tell Kaspersky, "Don't tell me about detections of this kind any more." They usually have a way to do it. And I would leave it at that. -Vance P.S., I used to be a developer on Norton AntiVirus and Norton Internet Security

I finally watched the "second pass" video, and the added weight of the sword really made it come alive for me. But the monster's weapons seem lacking in weight in comparison. You are on the right track! -Vance