Wildsided

If I remember, when you use the mirror bones plugin, it auto mirrors the weights. <edit> I just re read that and realised you said constraints. So ignore me.

That's some pretty stuff there Roger.

In a country as obsessed with the concept of personal freedom. The fact Home Owners Associations exist in America boggles my mind.

I've been thinking about Breckridge a lot recently and decided to have a crack at re-making the model for detective Nye. This is the model so far with the rotoscope slapped on it as a decal from the front. So it's not properly flattened and applied and looks terrible from any angle other than this one.

Select the patch/s that are facing the wrong way with the patch selection tool and then press the F key to flip them. Or right mouse button and select refind normals from the menu (You don't need anything selected to do this).

Lo res test render of Dan explaining modern women to Tech. No audio/lip sync yet or hand (But Dan does have hands now) animation. Tech stands bymajestically, unmoving, statuesque. lorestest.mp4

I have a question now I'm thinking about it. How much are we allowed to edit the BVH before it becomes ineligible? Like to eliminate jittering or move things to prevent model clipping? or exaggerate something etc.

Re-filmed and resubmitted to Deepmotion. Worked a lot better. Rendered it out with Mel from my Bernie Snuffles book because he was a parody of Del Boy anyway. Piggy fall down.mp4

A long long time ago (2013), I bought an Xbox 360 kinect with the intention of using it to make Motion capture files for A:M (seriously I've never even owned an Xbox 360). It did not go well and the kinect ended up being stored in my wire monster (The big tote where I keep all my miscellaneous wires and tech doo-dads). Shamed into action by the Mocap contest, I started looking into the process again and discovered that there was free software capable of simultaneously capturing data from 2 kinect's, combining the info and then spit out a .BVH file. So naturally I went to my local second hand game store and bought a second kinect. This afternoon, brimming with undeserved confidence, I rearranged my living room to make space for an inflatable air mattress and attempted to recreate one of UK Televisions most iconic moments. This one... My wife kindly filmed the attempt. Untitled.mp4 I imported the resultant .BVH into A:M and well, see for yourself. Kinect.mp4 Yeah.... If you can believe it that was the tidied up version. Originally the kinect's thought my entire waist twisted 180 degrees about 2 seconds in. I'm pretty sure with some tinkering I could get better results but it's not a setup that I can leave set up. I also signed up for the free deep motion account and submitted the video my wife shot. It did an admirable job considering I wasn't facing that particular camera. But it didn't seem to understand the falling over. Again most likely due to the angle. deep motion.mp4 Anyway I hope that was a bit of a giggle for everyone.

Okay, got me a car park/parking lot. It's currently floating in the void, but hey, baby steps.

I don't know if anyone has ever done this successfully, but you could try downloading something like virtual box and running an older version of windows on your modern machine. Then run the old version of A:M in the virtual machine.

Weird how the tweets are from 2022 but none of the reviews on Amazon are older than 2013. Is there a way to see how long a product has been out of stock? I'm wondering if somebody bought copies of the perpetual license or boxed version years ago and then sold them on for an inflated price like those current sellers who buy stuff from Ali express and then resell them on Amazon with massive markups. Not that that would explain why they're tweeting a link in 2022. Although it does seem like that entire Twitter account is just auto generated affiliate links. Potentially just a bot that makes a twitter account and spams affiliate links without checking stock quantities.

Finally have all the voxel vehicles I built in MC rebuilt in A:M. Now I can make some colour variations (a process that is a lot quicker in A:M) and get them put in the car park.

Added 2 more voxelly vehicles.

Damn Daniel! Back at it again with the white Van. I had previously built a few vehicles for the car park using a mod called chisels and bits. I've now started rebuilding them in A:M.

Okay, so the main floor layout is pretty much complete. I still need to do the Deli/Bakery section in the back left of the store. The rest of the store like the back offices, storage and produce prep area won't be shown on camera so everything beyond the bakery area will be empty and just walls for the exterior shots. Then I can move on to making the rest of the surrounding street (Which will all just be facades and should take a lot less time. Then we can get down to the business of killing off the protagonist.

I have not, but I will the next time I use radiosity. If I remember from when I set it up before, I just kept gradually cranking up the numbers in the radiosity settings until my PC couldn't cope with it any more (admittedly not very scientific). All I did yesterday was turn radiosity back on (With the settings the same as they were when I last saved 2 years ago) and turned on multipass 16 before I rendered the image.

Back when we did the Planes, Trains & Automobiles contest I tried rendering out my entry with radiosity switched on and it looked cool but also a bit like an explosion at a disco. So I ended up submitting a render without radiosity for the competition. A long while later I either read, or heard in a youtube video, someone mention using multi-pass with radiosity to get better results due to the blending of the multiple passes. That discussion popped into my head again today so I thought I'd try it out and ended up with this result. For reference this is the competition entry at the same resolution (720p)

Oooh Aisles...

Funny you should mention that, as I was looking at that forum thread the other day and tested it out. Multipass even at 16 passes, which I think was the minimum suggested in the thread, greatly increased render times. But I have it set up now so I might use it for still images down the road. Probs just stick with a single light for each tube for animation. Maybe adding a small glow effect to the tubes would sell the effect a bit more.

progress continues to be made.

Is there a minimum rig we should be using? None of my stuff uses any of the pre built rigs like TSM2 etc and the last time I messed about with .BVH (Using the kinect to make them) they required a more advanced rig than I had built/installed. My rigs usually look like the one below. They don't have any special constraints beyond weighting.

The opening part of the MC project starts in a local grocery store. I designed and built it in MC (along with a decent sized chunk of the surrounding street) with the intention of using a program called JMC2OBJ to export the map as a model into A:M. Sadly a lot of the mods I used to make the set were incompatible with JMC2OBJ. So I've been recreating the set directly in A:M. She's taking a little while but she's coming along. For Context

translation - You can substitute arbitrary shapes instead of Control Bones and Nulls, but in AM this is not as convenient as in other programs.

Cheers Robert. That's got the conveyor working.