Wildsided

Happy birthday dude have a good one

2 splines! old hair where have you been all my life......hang on that just sounds wrong somehow......classic hair that's what we'll call it.

The Elite Force is a team assembled by the U.E.G (United Earth Government) to combat threats that would otherwise be outside of the scope of the U.E.D.F (United Earth Defense Forces) or to carry out clandestine missions that the U.E.G council want to keep quiet. Each team member was recruited due to them each possessing abilities beyond those of a normal human being. Be they of a natural origin or abilities that the individual has gained through some kind of physical augmentation. But no it`s got nothing to do with Star Trek, the 'Elite Force' sub title really came out of necessity. Parallel Worlds was the story`s original title but as the concept developed I realized that i had a lot of ideas that explored different themes and while they all took place within the same universe they couldn't all be one story. So I split them into different stories 'Elite Force', 'K-8' and 'M.I.A'.

Hello! Being as though I've put Epic Gamin' on hiatus, not cancelled, it's just a copyright mine field that I don't have the time, money or inclination to wade through. I've decided to make a whole new topic for my shiny new project and when I say shiny and new I mean for you guys, for me this project has been on going since 1999. I won't bore you with the details (unless someone asks), but needless to say the plot and characters of the story I intend to tell have been around for a long time. I mentioned over on Dan's Epic Gamin' stuff that I'm moving into motion comics and as I've been flirting with the Anime art style for years I decided to go with that style for Parallel Worlds: Elite Force. Below is the first step toward making this new show a reality. Her name is Amy and while she may be cute...Well lets just say looks can be deceiving. To make production quicker, the only parts of the comic that will be hand drawn are the eyes and mouth. Everything else will be modeled in 3D and posed in A:M, exported to Photoshop and finished off.

That's fixed it, cheers Rodney. I'd already tried deleting the ground, but putting a chunk of geometry behind seems to have done the trick. Now I can get back to styling that mop I dumped on her head.

Morning all, Been working on a new project and have run into an an odd problem. So quick (hopefully) question. Does anyone know what might be causing this? It's like toon render just gets bored when it gets to the top of her head and stops. (Note: that's not final hair or anything I'm just testing)

Hello!! It's 2013, the kids are back at school which means it's time for Dan to get back to work. A while back (about a year) I was discussing motion comics on the forums here and have been playing with the idea ever since. Anyway I've decided to take the plunge and try making one. The primary reason is that the 5 minute Christmas episode took a heck of a long time to render and the general video watching populous of the internet have short attention spans so you need to have consistent releases to keep their attention. I cant afford to spend a couple of months animating and rendering an episode and then have nothing new for another 2 months. Anyway I just got through making a little test frame and I think it looks kinda nice so I figured why not post it. Also it kinda looks like a screen shot of a video game and oh how I wish it was!

Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages! It's finally here, the Ace.Co Entertainment Christmas special has landed and there's a link to it below. http://blip.tv/aceco/ace-co-entertainment-...al-2012-6488297 It's been a journey getting this one done, so I really hope you all enjoy it. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all and here's to more stuff in 2013!

That is possibly the funniest thing I've seen all year and with only 3 days left to go before the end of the year I doubt it will be dethroned. Also how awesome would it be if this were an actual version of chess? Minus the pissing maybe

Is the global tab there when you go into options?

Certainly does Robert. To fix the background/foreground syncing problems I rendered the whole thing all at once and his head went all jiggly again. But I saved over those frames with the finished ones. It's not a huge deal I just thought you guys would get a giggle out of it.

It's the first time it's ever happened to me and only happened at that one particular spot. but it's the same choreography and same instance of Tech for the entire scene. I double checked the timeline for the head bone and it's keyed at one position at the start of the cycle and turned slightly at the end of the cycle (Because he's looking at Game as he walks over). When I rendered that segment with A:M's built in render system it renders fine. But Like I said loading that exact same file into Net Render caused his head to practically shake off his shoulders. In Fact I couldn't wait to show you guys. If you're drinking anything I suggest putting it down lest you snort it through your nose. shake_what_your_designer_gave_ya.mov On the right we have the correct render and on the left we have Tech looking like he's not had his cocaine in a while

That looks mint Gene. Is that all A:M or Some After Effects?

definitely wasted Rodney. After I'm done with the Christmas ep I'm gonna post Netrender's interpretation of the segment of animation I'm talking about. It's a seemingly simple shot of Tech walking over to Game. But even though his head bone was not animated or set to be a dynamic constraint. Netrender decided to move the bone at random anyway and it looks like Tech has Parkinson's disease. But in my experience, the easiest way to get fast render times is to avoid particle hair wherever possible. Unless you have your own render farm that can do a whole whack of frames all at once. My i5 processor only has 4 cores and 4 frames every 15 to 20 minutes on a render longer than a few seconds takes forrrrrrrever to finish.

But also be mindful that if you change something in the choreography (say move the camera later on in the timeline) in between rendering the foreground and the background. That those changes don't have an unforeseen impact on the earlier section. I lost a whole bunch of time earlier in the project when I rendered the characters and the background/foreground independently. Did some more work on a later segment thinking the earlier part was done with. Discovered an issue in the earlier segment and then the re-render didn't match up properly. Sorry if that is a bit hard to follow.

Thanks man, but I think the transfer times would be too huge. But seriously thanks for the offer and thanks to everyone who's thrown in their help. I think this time I'm just gonna have to take it on the chin and start working on the Christmas episode earlier next year. Lol although I thought mid-October would be plenty of time. Next year - August

they ought to be there but you could save a render Preset from the A:M render panel and use that in Netrender. tried that Robert. It loaded the entire preset except the image format. 32bit works fine, I think it's an issue with my PC and the 64bit netrender because no version of 64bit netrender has worked on this machine (same no format option glitch) c'est la vi

Oh and while I'm thinking, does anyone know why 64bit netrender doesn't give me the option to choose an image format? where the drop down menu should say Targa, PNG, Jpeg etc. It's just blank. Everything else is there, range resolution etc. But there're no format options so It won't work

thanks for the help guys. It's the hair that's killing me. The frames render pretty quickly without it. I'm already rendering everything at half resolution (640 x 360) to save time.

Guys I need some advice. I've got 2395 frames that need rendering by the end of 2morro. They're taking between 6 and 12 minutes to render per frame and that works out to roughly 5 days. I wanna know if there's a way I could make the process faster. If for instance I stop the render re-open the project and bake the particles will that speed things up enough to get this done and will the baking take forever. Any thoughts on how I could get this done would be greatly appreciated. I don't wanna disappoint any fans I have by not having a Christmas episode and I know I could get it done for christmas eve if I could get the rendering finished by Sunday morning

Hey guys, just wanted to show you the first rendered 7 seconds of the Christmas special. No background music or ambient sound yet but just thought you might like to see it. Oh and there'll be a backdrop outside I'm rendering that separately. It's rendered out at a lower bitrate and half res to keep the file size down for the forum. in_flew_game.mov

Thanks Nancy! I'd like to make a couple of different ones for variation like you suggested. It's all a matter of time really, Last years Christmas special didn't get posted until Christmas Eve (Which is about as close as you can cut it) and I had to make a ton of sacrifices with the story. I'm hoping this years effort will be a lot more solid and get people pumped up for the new year.

Thanks Robert and hello again to all. 2 posts in 2 days it must Christmas lol. This probably isn't new or exciting for the more experienced forum members but I like how this turned out so I figured I'd share it. You might remember I asked a while back about making a decal visible while making the geometry invisible and thanks to Nancy I learned about transparency maps. Anyway the reason I asked was because I wanted to test an idea to make some simple trees for this years Christmas special. There's gonna be a fly-through of a wooded area on the way to the cabin and I didn't want to make a bunch of geometry heavy trees that would take ages to render. Instead I made a series of rectangles that over lapped as seen in the screen grab below. Each rectangle had the same tree decal applied consisting of a colour, bump and transparency map. When these render they make a nice looking tree that's not flat from any angle. It's obviously not a replacement for a fully 3d tree but they render quickly and I think the effect is pretty solid

Hey guys it's been a while. Been busy making stuff and re-branding a bunch of stuff. Anyway I figured I'd post a couple of bits I've been working on for this years Christmas special. Check out Santa, my tree and the updated Gaming retreat.

Very interesting concept Rodney. Does this use more or less processing power than particle hair. If there's on thing I hate about particle hair is that it bogs down my computer when it's turned on.