Wildsided

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

Cheers Robert. That's got the conveyor working.

Quick question regarding animated decals. I have a 16 frame animation that I've applied to a patch and set length to 1 second. This makes the animation play out over the course of 1 second (obviously). If the choreography is 2 seconds long, the animation plays over the course of the 1st second and then stops. I can set the duration of the animation to 2 seconds but that makes the sequence half speed. What I want to happen is have the animation sequence loop back to frame 1 at the beginning of second 2 but I can't figure out how to do it. Is this doable or do I need to make a longer sequence with repeating frames?

Just realised I never followed up with this. I did end up adding a mouth and it works pretty well. Also ignore the fact she looks a bit sozzled.

To quote a famous London market trader. "Lovely jubbly, innit,"

That seems like a decent work around. Not ideal but better than faffing with multiple renders and compositing.

Progress has been made on the new project. Tech and Dan are now fully modelled and can blink, wink both eyes individually and have a full set of pose controlled phonemes. The girl on the left is the avatar of YouTuber Geminitay who makes videos on a group server called Hermitcraft. She will not be appearing in the new project, I'm using her as an experiment to see how well the mouth I've made will fit into a skin in that style. A lot of female Minecraft skins use this style of having the eyes low down on the head and it doesn't leave much room for a mouth. Not that it matters as Minecraft characters don't usually have mouths. So I am planning on installing a mouth and seeing how it looks in practice.

Lol, sorry John I misunderstood, I thought you meant in real life!

On the topic of what I would like to drive it would be a replica of the Hardy Boys' Van from The 70's Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Mysteries, but it would be a modified custom shell for a Smart Car like the VW Smart Van in the picture only a Smart Vandura (Would have to have the little round bubble window in the back, it's a deal breaker).

Been thinking about possibly making YouTube videos again. If I did they would be Minecraft based. So I took some time and modded Tech into Mineraft. But I also wanted to be able to add in animated cutaways so I have also modelled and Rigged my avatar and Tech within A:M. Minecraft uses a dual layer system for its skins. The outer layer gives more depth to the avatar but only consists of a slightly enlarged duplicate of the inner layer which has no thickness so from it looks odd from some angles. For the models I'll be using in the cutaways I've added thickness to the outer layer to give it depth and consistancy while keeping the overall look of the game.

C'mon John, you know I can't resist a pun and the potential for silliness. Quack Commando, I regret nothing.