TheToadStool

Matt, your wisdom is invaluable! I've been messing with that hair all week and am planning on redoing the hair entirely now that I possess more experience, etc. I used the SPLITPATCH plug-in which is very helpful but also sometimes makes the model unworkable and has to be replaced with the mesh of an earlier model. This is a very wonderful plug-in but I'm guessing it can cause problems in the geometry, perhaps if the patches become too small. Not sure, exactly. My model has a very dense invisible face Dam which the hair still penetrates, etc. I split the dam mesh thinking that the more dense it is, the more resistant it might be to penetrating hair. Not necessarily the case. I am very excited to start model #2 for this project so I can utilize some of the other techniques you describe involving more controllable hair. Hair is a powerful tool and I hope to master it. We shall see ! -Adam

Hi folks, I bet there is a completely obvious solution to this but I can't seem to figure it out. I wanted to swing the camera around a model character and in a process of manipulating the camera at several second intervals, I start getting a 'brick wall' in the camera flow. What did I do to start getting this issue that ultimately causes the camera to jerk and interrupts it's smooth flow? thanks ! -Adam

Hi folks, I've been working a lot with hair lately. I am using a tutorial that Matt made called AMhair.pdf (2010). I wanted your particular look for this character which I discovered was a process of letting hair fall down and do its thing. I have been tweaking this and still can't get the hair to avoid penetrating the geometry100% but have gotten pretty dern close. I like to stress the model out in the testing process so here she is at the beach with a lot of wind on her. I am still working on having the hair part to the degree that you can see her face. Perhaps in a less windy world. I'm not going to lie, hair has been a struggle. Anyhow, thanks for that tutorial, Matt. I like your models and you have done great things with hair. This discussion was originally that hair is not being affected by forces in v18. I was having some problems with 'hair' made of images not moving by forces but I believe that this is user error. Anyway, I'd be interested to know more and hopefully it's easily resolved. thanks, -Adam Ruby_Hair_test.mov

Hey I use Mac too and I can tell you that .jpgs do not work. They might import. They might allow you to decal, rotoscope, etc. But you will crash in rendering unless you convert them to .tga or .png. Also, you will discover that rotoscopes barely work in any format and layers do not present themselves unless rendered. There are known graphics issues with mac and I believe somewhere I read that A:M prefers .tga. I am building some models now and my rotoscope images are entirely unreliable regardless of .jpg or .tga which sucks. If you have any other Mac questions, please let me know. I just may have wrestled with it, maybe not. I think overall, A:M works best on PC but the mac version ain't shabby. I use it constantly and love it . -Adam

Everybody who enters this contest has 72 hours to make a horror movie. The filming process occurs during a marathon weekend in October each year (here in Portland). The following Halloween weekend, all of the movies are shown at a local theater and I just made an introduction film (took way more than 72 hours) to kick off the whole evening, and hopefully it gives the festival something of a corporate brand . It's cool getting to see a rendered animation on the big screen.

Hey thanks, Rodney ! sorry I was using the Youtube embed feature which I guess short circuits the forum maybe.... anyhow, I like promoting A:M with finished films. Thanks for re-posting -Adam

That is a beautiful thing !

this is all very interesting! I appreciate the discussion about how to make creative surfaces. Combination is the key. Good Job, Jeff !

hey that's really cool !

pretty cool. I love compositing. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you all so much, by the way. I've been having different problems with this, but it may be by my own doing. I was just rendering a model in multi-pass and progressively the hair would disappear. I think it's fixed now. thanks again, Adam

Hi! I just thought I'd share a project I've been working on that combines A:M techniques with Final Cut Pro. This was a great opportunity to experiment with Animation Master with an "anything goes" attitude! A very liberating experience but even more liberating to have it completed. -Adam Video: https://youtu.be/iYShjTEmg8k

Hi this is probably a dumb question, but how do I make the geometry of a hair emitter render as invisible while the hair still shows through? I thought maybe the transparency of the geometry could be set to 100% and that wouldn't affect the hair emitter. Upon a multi-pass rendering, the hair disappears. I feel like there is a simple answer to this... This model was made before I discovered the treez plug-in, by the way... Adam

I recently contacted Barry Zundel about his A:M tutorials and he said that he has just posted them online for all users, free free free !!!! I am very excited about these. He gave me permission to post this on the Forum, so here it is: http://barryzundel.blogspot.com/p/animationmaster-2005-tutorials.html thanks, Adam http://www.totallypunk.com http://www.secedefromtheunion.com

I love you guys. thanks! -Adam

Hey! Can someone direct me to a good water tutorial that was made after 2001? For some reason I cannot make any of the steps of this process happen at all. I have been going off of the tutorial on the bonus disc (http://www.babbagepatch.com/water.htm) and I'm not sure if the author is skipping over valuable information, or if I'm just an idiot. The first phase of this process is to make a model with a Turbulence Combiner that can be animated in an action (and thus define water depth) on the Y and Z axis that will cause a wave material. I cannot get these basics to work and I'm starting to get really frustrated. I've also been comparing my work with the .prj file accompanying this tutorial and still nothing. The included project doesn't animate anyway but it does have a good water bit map . I really want to learn this, any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks, Adam

Hi, I've been wanting to ask about this for some time now... Every time I attempt to apply a decal to a model, I get fragments of other jpegs and whatnot that appear as the decal in A:M. I can't make accurate decal applications as a result. It's really weird. It has always been the case and I've had to do all sorts of voodoo to correctly apply a decal. Is A:M designed to work best with a PC? I have those continued problems like not being able to open files unless I switch to the finder and click on some random file in order to go back to A:M and use the open file commands. I am just wondering, in this case, if there is a way to get the decals to appear correctly and no, it is not a matte of hitting command-D. This is a bug. thanks, Adam

the gravedigger is all A:M the "pervert" is my friend, Dylan. If the gravedigger looks as though it may be an actual puppet then... score ! adam

Oh, I just really look forward to post something finished-esque on this site. adam http://www.totallypunk.com

Hey community peers, I am excited to announce that I have officially finished a video that showcases my rudimentary A:M skills! I have, in the past, been pretty good at doing green screen/chroma key type stuff here at home but then I bought A:M and used this video I was already working as an inspiration for learning and applying some of the basic techniques from the Art of A:M and technical manuals. Here are the results of my last several months of exploration with A:M and hopefully the process is getting stream-lined and there will be more worlds of imagery coming soon! -Adam gomads@gmail.com class M Planets: "Timepiece" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhoTKl0oy0Q

As per Mac users, A lot of my confusion is Mac related. I do not have the little application toolbar to 'enable' cores that have gone off-line, BUT the easy solution that I was looking for (instead of constantly re-installing A:M) is to remove the files that are created in the application folder for each core. These files are located in the app folder as ie. "Instance1". If I delete those files and reopen netrender, it opens fresh nodes. This took me a few hours to figure out because I was thinking about the whole problem wrong. The other part of adding additional nodes from remote computers is coming along. A lot of it was Mac networking 101. Go into your sharing system preferences and make various things sharable. I had to mess with this so that my server computer would SEE the other computers. So far, I have an older version of A:M that I no longer use on the remote computer and I opened Rendermessenger remotely. So, (and I am experimenting with this as I go) I was able to have rendermessenger open on the server and I opened it again on the remote computer and I got an error that said the ports weren't in sync and there cannot be two messenger apps open at the same time so I just updated the remote messenger to have the same IP address as the server computer and so far it installed one additional node on the server. I will keep messing with this until it works, but I thought I would contribute some additional mac related info for folks like me that are trying to reinvent the wheel. Thanks so much for all your help and I look forward to sharing some future projects with alls yalls. -adam

By the way, folks. Hello !! I'm really glad to be here and I really appreciate the animation tool and the opportunity to tech out on the new artistic freedom in this community. I just got netrender working by just re-installing A:M all together.... Now, to try and get external machines going... adam http://www.classmplanets.com

Well, so I updated the code in the netrender.scrpt applescript file to show 4 cores. When I boot netrender it gives me that 4 cores detected, you can only use 4 cores and so 4 rendermessengers loaded and one was "off-line". Now is there a difference how the 'server' displays versus the 'slaves'? Should I only be seeing 3 active slaves for a 4 core processor? At some point I though deleting the cores from the slavelist in the bottom window was a good idea (thought it might re-recognize what I have and give me a clean slate) No go on that. Now, I have no slaves and have no idea how to refresh them. How does one trouble-shoot this netrender? How do I get my slaves back and how do I get them "On-line". This is day #3 on this switch over. The good news is that last night I had 3 cores running and managed to render like 25 frames or so over night. Now I've seemed to screw up netrender and can't get it back.... Any advice on how to change off-line to on-line? adam

Hi! I'm trying to avoid posting stupid questions, but I have an inquiry about netrender. I use OS X and just got netrender running. I followed the tutorial http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=a...st&id=61145 which is very informative about adding additional cores from the 2 core default, etc. Applets, all that... very informative. My question is: WHERE is there a document that just states in plain English how to make external machines into nodes and how to have them interact with the main computer? I just bought additional nodes and there is NO satisfactory information on what to do with the master0.lic file that I just purchased. PLEASE tell me that it's so simple and that's why there's no literature about it? I've scoured the forum and I feel like the hours are just flying by and I can't understand why it's so difficult to figure out what to do next. Any help would be greatly appreciated. By the way: in the FAQ link on the subject : http://www.hash.com/faq/index.php?action=a...&artlang=en the link for OS X installation of additional nodes is a dead link. thanks! -Adam