nemyax

Funny, the SDK section is pretty high on the first list.

The only thing that's lost in an A:M→Blender→A:M round trip is hooks (they turn into CPs). Otherwise it's the same geometry. However, if you're already working with that pipeline, you'd be better off using Blender's built-in 3D painter instead of the Microsoft toy.

There's a weird transition here:

Is 18.0p+ going to be the last update for 18.0 or might there be more?

It's a plugin in the shortcut menu for an action. It seems to work well, but unfortunately it doesn't have bone orientation adjustment options. And it silently replaces spaces by underscores in names. Both of these things need to be accounted for on the receiving end.

Heh, I didn't know there was one. Thanks for tipping me off. If it produces WYSIWYG motions, then that's all I need.

John Bigboote I want this for a Blender importer that applies animation curves (transformed from A:M animation splines) to bones. Mesh deformations are a different story. With the baking feature being in the state it's in, I might be better off coding a .bvh exporter for A:M.

What's a good (and hassle-free) way to hard-bake an animation? I mean that the result should be the following: All visible transforms from the original animation are recorded to bone channels. All relationships such as IK and constraints are stripped from bones so that only the direct transform animation kicks in. I tried Bake All Actions, but it didn't give me the results I needed. It appears that this command doesn't really bake all relationship-driven motions: if you delete the model's relationships, the "before" and "after" animations are different. I need this "barebones" motion for my action importer. When I import simple FK-only animations, the import results look adequate. When I try to import the output of Bake All Actions, the results are unsatisfactory, but still consistent with what you get in A:M with the relationships nuked. So, is there a way to really really really bake things?

I mean most 3D software can do A:M's stamp thing. You can use that method elsewhere if you're not comfortable with UV unwrapping.

John Bigboote Can't C4D apply projected textures?

Isn't A:M's default bias handle length one-third of the CP-to-CP distance?

I think I've got it. In gamma is the angle between in_handle_vector and (prev_cp_vector - cp_vector). Out gamma is the angle between out_handle_vector and (next_cp_vector - cp_vector). Magnitude is tied to the distance between neighbouring CPs, and 300 (3.0) is the full distance for some reason.

What's a "degree of the axis"?

For a 2D animation spline, A:M stores the bias as gamma and magnitude. What are those values and how do I convert them to a 2D vector? Apparently the gamma is the value of a trigonometric function, but which one?

Yes, I thought as much, thanks. It's weird though that action files present frame numbers as 30-frame chunks plus remainder instead of plain decimal fractions.

I'm finding that in exported .act files a second is always 30 frames, no matter what FPS you set in the project properties. So frame 0 will be exported as 0, 17 as 17 and 54 as 1:24. Is that by design to make actions project-independent?

This topic might have the answers: https://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=47612

Box selection affects all CPs stacked at a point, and click selection affects just one of them.

You'd likely want full transparency even if one instance was 32-bit and the other 64-bit. Couldn't even do much reading in this case =) A lot of software monitors changes to currently-opened files. Your preferred text editor probably does it. Another approach is to use a client–server model where the server manages the data and the clients work with it over a specialised protocol. You may have heard of the Verse protocol, which was an experiment in adapting this client–server stuff to 3D graphics. It didn't catch on though.

I suppose A:M would have to define a common clipboard format for its data so that multiple versions of the program can read and write it. That is not a good idea =)

A pointer is a number that specifies the address of something in memory. When your A:M session ends, any pointer value you saved during the session makes no sense any more.You can always dereference a pointer (meaning, get the thing it points to). Note that the referenced data structure will contain pointers of its own, so you'd need to do some deep dereferencing to gather the data you need. But when you've gathered everything you want, you can save it in any format you please, binary or text-based.

Probably pointers to A:M's data structures.

There's also the Steam edition of Mari which you can use commercially and which is a sight cheaper.

Is there a plugin that cuts through a row of patches with a spline and keeps the decals intact? I'm thinking of writing one, but maybe it already exists.

Thanks a lot for the API fix! Is the SDK updated as well?