nemyax

Looks like Hash Inc's activation server is down. Try emailing the host ID to them.

I'd love to compare them, but, needless to say, I haven't touched either. From the promotional videos and images it looks like the UI design is different (BUF's stuff is reminiscent of the old Softimage 3D).

Rodney It appears that BUF Compagnie and R&H aren't (weren't) affiliated. Their paths crossed, of course, as they worked on shots for the same titles, but the studios have separate histories. Why did you mention R&H? Did you mean it became the "last straw" for BUF?

RenderMan? Arnold? Clarisse?

For this part, you're probably best off using the existing export path through MDD. If you want to keep the curvature you have in your patch model, you have to give it a couple of subdivisions to apply the shape, so that the subsequent subdivision by the external renderer doesn't unexpectedly shave the model. However, A:M's pre-export patch subdivision could use some improvement, as Malo suggests above.

If the specifications for A:M's proprietary formats (which are plain text anyway) were made publicly available, that would be a huge step towards problem-free data interchange. That's the least Hash Inc. could do, and it wouldn't even cost them anything in development. This is somewhat related to Rodney's question elsewhere: The company isn't giving their specs away, so why should anyone bother? Newtek document their formats, and as a result they are popular and well-supported.

Fuchur Do you mean reimporting them as hooks again? This would require agreeing upon a convention for what kind of polygon to treat as "hooked". For example, you might want to interpret the topology below as a patch with 3 hooks on one side. Looks easy enough. But it's always going to be ambiguous. If you make the topology a tiny bit more interesting, it becomes unclear which way a hook should go. See the selected point: I don't think you can support hooks using strictly topological cues.

That's true, but you get more "poles" close together that way.

For some reason, "alter Meister" became plural. Fuchur So which is it in the article? The dino or the master? =)

If you have to subdivide them, you may as well give them the regular Catmull–Clark treatment: It's ugly, but at least it's consistent and expected.

These models aren't normally supposed to be animatable. They are mainly for displacement map generation and material design. Do you mean polygonal export? Styler implemented it recently in his 3D Coat link without much trouble. I believe he even used an external FBX library.

Wrong. Firstly, the smoothness is provided by the subdivision algorithm. Secondly, you have the option of using a very lightweight deformation proxy mesh, which drives the deformations of the denser mesh like a lattice, and you only need to weight a handful of verts. Thirdly, a good spline model—I don't mean the likes of "Thom", but the really good stuff on display in the gallery and in this forum—is about as detailed as its polygonal counterparts would be. Note: I'm assuming the case in point is prerendered animation, not real-time as in games. If it's animation for modern games, you are in the same kind of trouble in A:M—direct manipulation of dense geometry. The "lots and lots of polygons" prejudice is common in this community, probably stemming from this bit of misinformation (and others like it) in the reference: It reads like a 70's Pravda article. These things may have been somewhat true in 1995, but today it's utter FUD. A non-spline modeller in A:M will never happen, but if it did, this would be a waste of effort. Excellent polygonal modellers are a dime a dozen these days. Off the top of my head, at least four of them are free (Blender, Wings, Softimage Mod Tool, VoidWorld). And it's entirely possible to bring a polygonal model into A:M. They never will, and any interchange would involve pretending that spline models are polygonal models and exporting them accordingly. And if you are animating for games, for example, you have no use for spline output anyway.

I don't agree that's the problem. Polygons are easily represented by patches, but not the other way around. Crank the geometry resolution in the viewport all the way down, and you'll have polygons. In other words, polygons can be derived losslessly from spline and patch data, but the reverse is not true because of hooks and bias handles. It's the lack of interchange format support that's really at the heart of the interaction issues.

It's actually the same paper. And now we can see its subject matter in action.

Here's an awesome sketch-based retopology software prototype: http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/sketch-retopo/ You can download it here: http://igl.ethz.ch/projects/sketch-retopo/sketch-retopo-license.html Other stuff from the same blokes: http://igl.ethz.ch/code/

Yep. The AppDB rating for A:M was never higher than "Silver", which is a polite way of saying "barely usable".

This movie needs an AT-AT with an udder.

Ah, so Voodoo is going to be released as Bstudio.

You don't. There's no support for animation interchange formats (FBX or Collada). There's some support for BVH, which handles bone motions, and you can export geometry separately. You'd have to rebuild your work in Blender piece by piece if you took that route. You could also export posed geometry (one file per frame), but you probably don't want to go on that adventure. Do it all in A:M.

Don't be too quick to give those away... you may want to use A:M with Blender later. Seconded. As a 2D animator, you may want to check out Blender's Grease Pencil toolset. It's an animated painted 2D overlay for the viewport; you can use it for annotations, in-view storyboarding and even full-blown 2D animation (with 3D effects if necessary). Example: vimeo.com/113610809

Messiah's development has halted, and there are complaints from people who have have paid pmG and got nothing for their money. The company has turned into a hoax, and I don't think you're able to buy their software any more.

What do you mean? I paid my $79 last summer. Didn't make my life harder or easier. There's a set of tutorials and a UI reference: http://www.hash.com/manuals-24-en

stefff285 Animation:Master has very powerful nonlinear animation tools in its choreography mode. Blender used to lag far behind in this department, but in the latest release it actually made a huge leap forward, and the coming version (2.75) builds on that further. Blender's nonlinear animation editor is now roughly on a par with A:M's choreography feature-wise (but of course the implementations are totally different). So if lack of decent animation layering/mixing tools has been keeping you away from Blender, that's no longer the case. A:M's neat pose system has no counterpart in Blender, but you can emulate it with the same NLA tools, and that would actually be more reliable, because poses don't mix too well with direct manipulation of curves. Regarding interoperability, A:M really expects you to go all in and doesn't happily act as part of a foreign pipeline, whereas Blender imports and exports a load of formats and you only need to know a smattering of Python to implement support for more. To summarise, I'd say go Blender and keep your A:M 2006 around for specialised uses.

Animation Desk Studios would be more appropriate =)

Some practical 3D sketching techniques and heavy-duty surfacing (including a complete violin modelling session): vimeo.com/26339130 The video is rather long, but it's content-rich.