[anyone know if "vue" can work w/A:M]

Ok, i own both proggys and i work with em on a regular base. Exept of exporting/importing models, there is no way to work directly together with both apps. But since both progs do support depth, fog and alpha channels when rendering, you can make up your senes by separating the things, each program works best with (will say do your characters in AM and do the landscapes and BGs with Vue), and compose the elements afterwards in AM using Layers etc. I did this more than once, and i am quite happy with the results. But be warned, Rendertimes of Vue are huge ... what did i say ... they are MONSTROUS ... especially if you are using Vue 5 with them "global illumination" gizmos turned on ...

Hope this helps!

Heiner

[Comic Character]

Hey, really cool charakter , what i am missing a bit is that wild hair which he has in the comics ... waaaay cool ... Franquin would have loved it for sure. What i like best is him (Gaston) playing on his selfmade instrument ... here in Germany it is called "Brontosaurophon" ...

Go ahead, keep up the good work!

Heiner

[Naming TGA-series render output]

Hey, you are right, i just tryed it ...

..dam

supid stupid me

... did it wrong all the time hrnng!!!

So much for that feature request :-)

Heiner

[Naming TGA-series render output]

As far as i know, i tell am to render a sequence and give it the name "Name_", then am produces a series like this:

 

Name_1

Name_2

Name_3

Name_4

Name_5

Name_6

Name_7

Name_8

Name_9

Name_10

Name_11

 

Cheers ,

Heiner

[Naming TGA-series render output]

Hi there,

 

just a little thought for a future version of AM: I would love to have the option to let AM know , how a series of rendered tga files is going to be named, or better, counted. Currently (as far as i know) AM names the files

 

one digit: name_1

two digits: name_11

three digits: name_111

 

I really would love to see a option, which enables AM to use names like this:

 

one digit: name_0001

two digits: name_0011

three digits: name_0111

 

This is just because i encountered quite some problems with the current solution, which some apps dont compute to well. And i think (just the humble opinion of a stupid non programmer) that it should be easy enough to implement an option, which gives you, what I described. What do you think?

 

Heiner

[V11.0p Crowd Flocking]

Hi,

i also just had some trouble with crowd flocks. I had multiples in my scene and only one draws. Make sure that you have turned on draw particles fur, if not, not even the one is drawn.

Anyway ... if it is a bug, the good guy at hash are allready on it :-)

Heiner

[What are layers used for]

Ok, Layers are the digital equivalent to a xeroplan camera (or however this thing developed by Disney in the thirties was called). It enables you to mix images. Imagine, you have a scene with background, midfield and foreground. Foreground is a hill, midfield some trees left and right of the scene and the background is a complete landscape with a city. To do this scene coplete in one go would be a nightmare in terms of patchcount and rendertime as well.

What you can do, is to split this scene in three parts, which you can handle seperateley. Do the BG as one picture, the same with the midfield and the foreground. Now you create a new scene, set the camera to orthagonal projection, add thee layers, and put the three images you have made onto these layers. Take care that transparent areas are really transparent, and you are ready to go. You can scale layers, use effects on them and you can do really a lot more.

It is a powerful feature, which in my opinion makes a programm like adobe after effects obsolete. Btw, you even van use films on a layer ...

All this is reffered to V11.0 ...

Hope this helps

Heiner

[Problems with Flocks]

Hi there,

i am still working on my ice sports arena and i have a couple of skater skating on the ice. I made it using flocks with a crowd setting. I have four different crowds, they are all following the same spline (translate to path constraint).

Three of these crowd systems working fine, but one ist not doing what i want. Instead of using the assigned charakter, turning it into a crowd and using the assigned action, it displays the initial charakter with the initial pose ... :-(

Has anybody something like an workaround for this?

Thanks

Heiner

[Ice Sports Arena]

Hi folks,

 

thanks for the input, it gave me quite some ideas where i make my mistakes. In fact i am using "real volumetrics", not only geometry which simulates the volumetrics. Hi knbits, that theather of yours is quite cool, and it gives me the feeling, that the image which i have in my mind can be archived with A:M (i never had real doubts about this, but sometimes one gets unsure).

I guess the trick lies within the balance of Light strength, fall off, Quality, brightness and contrast.

Thanks all!

Heiner

[Ice Sports Arena]

Here is a version without volumetric lightning, but with some bloom after effect added.

[Ice Sports Arena]

Hi there,

this is a project i am working on, it is for a little comercial, which should go into the local movie theathers. As you can see, the volumetric lightning is really out of controll, and till now, i dont have a clue, how to arcive the desired effect. Any suggestions on the volumetric settings?

Thanks

Heiner

[First model in A:M]

Nice, good feeling for anatomy. If this is your first model, you are going to have abright future :-)

[Got an offer to sell my Fish]

Hi, I thought, that something like this happend. In that case i would include a reasonable amount of time for the developing of the character include in the fee.

Anyway,

what i learned the hard way is, that everybody likes your art, but when it is paying time, everybody is gone :-)

Cheers,

Heiner

[Got an offer to sell my Fish]

Hi there,

wanna give my 5cent on this, whit some restrictions, since i am sitting in Germany, i face a different situation. But some basic thoughts about the whole thing may also apply on your situation.

First of all, you should check/calculate how much real work went into the fish, and how much learnig. I had a look on the picture and as an experienced modeller/animator you never need 9 month to do such a thing. And i think, the interested client wants to buy the image, and dont want to pay your education.

 

Then you should evaluate the client and the website, the image is used on. Is it a big client, a big website? Will it be a good advertisement for you to have your Work on this site?

 

Then you should consider if there is more work to do, which may give you further contracts in the future.

 

I always try to sell only images, and if they need more images of the caracter, they come back.

 

In general I calculate the fee for my work like this:

 

Cost of Hardware per hour

Cost of software per hour

Cost of your work per hour

Additional cost (rent, furniture, etc)

 

This multiplied by the hours spent working = your fee.

Put tax on top and you know what to write on the invoice.

 

To calculate your cost of hardware (software etc) per hour, i add up the real cost, calculate it on an 2Years cycle, and break it down to a cost per hour. Dont forget to include idle periods, where on payed work is to be done (no contracts). I calculate about 20% to 25% percent idle time.

As i said, you need to adopt this scenario to your situation, but i think it should give enough hints how to proceed ...

Hope this helps,

Cheers

Heiner

[Doing a bunch of skaters on ice]

Hi there,

for my current project, i am doing a stadion for icehockey. In the animation my client wants to have some skater sliding around on the ice. Would it be possible to do this with a single figure some skate actions and flocking? I want them to stay on the ground (of course :-)) and inside the boundarys of the ice field ...

Thanks,

Heiner

[AM as tool for 3D game design]

Hi there,

During the last couple of month i did a lot of work designing characters and scenarios which are going to be used in a realtime 3d app (Dark Basic in that case).

During that work, i has some ideas for features which i miss in A:M, and which i would like to point out.

1.

In my opinion AM is one of the best LowPoly Modellers out there. The only thing which i miss, is an option to declare a 4 point patch to be NO patch. I made a spider, and the legs of the spider are basicly made up by a tube which has 4 points on the outer rim. After exporting the modell i always geht polygons sitting "in" the leg.

2.

I would love to have the feature to set up a scene, apply some lightning, and the after the render have the option to export the applied textures with an additional lightmap, which simulates shadows, highlights and so on on the texture.

Ok ...

thats all,

just some suggestions followed by the question, if there are some tricks, workarounds to archive/overcome these things ...

 

Cheers

Heiner

[Marcel Bricman aka ZPiDER is back]

Good to see that you made it trough the hard times, and even better to see you back here!

[Using "Orient like Constraint"]

Ok, after long years of beeing mostly a hobbyist, now i am working on my fist AD which is going to be shown in movie theathers ... it is sooooo coooool man, and without the help of this forum .... you know what i wanna say :-)

Ok, it is not finished yet, and I have to figure out some problems till then ... and the one i am chewing on now is: how can i make a "orient like" constraint blend smoothly from 0% to 100%? At the moment all i get is a transition from 0 to 100 from one frame to the next ....

What I want to do is, have a object fly to the camera, and point exactly towards the camera. The object i covered with a decal, which contains the content, my client wants to see in his ADspot ....

Thanks for helpin me out!

Cheers Heiner

[Appearing Objects]

Make something appear in the middle of an animation ...

hmmm ... i would say, it depends on the objekt you are working with.

For example, that laser blast, i would make as an seperate objekt with one bone. A tube. with a pose, which is quite small at 0% (close to the Bone), really long at 50 (expanding in one direction away from the bone), and again quite small at 100% (this time away from the bone).

Then, i would constrain this to the barrel of the laser gun (and hide it inside the barrel) and use the pose slider. This not only helps to make the beam appear, it also makes it possible to have the beam "fly away" from the gun.

Hope this helps ...

Heiner

[Using Smartskin]

Thanks for the input so far, but it is not wat i was looking for. I will try to clearyfi my problem a bit more:

 

To use the setup machine the first step is to implement a "Basic Bones Rigg" then you add fanbones, then you add your personal constraints, which are most of the time related to the fanbones, not to the charakter rigg (these constraints are applied by TSM). After doing basic bones, fanbones and the personal constraints, i apply the smartskin (no problem to figure out how to do it).

After i did this, i save the model, open it in TSM and TSM applies the Anzovin-Rigg-Setup and saves a copy of the model.

When i now import this new model and try to animate it, i receive the "circular constraint detected error".

BTW i applie the smartskin in the modeling window in bones mode ...

Hope this describes my problems more clearly

Thanks

Heiner

[Using Smartskin]

Hello there,

I know, this has been asked a zillion times before, but i f search for "Smartskin", i do not get the desired result. Therefore i ask the question again, sureley someone can answer it, or point me to a thread, where this has been discussed before.

Ok ...

... I am using Anzovins setup machine, and I want to do some smartskinning on my model after I implemented the basic bones and BFORE I apply the setupmachine rigg/constraints. In the end, i get a circular constraint detected error :-( Doh ... how may I avoid this / how do i apply the smartskins so that they do work as desired?

By the way; i am using am 11 and fanbones.

Thanks for helping!

Heiner

[Dragonfly soft glow]

Hi,

to do some bloom, add a post effect to your camera in the coreography, and make it a "Bloom", adjust setting and here ya go!

Really nice effects possible, which can give your images something, which in my opinion is best described as a David Hamilton-Look.

Cheers

Heiner

[Creating a character for a game]

Hmmm, i was thinking about an similar workflow in the past. As far as i know, the x fomat is quite helpful, but at the same time it seems to be quite complicated with a lot of different options within the file.

Characterstudio may be able to import bvh data from AM. There is also a prog which is called Lifeforms. Based by there featurelist you can open bvh data and resave it as max or charakterstudio animation file.

I have not tryed the first way, and when i tryed the second solution, i received a lot of crashes coming from lifeforms.

 

Cheers ...

Heiner

[Toon rendering test]

"Little Space Cop rides again".

Here i another still coming out of one of my animations with this character. At the moment i am quite happy with the shading of the charakter, but i am still not able to get some real shadows into the scene ... doh!

How do you like him?

Heiner

[Toon rendering test]

Here one more pic, on which you see more of my "Little Space Cop" character. I am working on him quite a while now, and stll, there is a lot of work to do, but hey, they did not build rome in one day, or did they?

Cheers Heiner