ragtag
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Posts posted by ragtag
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It works with DirectX8, I tried it with Blitz3D with some simple stuff I had made, and it worked fine.
The NVIDIA driver has the option for both the shutter glasses and the red/green glasses. And besides, it worked fine with all the games I tested it with (I think all were DirectX), but not with AM and not with Wings3D.
It is possible that it requiers full screen 3D, and not windowed 3D...I'll need to test that when I get home. It would be cool if I got it working, but it's not like it's a big problem if I don't.Cheers,
Ragnar
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I downloaded the NVIDIA Stereo driver yesterday. What it does is let you make any game (DirectX or OpenGL) into an anaglyphic 3d game (red/blue or red/green glasses), it worked fine with all the games I tried it on. My whole point with the experiment was that I wanted to try and use it with AM, for checking my models...and it didn't seem to have any affect at all on AM. Has anyone tried this and got it working successfully?
In the past I've rendered out anaglyphic images of my models, to get a better idea of their shape, and though it would be very cool to do that in real time. Any ideas?
Cheers,
Ragnar
p.s. If you want to play around with it, do a search on stereo driver on the Nvidia site.
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You can also use Copy Keyframe and Paste Mirrored when flattening in a pose, so you only need to flatten one side of the model, and then just paste the keyframes on to the other side.
I'm working on texturing my character now and had exactly the same concerns. I think I will try and go as far as I can with a clone brush, and if that doesn't do the trick I'll use alpha blending where needed. I put the stitches on the side, and split the arms into top and bottom, to get the best use of the image/space. Once I had the UV layed out I took a screen grab of the UV editor, though it seems like I need to include 1 or 2 extra edge pixels to get it to line up correctly. I also found that the resolution of the real time texture created seems to depend upon the resolution of the texture. I'm currently using 4k textures, which is dead slow on my 733mhz machine, but worth it.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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I've been thinking of getting a Mac some time, but the one thing that has been holding me back is AM on Mac. It's not yet as fast and reliable as on the PC, and only just now came out for OS X.
On thing that is happening on Mac after OS X, is that a lot of previously Linux/Unix based progams are coming on the Mac (both open-source and pay). I think the rate of this is just going to increase, especially for the open-source ones (x11 and both being Unix based, makes porting most Linux apps easy). So we'll see more software on the mac, and a lot of it for free.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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It shouldn't be a big problem. Just render out with an alpha channel. In 3DStudio you could render the elements that go in front of the character, seperately for those that are behind him, to make it easier to composite together.
Here's an excellent tutorial (for 8.5 I think) for combining AM characters with live action. http://www.hash.com/users/ed/tutorials/fpm/fpm.htm Much of the same applies in your case, except it will be easier as you have greater control over output from another 3d package than you do from a live shoot.
antonyw: Nice video. I had never seen that before.
Ragnar
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Actually, I have some kind of bug with the mirror mode in 10.5r. When I disable it and drag select the model, some CPs will be left out (1/3 or so). I need to select something a few times, and then it starts to work correctly again. So usually when I leave mirror mode, I drag select four or five random things, just to be on the safe side.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/ is a neat little tool for compressing video and combining multiple .tga files. (just drag and drop them in there). It's free and fast, though I don't think it can do the sound part for you.
Ragnar
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I think I would skip fixing the model in AM. All you need is a rough representation of the model for animation reference. Then, instead of going to DirectX, go to .bvh and bring that back into Max. As a side note, check that .bvh is working in v11, I didn't get it working in 10.5 recently when I was testing exporting animation to Second Life, and had to go back to 8.5. In 10.5 it only exported a single frame.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Any chance of posting these lectures later on the forum. 8pm EST is 1am GMT and 2am where I live, so I'm likely to miss it.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Nice animation. Just one small thing. The first pebble needs "anticipation". It enters the picture and hits his head in about 1 or 2 frames, and then bounces out of the frame. It's small and hard to spot. You could add some dust or sand falling down before the pebble comes, and maybe increase the pebble size a little. If possible, you should also try and keep it in frame after it hits, maybe by having the character react by moving his head down when hit (so you get more space for the pebble).
Other than that. Excellent animation.
Ragnar
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Has the next quarter animation topic been announced?
Ragnar
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Here is a tool for genertating normal maps by comparing a low and high resolution model. http://www.soclab.bth.se/practices/orb.html The output from this could be used either to create bump maps or to create displacment maps. In theory you could write a plug-in to do the same in AM, though I'm not sure if the SDK supports all the stuff you would need (where on a texture is a point on the surface, distance between subdivided surfaces at each point and so on).
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Ok...you lost me.
For one AM has displacement maps...at least last time I checked. Though they could be vastly improved. And the trolls in LOTR may have used normal maps, but were rendered with displacement maps (at least when reasonably close to the camera). I think this is all getting confusing.
Here's how I used these different terms:
Bump map: A grayscale map that simulates an uneven surface by adjusting the angles of the normals at render time. The difference in value is used to determine the angle.
Normal map: Essentially the same as a bump map, but it uses color to indicate the direction of the normals. The advantage of this is that the normals can be at a 90 degree angle (or more) to the actual surface of the model.
Displacement map: A model that has the actual geometry modified at rendertime by an image. If the software supported it, I believe the picture could be either a black and white image (like the one used for a bump map) or a color image (like the one used for a normal map).
As far as I know there are two ways to render displacement map.
One is to tesselate the model (turn it into a higher resolution polygon model) and move the CVs of this higher resolution model in or out based on the image. This is generally slow and memory intensive, and if you want to get it very smooth you need a very high tesselation (AM doesn't support setting tesselation by hand, so you need to increase the actual density of the model).
The other is using sub-pixel displacement. This has something to do with shifting the pixels in the direction of the normals at render time, but I must honestly say I don't fully understand how it works. Sub-pixel displacement is great as it doesn't requier tesselation, has a resolution higher than the pixels in the final image (like subdividing the model so each poly would cover less than 1 pixel in the final image), renders much faster and uses less RAM. A single polygon with a procedural ocean material on it, can become a detailed ocean surface with sub-pixel displacement. It's better than popcorn.
--------- pause to breathe --------------
I don't see that normal maps will add a lot for most AM users. For one, they are terribly difficult to create and almost impossible to make by hand. Your only option would be to either model a very high resolution model with all the details and a low one, and using one of the tools available to generate a normal map from this (you could generate a bump map the same way). Or to use something like Z-Brush. All the tools for this are currently poly based, so it will be problematic (not impossible thought) getting it back into AM.
And secondly, they are only slightly better than the bump maps we have in AM as is.
Improvements in displacement maps on the other hand would be great. The easiest way to improve them, is to give us some kind of control over tesselation. So that we can specify that the group or the area covered by the displacement map should tesselate to more polygons at render time. Saving us from adding more detail to the model at the cost of an increase in rendertime and RAM usage. It should definately be an advanced feature though.
The hard way would be to actually add sub-pixel displacement maps to the AM renderer. That would just be brilliant!
Sorry for the rant....cheers,
Ragnar
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My first thought, and wild guess, was that you're using too much RAM, if AM has to start disc swapping during rendering the rendertime will severly increase. Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and open the Taskmanager (or the Activity Monitor on OS X) and check. The CPU usuage will also go down to a trickle, as the CPU doesn't have much data to churn on.
The solution to this is to scale the images down or get more RAM. You could also possibly render in passes, to limit the amount of textures rendered each time.
Other than that, it's anybodys guess.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Check out http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/index.htm
I haven't tried exporting the flowers created with it to AM, but it should be possible. If not, you could pre-render them and use them as stencils on patches in the background.
Either way. It's fun to play with and they've just made it free.
Ragnar
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I'm going to venture a guess here, as I have no idea if either of these methods works...but they should.
You should be able to do this with expressions. Maybe setting the bone to Euler interpolation first, and then do an expressions where 1 bones rotatation equals another. Since I don't know anything about expressions in AM, I'm not much more help here.
Possibly, you could orient constrain it and then apply rotation limits on the bone you only want to follow the other in a certain axis. Don't know if this works either, but it should.
Finally, you could simply set up a relationship (pose or smart skin). A bone can drive any other bones rotation. This may be the easiest way to do it.
Disclaimer: I haven't tested any of these methods, but I just ass-u-me they work.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Very nice model, love the simple cartoony style.
Once you're finished with him you should use him as your avatar...your current one freaks me out.
Ragnar
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We had a discussion about depth of field and focal length in AM a while back. It can be found here http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...hl=focal+length
It seems AM uses a horizontal aperture of 35mm. I think the formulas for calculating what you need are in that thread. Now all you need to know is the horizontal aperture of you video camera, which most likely is the width of the CCD (it could possibly be different). I couldn't find you camera on the Panasonic site (the search function returned an air-condition system
), but this one http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/s...gnoreRedirect=1 has a 1/4" CCD.Then check out this page http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Optical/ especially the two focal length and the depth of field one.
I'm hungry and need some sleep, so I'll leave it at that...but I hope at least this can guide you in the right direction.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Jake: It's 10.0n and you can get it at [url="ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/"]ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/[/url] click the windows or mac directory, and then the year. Don't remember exactly what AM10n is, was it AM2003? Yes, please Arthur put it back up, I'm interested in taking a look at it. Can this viewer be used as a standalone viewer for AM models, and can it be distributed to people who don't have AM if you want to show them your models? Ragnar
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You might want to check out the Torque engine at www.garagegames.com or Blitz3D www.blitz3d.com Both are inexpensive and could be used to create cool educational titles. In addition to that you could look at www.genesis3d.com (I think someone made an exporter for this engine). You should also check out AMxTex at www.obsidiangames.com , which is a .X exporter for AM. And something like Ultimate Unwrap 3D http://www.unwrap3d.com/ for converting those .X files to all kinds of different formats.
You should also definately check out http://www.arcticpigs.com/ Though I don't know how interactive you can make it, or actually how much interactivity you need for your project.
Cheers,
Ragnar
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This is probably one of the most specialized tutorials around. But if you play Second Life, this is a tutorial to how to create customized animation for it in AM8.5.
http://www.ragtag.net/xternal/AMtoSL/
Cheers,
Ragnar
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I'll just be anal and reply to my own post. After some experimenting and going back to AM8.5l. I found that exporting BVH from 8.5l works, and doing the same in 10.5r or 10n does not. It exports the hierarchy, but only 1 frame of animation. Unfortunately the bone format is totally different in 10.5 from 8.5, so I'll have to rebuild the skeleton in 8.5 to use it there. My question is, is BVH export working in v11, or should I send a bug report and hope they fix it before I upgrade?
Cheers,
Ragnar
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Hi,
Here http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai...=books&n=507846 is a book called Producing Animation. It contains lots of good information about the costs and proecess of making animation (it's more 2d specific, but still talks about 3d). Though I do think the book is horrible in the way it talks about working with ideas, and how everything is just about the money. It gives me the creeps. Like the only goal with making animation is to earn money, I might as well be making jock-straps.
That said, I think most of project planing and financial info in there is sound.
Ragnar
ARGH!!!
in (2003-2004)
Posted
I have to agree with Martin here. I use Maya at work and AM at home, so maybe I can give it a shot at explaining the differences (hope this isn't against the forum rules...it probably is).
Firstly, AM bones can be manipulated with IK controls, while having keys saved as FK. This is brilliant and is THE main thing that puts AM bones ahead of the rest! It lets you pose the character quickly with IK while still getting nice curved FK interpolation. In addition, you can lock a bone so that it's not included in the IK. Maya has nothing like this, and I've yet to find a way to set up anything like it there. Maya also had trouble with quaternion interpolation, which is a requierment for a system like this to work (haven't checked the latest version to verify this).
Secondly, AM has bones as opposed to Maya's joints. I guess this comes down to personal preference, but in Maya you need two joints to create a bone. This just meanst a more messy Outliner (Project Workspace), and more to make sure is working correctly. It also impossible to tell how a single joint is oriented by just looking at it in Maya.
Thridly, Maya joints have three numbers to define their rotation (Rotate, Rotate Axis and Joint Orient), which has some advantages, but mostly just confuses people and gets in the way. The same can usually be achieved by just using two joints/bones.
I didn't see your original post nemesis_256 or what you were suggesting, but I'm quite happy with the bones the way they currently are in AM. What would be nice to have is some kind of iconic selection system. A lot of people animating with Maya like to use curves to select the controls for a character, so either curves or small bitmap icons attached to bones and controls in the 3d viewport to make selection easier would be very nice...or just color coding of the bones in action/choreogrophy.
Cheers,
Ragnar
edit: Three post popped up while I was typing this one... :-)