Tore

You're right, Mark. Have now tried Chrome, Opera and Explorer, and they load allmost instantly, but nevertheless there is in them all a 1/2-1 second white flash before slides start. The long delay seem to be in my Firefox ver. 31. But anyhow, it would maybe be an idea to change the white background to a black, or to pre cache the slideshow.

So great with the new top slideshow, and a very cool selection of pictures, showing all the different possibilities when using A:M. I'm not al that keen on the text accompayning the pictures though - a bit to clumsy imo, and a bit like some slogan on the local plumbers van ;-) How about just skipping that text? The pictures speaks plenty for themselves! Three further comments: 1. On load the slideshow area shows a blank white for some 15 seconds or so, before the actual pictures start showing. And again when a new slideshow section begins to load the area goes blank again. It would be better to start the page load with one fastloading start picture, displaying while the slideshow sections loads in the background. OR just compose the slideshow of single pictures loading as needed. 2. The white background color on the menu buttons to the left makes too much of a contrast in my opinion. I would propose black buttons with no edge (win 8 style). 3. The third point has for long been a sore one. It has as such nothing to do with the new design, but it would have been so nice if it had been taken hand about when revising the look of the website. Namely that Hash Inc and Animation:Master do not have a consistent logo design. The website alone displays several different designs and even within the same designs different fonts and proportions are used. I am sorry to say, but that signals an unprofesionality that A:M doesn't deserve.

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Thanks Robert! Very nice texture. Will play around with it later. These days we are having a new kitchen built, so things are a bit chaotic. For my way of working though, the dense texture alternativ has some important benefits to it, and hardly any drawbacks. Mainly that when using ordinary polygon structure (peaked splines), models become exchangable with software outside A:M. Thus all problems with UV/texturing incompabilities between A:M and say 3DCoat disappears.

Experimenting with a woodcut look. This test is modeled in Zbrush, then smoothed with their clay/sharp edges algorithm, and remeshed to app. 30k polys and exported. Then imported into A:M (took some time!!) When inside A:M I peaked all splines, thus essentially bypassing A:Ms spline system (I bow my head in shame). When additionally setting the subdivs to the lowest setting, it is possible to get a managable model in A:M. But of course, this is for hard body animation only (which doesn’t bother me). Deforming this model would propably yield some undesirable results. An example of a real world wood carved puppet

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Btw, I can only see 3 skins in the "Change Theme" menu: IP.Board IP.Board Mobile Animation: Master - not a trace of Black Chrome...

Memory: http://community.invisionpower.com/files/file/5621-memory/

I like the one called Memory 1.1.1.

Thinking that it could be a nice thing if the project workspace in A:M was color coded, as to make a visible distinction between base parameters and animatable parameters. What do you think?

I use to click Shortcut to camera -> actions -> choreography action and then in the properties open up Chor Range and here set the numbers for Start and End to indicate length in frames of the chor. For me this saves with the file. But I am not quite sure if this only works when a rendering allready has been made...

Ah!! THAT’s how to do it! It was the “Show more than drivers”-part I had overlooked. Frankly haven’t ever used it, so this is a cool double learning :-) Thanks a lot! Now my character can pull out the knife of the guy he killed, and there will be blood on it!!

Say a model has two different but interchangeable image textures (using the same stamp/UV map). Is there a way to animate a shift (either gradually or abrupt) between the two textures?

I have noticed that on installation A:M ad a further and older version of Microsoft Visual C ++, and it suddenly struck me if this could add to a inconsistency with the nVidia drivers, causing some jam up… The Visual C version on my computer is 11.0.51106 from 2012, and after reinstalling A:M an additional version 10.0.40219 from 2010 appears on the progrtam list. Well, as an absolute non-programmer I propably shouldn’t delve on such things, but couldn’t help it!

Just tried to run A:M from a squicky new profile, to check if some of my settings should be the culprit. But as can be seen here, I just had to resize the window in the freshly started A:M for it to look like this and then crash...:-( Guess I'll start warming the coffee for Steffen!! :-)

You're right - that distance is nothing to speek of! And I promise to serve Steffen a nice cup of ecological coffee and the best chair in our nice little city garden! ;-)

"Do you experience YOUR same weird display problems if you don't use stick mode? For me, I don't trust the display in 18f but I'm not sure it has any other impact, other than being annoying and confusing?" Yes, Nancy, unfortunately I do. Even when not being in skeletal mode, a lot of weird stuff happens. And the more the display is manipulated (rotated, moved, zoomed) the closer the computer comes to the edge that it finally falls over and totally freezes. But the almost SURE way to cause a crash is to push the stick mode button. As mentioned before, the behaviour goes for both 32 and 64bit versions. And this propably also answers the second part of your question: as A:M > b crashes my computer so bad that I even cannot restart it (have to pull the plug) within the first 30 seconds (often almost instantly) or so of operation, I simply can not use the new versions of Animation Master any more. :-/

"The mystery is why it affects your computer and not other people with similar equipment. What is the particular thing that is different?" Well, Robert, it really is strange, but as I have understood it there IS other people with nVidia/windows combination having same problems - yourself for one...or did your crashes/freezes go away?? I guess there are others too? And the same problems but with Mac/nVidia combination has been mentioned too. "I still think getting a cheap AMD card and slapping it in there would be a worthwhile experiment." You're propably right that this is a nVidia/A:M specific problem, but I am not all that keen on the AMD cards (had one very troublesome experience with AMD some years ago), so even if it did solve THIS problem, I am afraid that it would open up for a host other problems with other software I am using, and I am not up to too many such experiments while having four projects currently in the works. I guess I have to wait for Steffen to hopefully take a second look on this, when he returns.

Rodney, I have tried everything to avoid that this is an error due to my configuration (changing compatability settings, renewing and reinstalling graphic drivers (nVidia) - even backgrading graphic driver) with no luck. This fatal error was introduced together with the bones stick mode setting, and I am still somewhat suspicious that there is something wrong in that area of the programming. I have also testet out other 3D software to make sure that my graphics card isn't broken, but both Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, Messiah Studio, ZBrush and 3D Coat (and of course Animation Master 18b) runs fast and smothly and without a single glitch on my machine. This HAS to be a programming error in A:M introduced after vers. 18B. I just so hope it will be possible to find and repair it!! For compairing, here the same scene as it looks in 18B:

I have tested in all win7 display modes with no difference in the sad outcome: Totally garbaged display and eventually crash and complette freeze of the computer requiring total power down. Garbaged display is all over, crash happens promptly when going to skeletal mode in chor view. That unfortunately renders A:M above 18 b completely unusable for me... :-( Steffen, please, please, please fix our beloved but broken A:M!!

"Monetization" is the keyword here. Mixed with art/creation I'm not sure that has a nice ring to it....