Paul Forwood

Nice work!

Merry Christmas, Michel. Cheers!

Thanks, Michel. I started from scratch and used a front and side rotoscope which were cropped from photographs found on the internet. Ha! I hadn't noticed that. Perhaps the "Triad and Tested Investment Bank". "Protection for Life". "We protect your investments". Thanks. Thanks, Mark. I will need to find some video footage of him talking first, preferably in close up so that I can study his mannerisms.

Thanks, Holmes! No textures or rig yet, the hair needs redoing and there is some tweaking still required.

Yeah. Great tree, train and rigging.

Thanks, Robert. I don't get on well with cross-eyed images so I tend to stick to anaglyphs. By the way, your "Punch" thread inspired me to try my hand at this guy: (638 patches) MadoffHead_A00_01e.mov

No criticisms from me, Jaff. It all looks very well choreographed, there is a feeling of weight all of the way through and I like the camera angles too. Of course the compression artifacts could be masking something but at it stands it looks great! ----------------------- Edit: Okay. I found something. The dog tag, that the guy in the green t-shirt is wearing, is glued to his chest rather than swinging around. I know this is probably a conscious decision but I'm really struggling to find something to criticize.

Brilliant! Merry Christmas to all at Soulcage.

That's a terrific tree, Mark! Are you still just using glow or have you included lights. It looks great.

Looking really good, TNT!

Heh heh. That is a great Santa, Mark! Sorry to hear of your hardship. Going solo in such dangerous waters was always going to be precarious. Hoping that your ship sails into Paradise Bay real soon. (Paradise on Earth that is! We don't want you going too far for a long, long time. At least until the Wannabes have found and enjoyed that hidden treasure.)

That's a beautiful piano, Photoman! One thing to beware of is the internal patches on the lid. You can delete all of those short splines that join the top and bottom of the piano lid and it should improve the render quality and performance slightly.

Don't use hooks, except in discrete places. Run those splines all the way around if neccessary. The price of a few more patches is better than the pain that hooks will cause you. I love the sock puppet tests, Robert! Mr. Punch is coming along nicely. Next you're going to need a Judy, a rolling pin, a hammer, a saw, a crocodile, a policeman, a baby..........

I should have known that you would have all of the bases covered. Awesome! (I don't use that word often)

Very impressive, Luuk! Is this first prototype aiming at just getting the dragonfly to hovver or do you have some clever mechanism in mind to alter the path of the wings to give forward thrust, reverse thrust, tilt, etc? Very clever stuff and I wish you every success with this project.

That looks like a great, angry fireball but try changing the direction of your lighting so that the shadows look like they are cast from the sun and animate the intensity to match the pulse from the light source. That would help the illusion. This looks like it is going to be another step up from your previous work.

Hey! Well done! Now go and prove Andy Warhol wrong.

Yes, I agree. Your Christmas animations get better every year. This one turned out exceptionally well! I don't remember if I've asked you before but are these projects something that you do in your spare time for pleasure or does Visualex actually compensate you for the hours that you put into them? Either way I can see that you enjoy the process.

Yes. Overall performance in later versions is much faster and stable than earlier versions, when you start adding in things like hair/particles, volumetrics, dynamics, etc., etc. One of the things that Steffen is intergrating into A:M code is OpenMP, so that might be affecting performance in recent updates, but it seems to me that introducing OpenMP points towards efforts to get A:M firing on all cylinders, or rather all cores.

Jason, I was surprised by the difference in these three processors: Robcat2075: 19:59 AMD Athlon XP 3200 1.921 GHz 1 core 2 GB RAM Windows 2000 ---------------------------------------- Ludo_si: 19:00 AMD ATHLON 64 X2 DUAL core processor 3800 2.01 GHZ, 2GO RAM windows xp --------------------------------------- Paul Forwood: A:M14c: 11:40 A:M15g: 15:43 A:M15h: 15:11 AMD ATHLON 64 X2 DUAL (4200+) (utilising one core) 1.79 GHz 3 GB RAM XP Pro --------------------------------------- I didn't think there would be so much difference between Ludo_si's machine and mine, in particular. That's all. Almost time to look for a new machine but I can hang on for a little longer. I still get alot of use out of my old P4. By the way, I'm no genius.

The code is modified between versions to work around problems that people have found and these changes can have ramifications that affect other parts of the program. Just tweaking the routines that handle how alpha is handled,for example, could add, or reduce, the time spent in that routine by a fraction of nanosecond but if that routine is called thousands of times for every frame you render you will see a change in the final render times. Fixing things doesn't necessarily make them faster but hopefully more stable and more useful.

You see, you must set a standard base for bench tests. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Please don't anyone confuse this example as a benchmark for versions of A:M. There are too many other variables that would have to be added to compare one version of A:M to another. There are many improvements in later versions of A:M that are not reflected in this test. This is simply to show that when collecting data, to compare render times on different machines, you must ensure that everyone is using the same setup, (software version and render settings). ----------------------------------------------------------------- I forgot to add that these were all rendered on a single core. Background activity was minimal: I had a QT movie open, (but not playing), and a live browser window onto a text and image website. I mention this beacause I am surprised by the results others have shown.

I am rendering at the moment but I have no intention of running it through every version of A:M that I have. I'll will accept that, so forget the additional variables and stick to your setup, but the version of A:M that you are using must be part of the datum. If you are unaware of the differences in versions of A:M and the impact on render speeds then I suggest that you test that first.

This test isn't very practical unless everyone is using the same version of A:M. Render times fluctuate dramatically between different versions as modifications to the code take place. Also the choreography should include things such as particles, fog and volumetrics if you want the test to reflect more realistic production demands.

Wow! That looks amazing, David!