gra4mac
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Posts posted by gra4mac
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Hi. I found my problem with the export not being displaced. I had the decals set not to show and the export didn't get displaced. It did'nt seem to matter what the onscreen resolution was set at. After some trial and error, I've found that the PLY export works best. It seems to load the model bak in faster than OBJ sand it has the colour map with it. The colour map was lost from the OBJ. To get good detail I had to use 4 pollys per patch, or variable. The AV2 export didn't have a resolution choice and came back in with too low a resolution for my perposes.
I tried blurring the displacement map to reduce the resolution, but it didn't make difference to the res, althought it did smooth the model. Here is a screen shot of the shaded wire and shaded. the hight is 2x normal.
RH. I am doingthis so I can get terrain geometry in A:M to work with, not just for viewing.
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I'm not having any luck with the Terrain wizzard. I got version 1.0.0.1 from Toonation, but it won't laod as a HWZ file in the HXT folder and if I change the extention to HXT I get an error message. Trying to download version 10.1 gets into a redirectio loop at Lycos. Is there a newer version for A:M 10.5 that I can get somewhere else?
As for the glaciers, I am working on a VR tour of a river near here and I want to add a bit on the formation of the river during the last iceage. I haven't yet figured out how I will do the glaciers. Any suggestions. Here is the tour so far if you are interested:River tour
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Thanks for the responce guys. I tried exporting as a PLY with variable patches and it worked, although it was spline heavy. I then tried it with OBJ and AV2 also with variable patches, but all I got bak was the same flat plane. So I tried it again with PLY and got the same flat plane again. Why did it work only the 1 time??? I also got the Terrain Wizzard. HWZ, but I don't know where to put it so it shows up in the wizzards list. It seems the other wizzards are all in one dll file. A:m 10.5p on a PC. Any hints?
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I'm playing around with DEMs again and have figured out how to make a good displacement map. Now I want to model some things that will interact with the displacement model, like glaciers and rivers, and life would be much easier if I could work with geometry instead of the displacement. Is there a way to make the displacement into geometry? I thought Vern mentioned this a while back, but I don't remember.
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I'm working on a QT virtual river tour that will be part of a world wide river resource website. The idea is to document your river any way you like, using QTVR. I chose the Capilano River in North Vancouver, Canada.
I'm posting this here, for crits, because I have'nt yet found a good place to get crits from the VR folks. It may be inapropriate to post this here, but you people are so good about giving crits, I thought I'd give it a try. I want this to look pollished and proffesional. I would appreciate any comments you might have.
Here is the link. to the tour.
I did use A:M for making the map. I modelled over a DEM and added texture. If you are curious about the river project, it is here. It hasn't been publicaly launched yet, but there is a description of the project there.
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A good little tutorial, very useful.
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Just a little follow up. I made this terrain in about a half hour by selecting progressivley larger contour areas, starting with the highest, then moving the area in the Y direction with magnet mode on. The magnet influence sphere was big enough to cover the next contour. I made the river canyon by making a river shaped spline and using it as a magnet, then I flattened the lake. I did very little moving of individual CPs. The decal is a DEM map so it has some shading detail that is not in the model.
Thanks again Rodney for the info.
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Thanks for the answer Rodney. Now that I know it can work, I've figured out how it does work. The trick is to make sure that the magnet effects sphere is big enough to encompass both the magnet modell and the target model, otherwise it won't work.
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I'm working on modelling a terrain using magnet mode and I thought I remembered a tutorial by Robert Frazier about using an object as the magnet. Was I dreaming? Is it possible to use an object as a magnet. I would like to use a flat object instead of the tools sphere. A:M 10.5r.
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Not to take anything away from Joe's awsome modelling and animating talents, but would it be safe to say that this film is popular as much for it's content as for the skill involved in creating it, especially for the young men who perhaps spend too much time infront of there computers.
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I like the new look, and word gets around fast. I just got todays issue of QT news and the second listing was A:M Films. Cool.
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I just found out that DEM maps are now avaiable in Canada, for free, at geobase.ca. There are some free PC veiwers listed on the support pages and there is a shareware one for the Mac called MacDem
I thought someone might be interested.
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Sounds amazing. I'm looking forward to seeing it.
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To make what I'm calling a panomation, you need to have animation software, QuickTimePro, and VRHotwire. You might be able to do it in Livestage to, I don't know. To create the animation I used 4 cameras with a 90 degree horizontal veiw and 90 degrees apart, on a path. Render each camera at 300 high X 400 wide. In VRHotwire, create a sprite track with 4 sprites, each 300x400, and sript them to scoll with the mouse and move the one that goes offscreen to the other end. This creates the panning. Now in QT, addd scaled each of the 4 movies, in the proper order, to the sprite track and map them to each sprite using tack override. This creates the panning animation, but with 4 movie tracks, which doesn't play well. Back in VRH, set the track to full width, 300 x 1600 in this case, so you can see the whole movie. In QT, export single frames, and then import as a movie. This stitches the 4 frames together so you have 1 movie at 300x1600, but you loose the sprite track and the panning. Back in VRH, in a new project, use the spriteorama tool to create a panning srite track and put the stitched video on it. Now you have a finished panning animation.
As for Arctic Pigs, who thought of that name?, I have only seen a couple of examples and they were very simple scenes. I don't know what it can really do, and it only works on PCs.
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Hi. I have made what I am calling a panning animation. This means that you can pan 360 degrees in the scene while the animation is playing. The sample I've done moves quickly, but any frame you stop on has a full 360 view. Just click and drag in the frame while the animation plays. The animation, scene, and lighting are very basic, I just wanted to get the process down. IMHO it works well and is very cool. Let me know what you think. It is in QT and uses On2 compression. Panoanimation
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Thanks for checking guys. Sorry about your pants Vernon. It looks like it was a weird thing on a couple of Macs runnnig OSX.
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I just had someone tell me they can't see the cubic. They use a Mac OS 10.3. Is anyone else having truoble veiwing it? I'd really like to know because the VR tour is linked to the site that runs the garden, and I don't want there visitors having trouble. Thanks
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Hi Simon, how about posting a picture so we can have a look to see the problems?
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Hi. I got this software called VRHotwire that lets you add tracks to QT panos and cubics. It' like Livestage, I think , but cheaper and rougher around the edges. I made a virtual tour with a QT cubic as the main node. I added a sound track and a small animation done in A:M. Comments welcome. Look down to see the animation.
I'd love to hear from someone with Livestage on how it is adding this kind of stuff, and if there is a way to minimze the speed loss when adding animations to cubics.
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Hi Stephen. You have some great work on your site. I'm looking forward to seeing more. Is there a chance for a breif description on how you did the Aloe flowering?
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I don't get it. It sounds like you are trying to do things the hard way, which is what I usually do. To make a blink why not do it in an action, drop the action in the cho and set it to repeat when you need it, like about every 1 second. If you want the blink to happen with some timing variation, just make 2 blink actions with double the normal time and slightly different lengths, about 2 seconds. Now drop them in the cho and start them 1 second apart. Set the repats for as long as you need them.
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Thanks for the info and ideas Paul.I assume stitching the videos is the time consuming part. I wouldn't want to do much of that by hand. I haven't tried taking one apart yet. In VRHotwire you can get at the script they use to control the effects. I have the demo, but haven't tried it yet. As for Arctic Pigs. it looks cool and the file sizes are amazingly small, but it is PC only and I don't knoe if you can link nodes. I haven'tplayed the Riven sequal for quite a while, I think I will have another look.
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I've been playing with Quicktime VR panarams for a while, but I've never seen anything like this. There are now movies that you can panaround the scene while the movie is playing. One of the ones I saw was of a car drivng along a canyon raod that you can pan 360 degrees around the scene while it's playing. I still find it hard to beleive. What they do is take simaltanious input from 5-6 wide angle video cameras, mounted in a ring, and batch stitch the pans together to make a panarama movie. The software they use to assemble the tracks is VRHotwire. There site is Vrhotwire, and it has other examples of what you can do. The site with the movie pans is called Immersivsions Immerhere, with the Immersivsions main site http://graphics.usc.edu/~tpintari/panorami...ramic_video.php. There is also a site that desribes how to do this with $750 and duct tape here. This last one makes the proccess understandable and is an interesting read.
After grasping the posibilities, I want to try and make a panning movie using a 3D set in A:M. I think the possibilities for making very cool interactive imersive games are great. I'll post something when I get it working. Don't hold your breath.
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This sounds like an interesting challenge.
With a bit of planning, a good mix of people, and no sleep you should be able to pull it off. Three minutes eh. I'm a big fan of internet colab projects, and having a short time frame will keep the pace up. I wish I could join you for the weekend, but I can't. Keep us posted with what you need, I could probably make some models.
Can I make geometry from a displacement map?
in (2003-2004)
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More fun with DEMS. this is the same area, but I used a scan of a satelite image I have for the colour map. It took quite a bit of work to get it to line up with the DEM image. I also made the hight more realistic. The colour on the previous imsge was from the DEM software: it lines up really well.
The patch count is a bit high at 26500. It's not bad to work with unless I want to change something in the mesh, then I read a book. I would love to try the Terrain wizzard, but I have'nt heard back from Andy yet as to why I can't download it. If one of you folks wants to email it to me, I'd appreciate it.