heyvern

YES! Save often. Save versions. Back up versions. We all lose work sometime, 5 minutes here, an hour there in ANY AND ALL applications. How much time or effort we lose depends on our working habits. I learned to save different versions for ALL my applications by using AM. If I had not learned that very important way of working with the computer I would have lost more over the years than just AM files. ALL programs will crash at some point. It's not a matter of IF but when. Better safe than sorry. AM is 3D... that's a lot of stuff for the computer to manage. A lot of memory is cranking away crunching huge amounts of data. Best to plan for the inevitable. I use a text editor called jEdit. It uses a minimum of 64mb-128mb of memory. It requires something like 3 times the size of the text files while working. It crashes too. A text editor. The cost of an application doesn't determine its stability. The OS, the extensions, the hard drive, the ram, etc, etc. All of those things have an impact on performance. Your problems with AM v8 may have been the result of bad video drivers, bad ram, unoptimized disk drive, weird drivers installed by games or other software... any number of system related issues. Keep that in mind. Be realistic with your expectations. ---------- p.s. This just happened to me yesterday. FireFox crapped out on my Mac right after one of those automated updates. It wouldn't launch at all. Unexpectedly quit... before it even loaded. I changed my profiles, made new ones, deleted preferences, restarted, launched FF in safe mode (didn't know it had THAT) did everything I could find on the web short of just reinstalling FireFox. That did the trick. Reinstalled. Dragged my BACKED UP PROFILE back in to the profile directory... BINGO! Back online. Had to use Safari for a while... ick. I hate Safari. -vern

I've read all the posts... and... uh... I still don't know what happened to this guy? Did he call Hash recently or 7 years ago? Or was it 5? Did he call during version 10? (he mentioned v10). v10 was ages ago. Even I don't have v10 on my machine anymore (I have v11!). Version 8 WAS one of the best most wonderful versions of AM (up till now of course!). So even that part of the story might be lost to the fog of time. Maybe it wasn't a v8, maybe it was a... Snapple... or a Nantucket Nector... or possibly v9? The issue about MS selling old software is a bit of a stretch. You can buy old software but MS doesn't like it or support it. They just can't stop it. The only "old" software MS sold was XP (and they didn't like doing that much either. ). Besides... if Hash was like MS that would make Martin like Bill Gates and he wouldn't put up with all the whiners. He would just write a check and have them erased from existence (I looked into doing that and it's VERY expensive). So I'm still confused when all this happened. I assumed it happened recently. Why wait so many years to post to a forum? It would be like me still bringing up how Pixels3D tried to do a bait and switch on me with their software, causing me to tell them to go stuff it up... someplace uncomfortable.... and then I bought v7 of AM (sounds like a character on Star Trek; "I am called v7 of AM, welcome to my planet!")... well... I did say it again... but not on the Pixels3D forum. p.s. I don't know if this guy is a troll for sure. Having actually met a REAL troll TWICE (the same dang one on two different forums) I have a high threshold. I think this forum is way to big and powerful for a troll to last long here. It would be like one tiny little guy going against a huge viscous army (yes dangit VISCOUS) to throw an evil ring into some lava... and... THAT WAS A STORY! It doesn't happen that way in real life! In real life the little guy GETS SQUASHED LIKE A BUG! Like a troll on the Hash forum. -vern

I think I get it. What I could do is import the TSM skeleton and just "link" it to the existing geometry skeleton I have. TSM should then just work with it's own bones to create the control rig right? The only draw back is all the "extra" bones that might be redundant. I could always start from scratch. It's tedious to rig but it's mindlessly tedious. No smart skin, no cp/bone wieghing just straight forward simple mesh group assignment to a single bone. the constraints are dead simple too... just tedious. -vern

Good grief? A brand new kid? I'm surprised you can even remember our names. You're forgiven. -vern

Please don't hit me. I will try out TSM as soon as I get my "new" PC and AM reinstalled. I find this talk of "scripting" TSM fascinating. I love to fiddle with scripting stuff. My question is in regard to what needs to be done before the rigging. Specifically the basic skeleton that controls the CPs. I have really weird shoulder/bicep bone set up for my Terminator model. (everything is weird actually due to everything being based on single axes rotations). I have 3 shoulder bones, 3 bicep bones, all with euler limits to control what turns/rotates what on what axis and where that rotation takes place. Because of this very odd set up throughout the entire model, how difficult will that be to add a TSM control rig? Will I need to do the scripting thing? Will I have to rename the bones? For instance I don't have a single forearm bone... technically... there are 2. One rotates the forearm, one bends the forearm. The bicep is worse. I have 3 different bones all rotating on each axis with different center points. I want to grab just one bone like the hand, and move the whole arm so all of those constrained bones spin and turn to reach the location. Should I create new bones over this skeleton and rig that to control the base bones and then run TSM? Can I run TSM over this bizarre set up? Thanks for any input. -vern

I'm good for saturday... But I won't have my legs done in time and I haven't added the control rig to the T800 so animation is a bit tedious... uh... I haven't really done any. It takes hours just to tweak the hands into position one bone at a time . If I have time between now and then I might do a few little animation tests to bring along for rendering. I was thinking instead of doing an animation render at the meeting we could render a 360º movie of the model to show it off... maybe use some AO. I could throw in a little motion to see how the joints work. I think I can whip that together. I have a feeling this thing is going to render like lightening on your system John. Maybe some of you can give me pointers and help on installing a rig. I was thinking of using the new Free! TSM. -vern

AHA! The light bulb goes off over Vern's bald head! I forgot about the "animate the hand bones" part. You can just grab those bones and animate them directly. You don't have to type in offset values right? Makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up. -vern

Question: Robcat, why would you prefer the "one rake bone" constraint, rather than having two extra bones in the rake? One bone would be simpler of course but the added benefit of just sliding the bones in the rake seems... easier than offsetting the hands (if you need to that is). Just curious. -vern

Put two bones in the rake as children of the "main" rake bone. Now just use a constraint on each hand, one for each bone. The extra bones in the rake just needs to be a child of the main rake bone. I would use two bones so they can be moved if you want the "raker" to adjust his grip. EDIT: You could just constrain both hands to the one rake bone... just use an offset for each constraint so the hands aren't in the same place. I prefer the two extra bone method because it's easier to animate. -vern

Rodney, in keeping with the "techy" theme it should be Robio and Joliet. -vern

See? What'd I tell you? Those splines are like a work of art. Sparse, perfectly aligned and symmetrical. I mean they are so elegant. There isn't a single spline that isn't needed or out of place. I am so jealous. How the heck do you do that? I tried to do it with my terminator. That was my intention... to mimic the elegant and sparse splinage of the top mechanical modelers here on the forum... but alas and alack... after a brief struggle I just said the heck with it and started dropping in splines willy nilly... I even stopped making my bevels all neat and tidy... I just eyeballed them. (willy nilly is a 3D technical term. It has nothing to do with Willy Nelson or country music) -vern

Considering the "hit" you mentioned... it should be "Robotic Bunnies". And the song sounds too good... you need to dumb it down for the mindless masses that make this stuff popular. ------- I overheard a conversation at the Wawa yesterday. Someone who works in tech support for some electronics company got a call from a guy who saw his reflection in the TV and wanted to know how he could record it. He thought it was real. What makes me sad... that guy is still allowed to VOTE! -vern

Sounds exactly like the plot of Pixar's "Wall-e"... that is a good thing actually. -vern

That's pretty cool! They think of everything. I was about to give up on this poor guy. I know that there are probably bunches of files associated with a game... he could be randomly grabbing stuff and never find the "3D" data. -vern

Is that like putting two tiny black dots on a white canvas and calling it: "Polar Bear in a Snow Storm"? -vern

Once again this must be some kind of proprietary file format for a specific application or game. Unless you can open this file in some other application and save it as something that AM can recognize there is no way to get it into AM. I can't even say for sure what that file is. EDIT: Keep in mind that game developers use all kinds of "made up" file extensions for anything from 2d art to music. It is often difficult to determine what those formats are. Many times the game developer doesn't want you to know what those files are. -vern

Yeah why is that? I'm sure it's the same image right? For some reason it looks better here than it did when I was voting... maybe it was my subconcious tricking me into thinking mine was better. p.s. I also felt it wouldn't be fair to vote for myself considering I only had one vote. In the past I could always squeeze a vote for me in under the wire of my highly critical judgment criteria. ------- p.s.s. Old Terminators never rust, they just fade away. They can't rust... they have... icky squishy salty skin stuck all over them. The fleshy bits would get tetanus and rot off if they got rusty. (This happened in early testing before Skynet switched to a rust proof hyperalloy combat chassis - micro processor-controlled, fully armored. Skynet also wanted to add an undercoat sealant stolen from the human auto industry but very few of the Terminators wanted to pay for it since they thought it was unnecessary, and they really wanted the iPod connection option instead.) -vern

I considered this entry to be my big competition on a "mechanical" level. It has a lot of chrome and it has a lot of "parts" that have to be carefully attached. And once AGAIN, rendered with AO, while mine was old school traditional render. (Eric's tank had a lot of parts but no chrome). First off on chrome... better reflections than mine. Very real, nice darks and lights. Nice speculars, good balance, nice definition of the reflective surfaces. On the issue of parts. I'm not sure if this has more individual parts than mine but at least it has just as many. Plus, I couldn't see any mistakes. Mine has horrible splinage. If you looked at mine closeley there was some really amateur splinage mistakes. You can't see splines in a final render so it really shouldn't matter... but... my splines are not very "neat" and I have more patches than needed in a lot of places. I haven't seen the wireframe of this one but based on past history and considering the wonderful flowing surfaces I am sure that the splines are beautiful. I had some areas that needed "car like" smooth flowing surfaces... uh... I didn't often achieve that and used the chrome and bumps to hide those failings. AO rendering. I started playing around with AO on my entry after the contest because of all the wonderful realism achieved by so many of the other entries. It really takes it up a notch. Personally, I don't think there was just one winner this month. There were a bunch of winners. I may have won on points but I think a recount in Florida should be done immediately. Great job. I loved this entry. (But I still don't know who did the one I voted for yet.) It's so nice when we can vote for 4. You don't really put them in any order so you don't have to make a specific judgment... and... you can vote for your own with out feeling vain. -vern

I don't think so. Can you "see it"? Can you view it as a 3D model? From a quick search it is most likely some kind of support file for games. It probably doesn't have anything to do with 3D. If it does, it is probaby a proprietary format just for the game. I think you are out of luck. -vern

I didn't vote for me. Mainly because I took points off for not even TRYING to use AO when rendering. That AO effect just blows my socks right off... if you were here right now you would see... there are socks EVERYWHERE and some of them aren't even mine. -vern

Can't you see just looking at this... why I was so surprised to have won? Come on people! I didn't even put battle damage on mine! Look at the detail in the treads! The worn details of the surface. My goodness... Killer robots from the future or well endowed females... I guess they were right all along. That's how you win. (Imagine if I had done the Terminatrix.) Great job Eric. Amazing detail. The AO render looks really nice. -vern

What in the world is a smo file? No, there is no conversion I know of for direct import of a smo file. Best bet is to find some way to convert it to something that does work with AM. What is smo and what program is it from? The only thing I could find googling smo was something to do with a QT format, a Smartmorph (whatever that is) animation file, Tony Hawks skater pro music file, or some kind of cell phone archive thingy. If it is really really new, there is no support in AM. Hopefully there will be some free or shareware app that can convert it to a polygon format AM can read, like .obj, or .dxf or whatever else is in the import/export list for AM. EDIT: Found another reference. A program for analyzing protein sequences saves .smo files. -vern

I'm on the edge of my seat! More more! -vern

I hope my legs are done by then... yikes! These things sneak up! And I have to get my drivers license renewed this month. -vern

What doesn't look right? the one in the middle or the one on the right? Did you just add the image to the model or did you use a decal? It looks like you dragged the image onto the model or group. This will give you bad results because the images "scale" to the size of the patches. On the other hand, if you decaled and THEN moved the splines this will stretch the decal image and make it look bad. Make sure you have the patches and splines just the way you like them first then decal. If you change things then remove the old decal and decal again. I am guessing at the problem from the center image. Another problem is the normals. Those yellow lines sticking out of the wall. Some of them are flipped the wrong way. The normals should point OUT away from the surface. The thick end of the yellow line should be at the surface of the model and point outwards. You also have some internal patches on parts of the wall. In this case it probably doesn't matter much, but it's not correct and can cause rendering problems. Have you done all the tutorials in TAoAM? The book that came with A:M? You should do all of those tutorials and pay close attention to splinage and patches. -vern