heyvern

I am a big fan of the "One Big Decal". You don't need a huge hi-res wire frame render for placement. Use the highest you can produce without problems... apply it to the model... then... resize this wire frame decal in photoshop till the keys aren't "fuzzy" in your renders. When you save over the "old" decal image it will update in AM with the "new larger" one. As a matter of fact you could have two decal images... one "smaller" one for distant shots (improves render times possibly)... then switch to the larger one for close ups by swapping the decal image. Vernon "!" Zehr

Yes please edit portions of my presentation as requested. And remember... the camera puts 10 pounds on you... and there may have been several cameras. ----------------- I especially enjoyed Rich's humble presentation... "I didn't bring anything to show you guys... except for this incredible ship with some fantastic renders.. and these realistic overhead fluorescent lights." The AI wizard RULES! "How'd you model those beveled holes?" Rich and I in unison: "AI WIZARD!" p.s. We plan to run Hubukai and Entity through the teleportation pod and merge them into one person to finish that ship design... I think we should throw a fly in there as well (or a chinchilla) just to see what happens. They will probably come out looking like Jeff Goldblum and start pitching Macintosh. p.s.s Rich looked even younger this time. And he didn't bring the painting. Pretty soon he will only post in the new user section. p.s.s.s Seaquest WAS a great show I tell you! Buy season one on DVD right now! Vernon "The cookies are gone" Zehr

I have a small Wacom with a two button mouse and scroll wheel along with the stylus. This is absolutely the best input device I have ever ever used... I love it. I use the mouse in AM and the stylus in Photoshop... just switch back and forth. What I loved about an optical mouse was not having to worry about the wheel sticking... cleaning... etc... so the Wacom with a mouse is the same as the optical mouse... plus I get the stylus for painting in Photoshop. Now all my editing in AM is the same on Mac and PC... because the Wacom uses all the same left click/rt click/scroll click etc... for moving around and editing. ---------- p.s. I use to think that my mouse was causing carpal tunnel... but... my dad actually GOT REAL carpal tunnel in both hands... let me tell you... ... I never had carpal tunnel... never. From his description... I realized carpal tunnel, if you have it diagnosed by a doctor... can be agony. If you "think" you "might" have it... you probably don't. After he described it to me... I realized what a wimp I was. He had 3 fingers numb and tingly all the time. Stabbing nerve pain in his wrist that shot up to his shoulder. His shoulder pain was almost as bad as the wrist. A little pain in my wrist... ha! It goes away after a few days when I change how I hold the mouse and position my hands over the keyboard. My father had both hands done last year. Some new technique... Virtually no scar. Teeny tiny cut... like half an inch... at the base of his hand... can't even see it. Doctor "hides" it along one of the wrinkles. After having this done all the pain went away in his arms and shoulders. Vernon "!" Zehr

I saw strange animals from the north crossing an ice bridge between continents to explore this new world of cold and frozen land... ... or... maybe it was just a big dog in someone's car at the WAWA... it might have been just a big dog. I'm still shivering... but we did have fun... I wouldn't want anyone to think the cold was the only memorable thing about our gathering... I smell of curry and shrimp... and cookies! A whole bag of cookies and they are all mine... I only ate four on the way home... ... Oh... I should mention something about A:M from the meeting... uh... nice ships! Glad to see you got home okay Rich... unless... you found some kind of all night internet cafe near the bus station. Figures... everyone mentions that I appear to have lost weight... and then I eat 50 million cookies. p.s. We should try and use the cookies as enticements to encourage more people to travel to our meetings... of course that would mean less for me... but we all must make sacrifices. Vernon "mnuy mopurth isd fuulll" Zehr

Oh boy! Is it time for the meeting already? Time flies when you're... uh... well... time flies. Yes... slaving away tonight! I get it from both ends so to speak... the stuff I want to show is also for the TWO project... two birds with one stone... I know Bob is probably about ready to fire me... or dock my pay... or... put something in my permanent record... ... uh... I have some other "mystery" things to show... have to see how much time we have. Vernon "!" Zehr

Path Constraint Objects from the online help file. There is more stuff in there about constraints but this should be a good start. http://www.hash.com/htmlHelp/v12.0/Generat...ConstraintA.htm Vernon "!" Zehr

Does anyone else feel this is like... talking someone through brain surgery using morse code? It would really help you a lot if you read some of the book that came with AM. Especially how to use the tools. The tools can be complex but if you have a basic working knowledge of them some of the advice you receive will make more sense. The tutorials in the book also walk you through step by step with screen captures and explanations of what you are doing. You may find if you put aside your current project and do some of those animation tutorials you will learn much faster. And when you return to your project you will find it makes more sense. I understand everyone's desire to help a new user... but sometimes... it is a good idea to recommend they do just a tiny bit of homework first. Just some friendly advice. Keep trying... if you do all the animation exercises in the book I promise it will start to make sense. Read all the sections on what the tools and menus are for. Also you can use the online help that comes with AM. That can be a big help. It lists all the properties your are asking about. Type in "Ease" in the search... it will have many links explaining where it is and what it is to be used for. Look for "Action Properties". It explains what all the properties are in the action property window when you click on it. Vernon "!" Zehr

How many patches on the box? Something similar came up in another thread. If you have only one big patch the decals... act oddly. Adding just a few extra splines might solve it. If you have multiple patches on that mesh... then... I don't have any ideas. Post a wire frame... that might help. Vernon "!" Zehr

Dang! I really should use that site more often. Vernon "!" Zehr

Not... exactly like that. You can create a new folder in the groups folder (right click Groups... New/Folder) and call it "eye" or whatever. Then you can put all those groups in there. If you right click the folder you can "select children". It will select all of the groups in that folder. Hope this is what you are after. ----- Edit ---- You can have folders in folders... so... you know like a tree... you could have... head folder -->eye folder ----->eye groups -->mouth group -->wart group I don't have a wart on my head... just an example. Vernon "!" Zehr

Yeehaa! Looks great! I am pleased to have been of any help with those pesky decal issues. Wow! You aren't kidding about those decals, the last I saw, that whole left side of the keyboard was kind of bare... if you had kept going in "the other direction" you would have had like 30 decals on that one tired, overworked patch. Great job... I can almost hear the music... ah the memories... I was just out of high school... I had long flowing hair... and I was very skinny... 32 inch waist... the sound of the 80's... Flock of Seagulls... Howard Jones... those were the days... Vernon "!" Zehr

Actually... after looking at your model, you could just try extruding the end of that big section a couple of times and slide those cross sections into the "body" of the model. This would be a quick and easy test to see if that would be enough splinage to solve the multiple decal problem. I have found that you don't need a TON of additional splinage for decaling. Sometimes just one or two "extra" patches can help. ------------------ I had this exact problem a loooong time ago on one of the image contest entries... actually it was my first. I had a cardboard box with the surface torn of slightly on the front. I wanted to add a second decal of the corrugated material over the larger decal of the cardboard. This was when I discovered that low patch count causes problems with multiple decals. Basically my second decal had "bits missing" because it wasn't hitting the edges of ANY patch. All I did was split the surface twice horizontally by extruding two extra splines on the ends of the box front. So... instead of one patch I had 3. Worked like a charm. I enlarged my second decal and made sure it covered an entire patch on all four sides. I may be wrong... but I always try to make sure my decals "overlap" and cover at least one entire patch... I never have any trouble with them that way. Fantastic model. Looks great. Congrats! Vernon "!" Zehr

Oh please please... this must be from now on the "go to" demo to show how alphas SHOULD be done in PS and how they work! I have always tried to explain this concept for avoiding "fringes" and for some reason it seems hard for people to understand... this is very very clear and simple and very quick. (p.s. a shortcut for creating the alpha is to, after opening in photoshop, just drag one of the RGB channels to the create alpha dohicky. No flatten or cut and paste! Then you just fill the RGB channel. All channels of RGB are 100% black when the RGB is black... great "premade" alphas built right in.) ---- I had bought an ancient copy of SnapZ pro ages ago... I wonder if I can still upgrade it?... hmm... completely forgot about it when I changed jobs... and computers... I will need to pull that old computer out of the closet and fire it up to find my license. I definitely need this on OSX... definitely. Vernon "!" Zehr

There are many different ways to encode a .wav file... I don't know them off hand... but I know that some wav formats are problematic in AM. I don't know what these are either but I seem to recall mentioning of this on the forum sometime in the past. If you were able to track down a free or demo application for reformatting/converting sound files you could experiment with it to see what might be the issue. As for AVI... don't know about that. AVIs can also have a myriad of different formatting options with codecs and sound formats etc... that might effect compatibility with AM. Best bet would be to find some that work (on the AM CD maybe) and if you can find out what is different with yours... you could maybe find some way to fix it. Vernon "!" Zehr

No cookies!?!? No cookies!?!? Does someone else know how to make cookies? I need the cookies. I want... the cookies. Oh... yes... sorry you can't make it... ... but could you send the cookies anyway? Or could you send Rich the recipe? He was looking for more ways to contribute. Vernon "Cookies!" Zehr

If you are talking about that fantastic keyboard model... ... like you said... if you plan to get real close... higher is better. remember that saving as 300dpi is the same as 72 but a larger pixel dimension. Since AI is vector based... you have to define the dpi on export. AI is "resolution independant". This is probably why you have trouble with the "units matching" from AM to AI. On your keyboard model you have one of those pain in the but problems with decals and resolution... TEXT and SHARP STRAIGHT LINES! Text and straight lines are always a pain and require "higher" resolution so it looks "clean". On top of that you need an alpha on them so they shows over other decals... so you can't even use a grayscale image to save on size. Determining the proper resolution in your case would be based on how you are presenting that model. If it is in an animation and the camera will zoom in on details of it... you need high res decals (what you have currently is more than enough... almost too big actually). (Try this... with your choreography window open in AM double click on one of your decal images in the images folder in the PWS. Press shift+Z that is 100% of it's "natural" size. See how big it is in comparison to the chor window? really big.) If the model is not going to be seen that closely you could easily drop down the res output from AI to 150... remember this is AI... not photoshop. In Photoshop I keep everything at 72 and change the size using the pixel dimensions. ... trial and error is the key. Drop the res... do a full size render and see if the decal looks okay. If it pixelates too much for your liking then bump it back up. If you do this with one decal the same would apply to all of them most likely. Vernon "!" Zehr

Hey dude! You don't have photoshop? You should download the free Gimp application. It has almost all the features of photoshop... it has layers too doesn't it? I am pretty sure it does. The problem with AI is that it is a vector application... there is some funky stuff going on when you export out of it. Plus... it is very hard to crop to the exact pixel dimensions of an image. Try using the "view pixels" feature in AI. It "pixelates" the preview at the resolution of the document... now that I think about it... it might just pixelate to screen resolution... give it a shot anyway... gives you kind of a sample look of how it will appear as a raster image. I use AI sometimes for web graphics and use this to REALLY see what I'm doing. Vernon "!" Zehr

I just did a real fast quicky test and was able to render out the top view for use as placement. I brought that render back in and was able to line it up pretty darn close in a very short time. I then applied this as a decal. The next step would be to use that render and size it up to match the resolution of the other decals and place each one on the big decal (not going to do this but it wouldn't take all that long). Then you just save over top of the original render you used for the decal and BANG! One decal for the whole shebang. I recommend thinking about this only since you may have to reapply all the decals anyway if you have to add splinage. This might make that less of a nightmare. Another tip.. if you use photoshop or something with layers. Save each element on a layer... if it doesn't line up perfectly when applying the decal just nudge it in photoshop and save a new decal. Vernon "!" Zehr

The first thing I said when I saw the wireframe was.... "WHOA! WHOA! That might be it!" I don't think you have enough splinage for the decals to "stick" to. You only have one gigantor patch for ALL those decals. This... well... theroetically this should work... in a perfect world... ... but in reality you may want to increase the patch count so all those decals aren't trying to live on just one patch. If you right click on all of those decals and "select CPs"... they all use the same 4 CPs... well almost all... anyway... I am guessing... I don't really have time right now to play with it... but that is my best guess... I would say... 85% certainty... maybe 90%... room for being wrong in there. [Edit] When you decal a very big single patch... I have found there to be some issues with stretching and distortion... this was ages ago so that might not be a problem any more... but I generallly don't decal large single patches. I like to have at least 2 or 4. Or if you don't want to add the patches... you could just create a giant image for that one patch and stamp once. It is a completely flat patch... so no flattening issues. Do a very large "low quality" render from the top view of what you have currently and use it in Photoshop for placing the images... ... that would save a bunch of work. If you planned it right you could stamp the tops of the buttons with the same single decal.... whole thing... one decal... just a thought. Vernon "!" Zehr

Yes this is extremely hard to figure out. I looked at the model... with those decals... I don't see why you are having to stamp so many times. It looks like they should cover the whole thing in two shots! I will say that in the past I have had "trouble" with decal "ordering" and display. Sometimes a decal "on top" appears correctly... or incorrectly... if I change the order in the PWS, the appearance over other decals changes... Sometimes it gets confusing and I can't keep track of which is on top... is it under in the PWS to be over on the model?... or the other way around? Sometimes I need to save before the reordering changes my model view. Sometimes closing and reopening the project will snap things back. ------------------ If you are stamping decals to "cover" other decals... not the ideal way to work... you would want to think about how you want things to appear then... modify the decal to match your "plan". I have a feeling the problem is related to the order of the decals and which patches they are assigned to. If you find that a decal stamp is showing on patches that they shouldn't... select those CPs, right click and select "remove decals". A list of the decals and stamps for those patches/CPs is listed and you can remove the ones that shouldn't be there. You can remove the whole decal or only selected stamps. I often rename the stamps so I know which part they cover. Screen grabs would be great. Vernon "!" Zehr

Nixie that was not rubbish by any means at all. I know why you "think" it is rubbish... but you are wrong. Nicely done. Nicely done. p.s. I am both the guy chasing the money and the guy sleeping on the street... depends on the day of the week and which client hasn't paid me yet. Vernon "!" Zehr

Keekat in the library causes no problems with sound files. However if you load Keekat from the library that is linked to the CD and try to save it... you may encounter an error since the original linked file is on the CD. This would happen either way... from the library... or loaded "by hand". Libraries are just short cuts to files in a directory specified in the AM preferences. You could just as easily load keekat into a project by navigating to the CD or to where ever he might be on your hard drive. Some people reuse a lot of things and store them in libraries for easy reference and access. For instance the ExtraCD content has a library file that can be loaded into AM so all the content shows in the library window. --------------- Sound file/s do not need to be in a library to be used. They are like any other file external to AM that needs to be loaded into a project for use. You could have Keekat loaded from the library and a sound just imported from the hard drive... actually they are both the same thing. When you load something from a library it is exactly the same as right clicking on the model or sound folder in the PWS and importing that item. Libraries in AM just make it easier to view and access frequently used items. I personally don't use libraries... don't know why. I just don't use them. Personal preference I suppose. Vernon "!" Zehr

No, as far as I know, AM v10.5 doesn't handle mp3. On location... it doesn't matter where on the computer the file is. You can load it into a project from anywhere on your computer. You need to load it into the sound folder in AM, the same way you load images. Unless you are doing something with libraries. I don't use libraries myself. Like I said before... sounds are external files in AM just like pictures. Just right click on the sound folder in the PWS and import the sound. ---------------- 48mg sound file!!?!?!? 384mg ram!?!? Yes... this could be a problem. Don't know for sure but that is a HUGE GIGANTIC SOUND FILE. Generally I create really small low res versions of sound files for animating purposes. At the end you could then use something for the PC (don't ask me what... I have no idea) that allows adding in the hi res version of the sound to your final render... or if AM can handle the larger file, you could just switch it out before doing the final render. There is no reason to use such a large file while you are in the beginning stages of animation. I do the same with decal images. Real tiny to start... upsize at the end. This can speed up the process. 48mg sound file? I would seriously think about some way to chop it up into manageable pieces. You probably won't be animating to the whole thing all at once. Think about how you might chop it up. Vernon "!" Zehr

Is this 21 images? Or 21 decals? I would say there is no "stated" limit on decals. But there is a limit on what your computer can handle. Each image or decal requires memory... at some point you reach a "hypothetical" limit. It would be different for each user. ----------------------- Try to see if there is a way to combine some of those decals. If you are stamping the same image over and over... put them in one decal. If you are are stamping multiple different images... see if you can combine several images into one image and stamp with one decal. If the decals are in a small area... and you are scaling the decal down a tremendous amount... scale the image down in your paint application. A larger image uses more resources in AM. 21 decals... that is a LOT of decals. It would be easier to manage if these could be combined in some way. Vernon "!" Zehr

Can you be more specific? It doesn't show in what "directory"? Where are the sound files suppose to go? WAV files in AM are just like images or any other external file. Some people have had problems if the WAV is in the "wrong" format... don't know the specifics... never had a problem myself. Size doesn't matter... uh... well that's what they tell me anyway. Of course a huge sound file may slow down or even crash AM depending on how much ram you have since it uses more to load the sound file into memory. Vernon "!" Zehr