Fuchur

Wow Jamie . That is really great. We will surely try to help where we can . Rendering is something I do not have a tutorial about, but I am sure Rodney or Robert have something for that . See you *Fuchur*

I think you should consider increasing that rate a little . Nice to here from you Brian and interesting to here about your work at Blur and what you are doing today . See you and thanks for visiting *Fuchur*

Soulcage still works with A:M for some projects. For others they use other software. It depends. Avalanche has been bought by Disney a couple of years ago. Last time I heard from Anzovin, they sold Maya-Plugins... I am not sure if they still do. Some of the artists you are talking about are still with us... like Stian, William and Dusan... I am not sure about Stephen. Jeff Lew is a little hard to answer for me. He has worked on some huge movies (like Matrix Reloaded) and so on, then he made his animation tutorials and the KillerBean 3-animation. It cost much money to do that KillerBean3 and I do not think he got everything back he has put into it. Still he said, he would have done it again. It's and artists life... ups and downs. I think people who are not the absolute shooting stars are longer lasting. They are small gears in a big machine, but they often keep their jobs longer and I think are often more happy about them on the long run. I am still with my company for about 8 years now, I am doing animation work and web-developement / app-developement there and from time to time there are 3d projects too. I like that kind of diversity and I think you need to be flexible in that way to stay up and running in the business. On the other hand, I am in Germany... it is much less hire and fire here... people tend to stay in their job for quite a while. It is harder to get one, but if you have one and you do your things well enough, you will stay in longer (because laws are more protective of the employees here...) I am happy what I can do at my company. It is fun, demanding and never boring especially because I have many different projects like that.

Softimage (XSI) has been bought by Autodesk and was discontinued. (I think between one to two years ago) Left is Lightwave (but they are not in best shape...), C4d, Houdini, Blender and of course A:M. There are specialized applications available, but all in one products are more or less rare. See you *Fuchur*

I'd say it ties in with Autodesk's plan to get rid of all possible competitors... I just don't like them for what they are nowadays... They are close to a monopol company. Not as bad as for instance Google (since Google is it in several very important markets and Autodesk is it only in the 3d-market. (not even in the CAD market) but still... See you *Fuchur*

Smooth will "smooth" stuff... it is meant to be used to create "smoother" surfaces without changing them too much. Like that it is not exaclty what you want there... making a circle of the splines would change the spline very much... I already thought, that it is not exactly what you want it to be. See you *Fuchur*

Great wizards Malo . For the first one, you may want to check the "Smooth"-Wizard out. Maybe it is what you are searching for... (maybe not exactly – it depends) See you *Fuchur*

You can right-click on the pose (eighter in the User Properties or the timeline) and choose "Settings" from the menu. There you can choose what should be the default and it will be saved for the pose of the model. See you *Fuchur*

Jason has broken his arm a few days ago. He'll try to answer as fast as he can, but it may take a little longer then before. See you *Fuchur*

Very interesting process . Keep the tuts coming . See you and thank you *Fuchur*

Not really... put two grids in the same size next to each other (facing the same way) and put the emitter in front of them. An emitter would now shoot rays on both surfaces and the direction would be changed for both in this situation. With a "master patch" you need to select one patch of each grids to do the same. In other situations an emitter could be bad so, if you for instance put a continous surface in front of it (a box) and shoot on it without being in it for instance. I am not saying that this is a much better approach, it is just a different one. If the master patch is better in your opinion or much easier to implement, I am fine with that one too. See you *Fuchur*

This can be helpful for many situations, but it would only work if everything is really attached to eachother, right? The good thing about shooting rays from a point is, that that does not have to be the case there. See you *Fuchur*

That are two different feature requests more or less. In the end there is no way for the software to know in which way the normals should point in a model. It could be that you want to export "reversed" normals for instance if you want to export a sky-sphere from A:M for a game engine it needs to have flipped normals. Like that you can see into it but you can not see out of it in the game. But a basket ball (which has roughly the same geometry) needs to have the normals pointing out. And this can easily get much more complex if we are talking about more complex geometry or even a whole scene. I am not aware of an exporter in any other software that will automatically be able to determine what you want in every situation... like that it is not wise to make that an automatic process. We are the artists who need to have that kind of control over our models... any other approach is only helping in very specific situations and will give us a head ache in others. But again: This should not be attached to the FBX-exporter. The FBX-exporter should work as most other exporters in A:M too. You define the surface / material / animation / bone-structure in A:M and the exporter really does nothing else than translating that to another file-format. The correct normal algorithm I am talking about is to make the model look like it should before exporting. This is an own plugin-request for a simple but effective way to fix normal problems created while modeling while preserving the full control over what you do. All that talk about COG, Lights, etc. is just too much talk about a very simple thing: You need to tell the correct normal algorithm from where to start. You do not really need to know what a COG is or how a light works. All you need to do is to define a starting point in the 3d space. See you *Fuchur* PS: This is offtopic and only for explaination: I myself find Center of gravity (=> C.O.G.) a very stupid name for what we are taling about... COG is something that is an artifical concept for animators while animating or a real thing for physicist / structural engineer but it is not suitable in an articial geometric modelling universe itself. It can be helpful to create a certain impression for a human, but from a mathematical point of view, it is useless as long as no "real" masses are involved. I like the name pivot much better, because a pivot can be moved wherever it needs to be and has no "defined/fixed" position.

I'd say this could be overcome by just letting the user select for which parts of the model s/he wants to correct the normals for. In general a 3d-designer will not attach eyes (for instance) to the head but just stick them in the holes for the eyes. Like that, the user could easily just make a attach-select and hide or lock everything of the model that should not be affected. The good thing about that approach is, that you can for instance have normals which guide in a special (unexpected) way if you want that. See you *Fuchur*

In the end if you move the COG, it really is no longer important if it is a COG or not. Then it is the pivot part I mentioned above in this example from the selected group. I often work with that when for instance rotating things around other things in the modelling window, etc. But back to this: It is all about defining a starting-point for the rays to shoot from... in which way it is done does not matter. Just give the plugin something to shoot the start-rays from. A Null object, light, pivot (of a group, or even the modelling-window, but I recommend a named group), "moveable COG" (i do not think something like that exists, since it has to be at the center of gravity to be a COG and the gravity makes only then a sense if mass is taken into account), a CP, a numeric input (I do not recommend that) etc. See you *Fuchur*

The difference is, that you can put the light wherever you want. Not only the Center of Gravity but anywhere you like. A very simple example why it can not work with COG in many situations can be seen in the image attached. The only possibility to get the approach to work is to define the point where to start by yourself. This could be done with a null-object, a single-point on a spline (for instance one that is part of a 2-CP spline but is not connected to the patches you want to do the correct normals algorithm on), a pivot of a group or for instance a light. I use the light-reference, because it is easier to understand how it should work if you think of a photon-mapping-approach here, but it really does not matter much. Show back facing polygones is easy... it takes any "polygon" created, copies it and inverts it using the normal as a mirror-point in realtime (or while final rendering, if it is necessary). Concept of normals: It really is not very important in a spline-world, but in some situations, where the calculations are based on the direction of the normal: Exports, especially if you want to create real objects from it (3d-printers, etc.), Hair and Hair-Dynamic Simulations, Smooth-Algorithems for showing smooth surfaces, etc. "So any patch with neighbors that are abnormal (approaching 180 degrees away from what is deemed normative) can safely be flipped." I think this is, what Correct Normals is trying to do (it does a little more, but it is the basic algorithm). The problem is, that the neighbour-patches are not necessarily facing the same way as the first one, because they can be heavily bend for instance. That is fine for them to do, but the calculation has a problem there. And of course 180 degrees is a real extrem... but look at the patches shown on the donut-shape in the attached image. Even if the patches would be flipped, they would not really have a 180° difference, since they already are "rotated" by themselves in comparision to the neighbours. It would only be 150° or something like that... so you have to specify a starting-point for the flipping to get it right. for instance 90° or 120°. The problem is, the more complex the models are, the harder or even impossible it gets to find that number. See you *Fuchur*

You can export the current keyboard shortcuts for your A:M installation by going to "Tools > Customize > Keyboard" and pressing on the "Export"-Button. See you *Fuchur*

COGs will not do the trick Rodney... make a tube-construction with several tubes intersecting each other, etc. and try to find the center of gravity of the whole tube-construction it may not even be in one of the tubes... it will not work for more complex structures but only for very simple once. I thought about it for quite some time now, and there is not really a better solution I can think of. Yes it can be overcome by good modeling practice, but I think I am quite able to model in a good way and understand more or less what I do, but even with all that years of modelling experience sometimes I run into trouble with normals if I try to model fast without thinking too much about it and just having a little bit of fun till it turns out to be something nice I want to go on with...

Bingo Nancy... it is really just about the normals pointing the right way. Seffen tried several ways to implement an algorithm to get that job done ("Correct Normals"-Plugin, Refind-Normals, etc.) but it never works perfectly for me in more complex situations. And I think this plugin should do the job. And yes, some features need correct normals... hair, 5-pointers and all the exporters, especially for 3d-printing-stuff it is quite important. See you *Fuchur*

You have to get in touch with Jason for that. (> support@hash.com). You can make it a little faster if you use the host-id-tool (for instance available at the trial request-page) and get the host-id and let it determine the host-id of your new computer and send that to Jason too. I'd say you will need the new host-id, your subscription-key and if available the old master0.lic-file. (if that is not available, it should work without too... Jason will tell you what to do then. See you *Fuchur*

My most wanted: - an FBX-Exporter / Importer. - a plugin, which will set normals by placing a light inside a model, on the light and open the Plugin. After a setting dialog (bounce-time, distances?) the rays of the light will now hit the patches from "inside". Anywhere where a light hits a patch, the patches normal will flip to the inverted direction of the light ray which it has been hit from. The "light ray" should than be killed or even better: bounce of and do the same again for a setable amount of bounces. Should only be done to "visible" patches. (so if you hide something, it should not be affected) Just to mention it: It does not have to be a light of course... if a null or a point of a spline is easier to do, that is as good as a light too . See you *Fuchur*

The problem I see is that, you are using no 5-point-patches but instead a star-intersection (more then two splines crossing in a point between the fingers). That will result in the hard edges there... Have a look at my tutorial here... it is about a foot, but in the end, it is the same... . http://www.patchwork3d.de/erstellung-eines-fusses-181-de around 6:00min it starts to get interesting.

I'll follow this . Very interesting workflow. See you *Fuchur*

Why? Win8 was bad, Win 8.1 was a little better and I think Win 10 is good again. See you *Fuchur*

You will need eighter 2 groups to do what you want or you need a higher density of patches / CPs in your model. There is no way around that. This is the problem with a "one-selection-mode"-approach, but I have to say I like the simplicity of that much more than I dislike the disadvantages and you will very fast yourself acustom to that and think in the "right" way when modeling stuff like that. In other software, you often can select many different things like vertex (cps), edges (a single spline) and polygones (a patch) by itself, but that makes stuff much more complex and you will often need to switch modes while working and you will often wonder why a certain tool is not available till you release, that you need to select the stuff in a different mode to get the tool you are looking for... if you are used to the "just select something and think about it later"-approach, that can be quite frustrating too... See you *Fuchur*