Fuchur

With subdivision applied, I could not easily find the edge I wanted to split for instance. I could have used a viewing-mode with both (smoothed and not smoothed) surfaces, but that is really just adding more lines (possibly many more) to your viewport and was not really easy to handle. So I hit + / - over and over again to see what a splitted edge in the low poly-model would do to the high polymodel in the end. Maybe I was using it the wrong way, I don't know. Does not really make sense to get into that kind of stuff. Never really helps anybody and I doubt there is a "true" answer to such a question anyway... in the end it is all a Glaubensfrage... (just to ask: Are you German? Kommt ein bißchen so und die amerikanische Tastatur hilft nicht gerade beim "Ü" finden )...

You do, because you don't model "before" you subdivide. You display your subdiv and your poly proxy simultaneously. I would not know how to split an edge (for instance) in any reasonable way without decreasing subdivision levels again. At least the last time I tried that in Softimage I was constantly changing the subdivision level over and over again till I got what I wanted. I have to admit, that that was maybe 3 or 4 years ago, but it really was a pain... I would have acustomed to it for sure, but since I was used to get exactly what I wanted at any resolution I wanted it really was less good in that aspect. Not necessarily, but there are situations when it would have been exactly that: Better. No longer having to use proxy-models or animated subdivision levels can be much easier. Always the right resolution you want, exactly as you wish it should look (not subdivided and looking slidly different than before because the smooth-algorithm is not exactly doing what you would think it would do... don't get me wrong: There are situtations in which SubDs can be very helpful and no doubt: It takes a master of the art in both ways to model to create great models, but it is not all better with SubDs like many try to tell you when argumenting about Splines/Patches/NURBS/SubDs... they have disadvantages as well as splines do have some. But splines & patches (especially Hash Splines&Patches) are in some situations much better to be used. As always it all depends on situations... I am not really talking about real-time rendering here but about final rendering with CPU&GPUs and RAM amount, filesizes at super-high-resolution-polygone-models, etc. See you *Fuchur*

Yes, it is hard... anyway I loved the way hamr did it... very small filesizes at stunning resolution-possibilities even a few years ago without CUDA and OpenCL-based approaches. Today polygone-based approaches (source-material... hamr used polygones to display stuff too) slowly get in the same direction, but it really was a step ahead of its time... The infrastructure was really the only reason why it did not spread widely, if you ask me... I really do not like this at all... it should be about best techniques, not about market shares... (I know this is unrealistic, but it is not the best way we could go...). Subdivision-Surfaces are not the same approach, since you just dont know exactly how your model will look before subdividing it. That is the biggest difference. Smoothing afterwards is never as good as working smooth from the beginning with... today it gets better and better, but it really was a bad thing that is took so long and that we are today at the same quality we could have reached years ago...

animated pngs where very promising... but only firefox really supported them...

i am using three.js and it is nice. hamr was nicer though because it could use spline data and calculate the resolution based on your hardware and settings on the fly.... a real killer feature if you ask me especially since the filesizes of mdls and prjs by A:M are way smaller and like that better suited for mobile users (and at that quality even desktop users...) but anyway it would be very cool to write an importer of mdl data for three.js i am using it with objs till now...

Yes... I have used that for implementing a 3d object viewer based on three.js and making the 3d-object uploadable as OBJ + MTL + Texture-Files there to be easily used by non-programmers in our CMS. For that, since I change the filenames for security reasons I had to change the MTL-file too to be able to use the textures again and in the end, it is nothing else than a text-file, which gets interpreted and can be changed too. See you *Fuchur*

Very cool Jason, looks nice . See you *Fuchur*

Thanks a lot guys . had a nice day and yodeled my a** off . See u *Fuchur*

You can create a pose (on/off) and use the visibilty-setting of the bone(s) with it. Like that you can swtich their visibility by switching the pose on and off. The pose can be named in a way like "show_export_bones". and that should do it. Is that what you want? See you *Fuchur*

Do not really get it... isnt that a Disney movie (and of course a comic book)? I quite liked it, (but I did not read the comics before or knew about the story, so fo a fan it may be different)-... See you *Fuchur*

Give it a little time, but he is back home again now . See you *Fuchur*

As far as I know, there is no complete documentation about the formats, but there are example-plugins available, which should give you a good starting point in the SDK (I think geometry only there) and here you can get the source code for the directX-exporter (including bone-animation data): DirectX-Export-Plugin with SourceCode Same is available for Torque: Torque-Export-Plugin with SourceCode Steffen has written an MDD-Plugin too, which could be quite interesting, but I am not sure if the code for that is freely available. I'll ask him about that... That should at least give you a good starting point. Are you trying to write an FBX- or Collada-Exporter? See you *Fuchur*

Have noticed that too... I told Steffen about it. In the meanwhile, you need to create a full spline (containing 3 CPs) and join the CP in the middle with the end you want it to stop. See you *Fuchur*

Did you assign a hair material to a model and did you switch to Grooming-Mode (next to modelingmode etc.)? Otherwise this mode is not available.

Or... it's possible the problem would be solved without side effects. AMD makes fine cards that are widely used by many people. I think it's unlikely that AMD would be a general problem with other software. I think it is more likely this is a specific NVidia-with-A:M problem that you are having. If you ever do break down and try it, make a snapshot of your system before you put the AMD card in, just so it is simple to revert back to your Nvidia state. Denmark is right next to Germany... maybe if you dropped by Steffen's place one day he'd be able to diagnose the situation. Say you just happened to be in the neighborhood hunting butterflies. Steffen is a little far from him, if you ask me But all I can say is: AMD cards are great. If you are not using Linux (which you are not since you are using A:M) it should work very well... I have exclusivly used AMD cards for many years now, bought different GPUs and APUs from AMD and never had any problems. My last nvidia card (a geforce 4 ti) was okay too, but I never regraded using my newer cards like my HD4850 I am using now. Anyway: If you want to, it may be an option to use something like teamviewer to see which problems are happening there... but this is something Steffen needs to talk to you about... See you *Fuchur* PS: If you want to use an AMD card, you need to remove the Nvidia drivers before installing it (the same the other way round...) that is essentially and not only done by uninstalling it simply... there are eraser programms for both manufactures, which will help there...

Hi Robby, welcome aboard . Let us know how you proceed and if you have any questions: Don't hesitate and ask . See you *Fuchur*

where can it be watched? see u *fuchur*

steffen reworked the obj import at v18a or something like that. maybe this is what he did? sounds very cool for me . see you *fuchur*

The biggest Pros currently are: Windows Software available for it and Wacom-Pen included. I do not know if it really is as well as the Cintiq-Series from Wacom, but if they are, they are much much cheaper than those. (13" Wacom Cintiq costs close to 1900 Euros here...) It may have advantages to have that one (at least compared to other tablet systems). I am not a big fan of tablet devices itself, since I do not like touch as input device (I just need a mouse and a keyboard, because they are that much more precise compared to my fingers... having a hit radius of 25 pixels (and up) is just so much worse than with a mouse (hit radius around 1-3 pixels). A pen is better, since it is closer to a mouse but still for anything but painting this is not an option for me neighter... I will not start on the keyboard thing... no physical responce, not suited for fast writting without looking at the keyboard and while I may not need to carry a keyboard around, I now need to carry a cleaning-solution bottle with me, since otherwise I would get crasy with those finger prints on it... for smartphones they are okay (the mobile thing is more important here), but for anything bigger than that and meant to work with in any reasonable way, they are just crappy... In general I recommend to get a good ultrabook / ultrathin laptop or just get a normal laptop (which may be a small amount thicker (like 2 mm if you get the right laptop) and maybe a little heavier (again, maybe 100g for the right laptop) but are much cheaper, you do not have to worry about breaking it in the middle that much and (in some cases) give you very exciting things like optical drives (I mean, hello? Devices without that would be kicked out the window a few years ago... yes CD / DVD / BluRay-drives are not that important anymore but still very common... for 2mm it is just not worse it to leave them out)... All in all: I think tablets are a bad developement, since they slow down the developement of real computer hardware itself, teach you to only consume and pay for the media instead to creating it and just are not suited to do much with them... a personal computer is as cool as it is because it has wide possibilities... you can use it to do MANY things... video editing, play games (the good kind), create 3d graphics, animate, write books, do audio work, programm software, create games, calculate important stuff, work with it on scientific levels and man things more... and of course you can consume stuff more freely, often with better displays, combine it with microphones, cameras, different input devices and so on... and now I buy a tablet with which I can do much less for the same amout of money (IPads and Co are expensive) to only consume stuff and anything else just does not work or is limited that much that I can not do it or I can only do it because the company selling the tablet does not want me to do it? If I put a SSD into a good laptop you get better and more flexible software and hardware... They are just cool because Steve said they are, but there are very, very small reasons to buy those if you ask me... See you *Fuchur*

3 just has been released to the public... See you *Fuchur*

I stumbled about it too, but it is logically. If you leave the state to "On" and you want the parts to be active for that state, you would have to hit the value twice. The first time to create the Channel to hold the data in (since On is the default state there is no channel at the beginning). But that would put the value "off" into the keyframe. You would need to hit it again to set the keyframe to "On". By putting the pose to "Off" you just need to hit the value once, since it is the right value which will be set to the keyframe. If you ask me, this tutorial was very well planned before he started it... . See you *Fuchur*

Happy birthday . See you *Fuchur*

Very cool and interesting method. I used the Active-Buttons alone before, but this has the big advantage that you can use one model (import it easily, etc. into other projects, etc.) I'll check that technique out . See you and thank you very much for the tutorial! *Fuchur*

Interesting find... On my PC with Safari, Firefox, InternetExplorer and Chrome the website loads just fine... But you are both on Macs, right? Very likely you do not allow session-cookies there by default... The reload of the website is done to test, wheather the browsers supports JavaScript but I think I will just assume, that it does and leave that test behind from now on... I will change that behaviour once I get home... See you *Fuchur*

i think with opengl3 the need of basic displaysetting is no longer given. opengl3 should be able to run it. but i would recommend using basic in any case... it just takes less system resources... see u *fuchur*