Fuchur

I'm not sure what you mean by this. NetRender will be able to render anything that A:M can render, you shouldn't need extra A:M licenses unless, of course you want to work in A:M on those other computers. Sounds to me like working in A:M while rendering which would mean buying new A:M lics. I think he knows aboit rendernodes which can be bought without a full A:M. see u *Fuchur*

Not sharp? Very hard to tell... it really is about the default behaviour I think... I had a customer a half year ago who asked for a specific look I just could not get from A:M (very likely because of my lack of knowledge... a horror of any 3d artist: Customer shows you an image and says: "Excatly that look... do it like that." or even better: "I once saw an image I liked very much... it looked cooler and more sharp... do it that way...". In the end it was a scanline renderer (at least I think it was) with very nicely (and only in that specific situation suited) materials which made the image he was refering to. It looked bright and hard very sharp reflections and it was about a transparent, glass syringe with a glue-like liquid in it in a very bright environment (white) since the companie's CD needed it that way. Very hard to tell, very hard to create in the short timeframe they had and close to impossible without heavy post work... I will see if I can show off an image (at least a part of the image) so you can see what I am talking about but I have to be very careful since this is nothing allowed to be shown in the public (prescription medical background with a big customer...). In the end they took one part of my animation they liked very much (about a transparent plastic injector and the other part was produced by someone else (looking sharp and cool ). I understood what they wanted but I could not get it without changing the part they liked about it since I had to change the lightening of the scene for that and I doubt I could have created it that well as the other company did... I am quite sure it could have been done, but I just was not able to do it... See you *Fuchur*

I'm not saying that. Not at all. I'm genuinely currious, though, about the expectations of those, like you, who dream of using an external physically based renderer with A:M. How do you imagine your workflow? Say you build a scene with A:M, and then what? Can you explain how you imagine the link between the scene you did in A:M and the physically based render? What are the steps? What do you need to do to your scene so it can render in a physically based renderer? Have you ever rendered a scene with a physically based renderer before? How do you define the materials and the lights for example? Just to make it clear: I am quite pleased with the A:M Renderengine... I think it is quite a fast CPU renderer (and very likely one of the easierst to use). I know from a recently discontinued 3d software (Softimage), that they use special materials or light/light types directly in the software, which only work with the specific renderer they are built for... The best intigration I could imagine would be (I highly doubt, that this is possible in an easy way): - Create your models, textures, materials, chor with lightenting, etc. as before. - Click on "Render to file". - Get a question which renderer to use. "A:M Native, LuxRender GPU, Arnold" (or whatever). -> A:M converts the scene to be useable for the other renderer (not visible for the user). - The external renderer starts up and asks for which settings to use. (which would be MUCH more complicated if you ask me compared to the render dialog in A:M, which I find very easy to use and very well suited to work with. > I am not sure if this will really give a significant different result (at least not if the converter does not do anything very different with the scene) Another possible workflow I could imagine, with more control, but maybe even harder to do: - Go to the options and choose a renderer to be used in A:M. "A:M Native, LuxRender GPU, Arnold", etc. - (since most other rendering-engines are expensive (like Arnold or Maxwell) you would have to specific a path to the installation of them. - Create your models and textures as before and integrated some "external" materials and lights (for instance Arealights, etc) in A:M which could very likely only be renderer using Arnold. > All the rendering work would be done in the other renderer now, since you importated materials and lights which are not compatible with A:M anymore (due to different settings, etc.) Again: This is how I imagine it, but I am very aware of the disadvantages in workflow that may result in. ////////////////////////////////////////////// My opinion is: A:M's Renderer can do everything that I ever need to do and it very likely would be my lack of knowledge and/or experience that would prevent me from doing something... If you ask me, A:M's renderer would need some sort of GPU-optimisation (for instance OpenCL-based) and maybe some sort of area lights and maybe light-emitting surfaces (which very likely results in longer rendering times) and it could do anything I could imagine it to do... A comparision between renderers can be seen here: Compare renderer I am well aware, that all obviously visible differences in the renderings are all possible to overcome in the renderers... See you *Fuchur*

A:M comes with 4 Rendernodes if you buy a licence. Animation:Master itself will not be connectable to netrenderer but the rendernodes/slaves it comes with are. I am not exactly sure if Netrenderer will be able to "see" that you have 4 A:M-installations available since the licencing is typically done on the computer netrenderer runs on and it references the licence on that computer. If it does not, you may have to speak to Hash to get a licence with all the codes in it. Since you bought 2 or 3 licences recently, I am sure they will put that together for you. Jason is the guy to go to at support@hash.com if it is not possible right away like that. See you *Fuchur*

Hi Yves, many thanks for your comment . Always good to have someone who really knows what he is talking about . Very likely it is about GPU-rendering speed using OpenCL or CUDA (I'd prefer OpenCL because of compatibility reasons even so some say CUDA is faster) and maybe the variation of the "style". (A:M has in my experience a very warm / not very "sharp" looking rendering result very well suited for comic characters while other renderers are often "harder" looking... I am not sure if this is the way it is because of Patches & Splines or if it is really a slight different in the renderer...) See you *Fuchur*

The pro-version costs $1500. In the past it was like that: For some advanced features you had to pay but the default once were free and you even could publish games with it, as long as you could get it going without the features. Here you can see the differences between the pro and the free version (at least for Unity 4): Compare versions Just to note it: If you want to publish to different platforms like iOS or Android, Unity will cost more money again... But still it is a very powerful and nice 3d-/Game-engine with a very powerful Editor and environment. I have used Unity in the past with A:M to create a small game with it, which can be found here and a turn around-application here. See you *Fuchur*

Basically yes. You run NetRender, load a PRJ, load a "Preset", then decide how many render nodes to devote to the render. A Preset is something you save from A:M that captures all the render settings so you don't have to make them all over again in NetRender. Thanks, is the preset a different file? I am about to set up a production line with A:M and external PC dedicated to render in May. Everyone is new to A:M and heavy render test. Yes, a preset is a different file. It has the file extension ".pre". There are many ways to go about setting such a thing up, but the most common and straight forward one is: - One server (computer > does not need any server-os but will be refered as a server here) should be used to run netrenderer on it. Depending on the amount of rendernodes used (how many computers are used to communicate with it) and how many cores this server has, you may be able to render with it too by activating renderslaves on it. At least one core should be dedicated to netrender (server)-service. - Every computer should have a network drive with the same drive letter (for instance P:/) from which it can access the project-files (including PRJ, texture-files, other external resources, etc.). (there are ways to do it otherwise, but I would not recommend that, since it is much more setting up work). I recommend to let them output their results to one folder accessable to all computers (for instance "P:/[Projectname]/output/v1/". - On each computer you need to install Netrenderer and run it. The licencing will be done on the server. That means the server needs the rendernode-enabled lic-file to be installed. The slaves do not need that. - First start one renderslave on each computer and right-click on the icon in the taskbar. In the options set the servers IP-address (something like 192.168.0.1, or whatever IP your server has). - Now start additional renderslaves for each computer till you hit the limit of cores the computer has. (a quadcore should use 4 renderslaves at max). - On the server you can open a new Renderjob by opening the project-file and setting it up with the preset-file (be sure to use the network drive letter if the projectfiles are placed on the server too, not the local one when opening the project file. Otherwise the renderslaves on the other computers will look for it locally too and will not find it). Important: Render to image sequences! Netrenderer can not render to AVIs directly. You first need to render to an image sequence and you can put the image sequence together using A:M later in the process (if you need that... most post production software can use image sequences) That should give you a little head start on the topic . If you have other questions, please feel free to ask . See you *Fuchur*

Unity is really great... and it looks very promising... They are working with Mozilla to make their engine WebGL (playing without a plugin in a browser) and they are working with AMD currently to implenet Mantel... Very cool stuff indead... realtime GI is very cool looking too. (it is very likely a trick and not realtime radiosity... sending out Millions of rays and tracking their behaviour in realtime is a little over the top for most GPUs today, if you ask me) but still it looks very very cool... (if I am wrong, please let me know... that would be a great break through ) See you *Fuchur*

Have a great one Robert I am very glad to have you around. You are a backbone of this community . See you and have fun! *Fuchur*

I think John/Matt had one showing Manhattan, if I am not wrong... > Link Will that one do? See you *Fuchur*

Hi and welcom to the A:M forums Blickfang, the biggest difference between those two is, that A:M provides an easier to understand and more consistent user interface and an easier and more fluid character animation system. Blender has the big disadvantage, that it is written by many people who do not really care about a straight user interface experience but just do it the way they want to do it. That means: Each tool looks different and is not written in the same way the one before is. That is fine as long as you do only tutorials or play around but when you have to think outside the box and do things that have not been done in a video tutorial, you very likely get lost much faster. Of course A:M has a spline/patch-orientation which can be good or bad, depending on your taste. A:M is more like drawing something while box-modelling software like Blender is more like sculpting. Splines / Patches / NURBS are resolution independ (no matter how close you camera gets, it will look smooth) while typical box-modeller do not have that advantage. Most software claims to have NURBS or stuff like that, but since they are using polygones as their main modelling tool their NURBS-modelling suffers heavily from that. There are advantages of Blender which mostly result from the open source nature of Blender (many different use cases, free, etc.) but if you get into serious production or want to learn the art of animation, that does not help much. Doing much but nothing indepth is like not doing it at all, if you ask me. I'd suggest that you get the trial (I can assure you that it is not a virus in any way...) and see which interface or modelling method you like more and decide it that way. See you *Fuchur*

Create a new group containing the whole model and use "Average Normals" = On and "Normal Weight" = 100. THat should give you a quite good looking model when brought to a choreography. (use final-rendering if you see some odd edges) See you *Fuchur*

Very well done . Thank you very much for sharing . See you *Fuchur*

v18b is right around the corner... See you *Fuchur*

Ah, right... why didn't I think of that... I already used that for a still at work some time ago... works great.

Shaded may be a little tricky, but in A:M you can tell any group of splines to render as lines, which should be close to what you are looking for... Shaded lines will be more tricky, but could be possible using Sweeper to simulate the lines as geometry. See you *Fuchur*

Really looking great Robert Well done! See you *Fuchur*

Happy Birthday Jason . Keep it rocking and have a great time See you *Fuchur*

There are different methodes but this is one of the easy once: The magic is - you need to make the actions independ from eachother by setting their influence-timeframes to be different. See my little video I just created to show what I mean: See you *Fuchur* PS: No audio on this one, just video... should make it clear anyway... PPS: If you want a transition between two actions, activate it in the properties for the first action and move the second one a little to the right. This will create a linear transition (which can be fine or not, depending on what you want to do...) The other way is to use the same keyframes on the last frame of the first and the first frame of the second animation as I showed in the video... it depends on what you are after and what your actions are like. easy_animation.mp4

Anyone with 10.9 can confirm this? It may be a problem with Macs 10.9 and up. See you *Fuchur*

Who is not waiting for that? See you *Fuchur*

Very cool Fun to watch and well animated . See you *Fuchur*

Hi Robcat Doing smart skin in an action designed for the motion planned for the bone will show all the interim movements and allows You to keep a record of all the rotations. Copying the bone rotation from one action to another may actually have been Your suggestion in Your tutorial, but not sure right now. The smart skinning transfer actually works, its the simple bone rotation that does not want to copy over. It does in v12 but not V17 or 18. Thanks for responding at such a late hour. Just to be sure: Do you have the filter for rotation, etc. active? See you *Fuchur*

Yes, the Mac version of TextWrangler can do it. As always Robert you have produced two more excellent videos. Very helpful and interesting... If I find the time I will use PHP to create a huge line with that approaches... maybe tomorrow or the day after that... we will see. See you *Fuchur*

Hey Mike, have a great one . See you *Fuchur*