Fuchur

And you should have a look at this video-tutorial. It describes what you should be aware of when working with A:M and 3d-printing (in this case Makerbot / Makerware, but I am quite sure it is quite equal to other 3d printers): A:M2Makerware (3d-Printing) (be aware that in v18 the subdivision level for exporting STL has been increased further more...) Best wishes *Fuchur*

You may want to check my blog . See you *Fuchur*

Coolest Font-Animation EVER ! Loved the Love-Letters... really transports the mood over See you *Fuchur*

Yes, A:M can export STL-files (and some of the highest resolution-files you will find). Exporting in general: OBJ, STL, DXF, DirectX, 3ds, LWO, MDD (this is actually a Animation-fileformat for OBJs) and some others. FBX is not yet an option but may become one in future. I myself am using A:M and a Makerbot Replicator 2 for 3d-printing. Works very well, especially after processing the files through net fab (free software) See you *Fuchur* See you *Fuchur*

I believe that is the type of task (the unsolvable) that Robert is seeking. The moving gas simulation should be hard enough and close to unsolvable... something equal would be water with ink disolving in it... I do not really have a good idea on how to do it without using live-footage as a texture (which would be cheating at least if the footage would be a video-strip of ink disolving in water )... See you *Fuchur*

I was experimenting with something like this in A:M about two years ago but I have no earthly clue were those project files were or even how to set it up in A:M at the moment. Reason No. 5673 why I should follow my own advice and post my projects to the A:M Forum. Then at least I could find them and pick up where I left off. I believe in order to assist Robert in his effort we may need to pick very specific targets and point to it (otherwise we get what we get... well, we'll get that anyway but at least then it'll be more specific) The problem with "Light Painting" is that not all FX we see is 'light painted'... much of it is compositing... and we get a similar effect as if it were lighting. A classic example of this is the trails behind a fireball. Those are usually created by manipulating a very basic image that can be created by a variety of means (particles, drawing, still images animated/scaled/transformed over time). This effect is then blended/composited with the back plate to complete the desired effect. I guess what I'm saying here is that the effect isn't created by a light in a 3D scene and therefore to me cannot strictly classify as 'light painting'. 'Light Painting' to me is actually using lights to paint a scene, environment, surface or effect in (more or less) real time. As such light painting is quite straightforward although just as in the real world there is smoke, mirror and slight of hand that produce the effect in a 3D scene. The image here... (http://digital-photography-school.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/light-painting.jpg) clues us into how one particular method of Light Painting works (as Fuchur mentioned... long exposure times). For one of many ways forward consider Marcos (Xtaz) Rezende's MUFOOF technique. This works the same as in the real world where an illuminated object moves quickly under the right conditions to have it appear as if it is almost a solid object... and in some cases fool the eye into believing it is actually a solid object. The light displays on the sides of buildings that has been all the rage in Europe over the past few years is a prime example of the latter. I'd be glad to suggest some tips in this direction but it is possible Robert may want to select this for his "It can't be done!" project in February so I'll defer for the present. I will note that a lot of blur and bloom gets thrown into the mix on some of the Final Fantasy shots I've seen. Those additions are (relatively easily) accomplished via Post Effects in A:M (esp. v18 as A:M Composite appears to be working even better for me). When painting with light one must consider several factors the minimum of which is: the lights themselves, the surfaces the light is hitting (even if those surfaces are not visible) and the environment in between. I am very sure this is not a light at all... do not confuse this: I am not after creating such a thing with a light. It is just about how the look can be created in 3d / A:M. No matter how. I have several ideas how to do it (for instance with a snake-like glowing-geometry with bones in it attached to a path but that might be quite much work especially for many of them) or with a particle-emitter (but that one is tough, because the particles will very likely never glow like that and look as "full" as the tails in the video at least not if we are talking about sprites in A:M here. I have several ideas how this could be archieved, I am just giving something that is hard to archieve here for Robert... I could give a unsolveable task, but where would be the fun in that? See you *Fuchur*

Just to translate it as promised: German: English (roughly): It is a rough translation, but it should be quite close to what I said in German. See you *Fuchur*

Best wishes Marcos See you *Fuchur*

Lightpainting is more or less something like this. In real life you can use a long exposure time in your camera to create these effects. It is the look I am after here, not a still-image: - http://digital-photography-school.com/wp-c...ht-painting.jpg - - > more or less like the light tails which are following the dragon here at 3:44s (and after that > greatest epic music by the way ) See you *Fuchur*

I got into A:M because there was a small brochure talking about A:M (and many other software programs) when my formerly used 3d software (Monzoom 3d/Pro, which I got to my attention on in a department store when I was searching for new computer games) went out of business. I remember seeing a Lava kind of superhero looking really great and a bit of text about the software. It looked great... I then searched for it on the web and found Alien Song and Killer Bean and then I just asked about it over and over again till my dad bought me the software with his credit card for christmas or something like that... Long time ago ... around v7 - v8. (A:M 2000 > v8.0 was the first version I got). In the end, I got to A:M because of some sort of "brochure"... not exactly the same as a magazine, but close enough... See you *Fuchur*

TGAs are fine... PNGs have drawbacks (like not being able to reconstruct pixels which are transparent which can be done with tgas) but are widly supported. Both are fine, but TGAs are actually the better format for postprocessing because of that. See you *Fuchur*

I've wondered about that too. Have you made a feature request out of that? I'm not sure how many user have Photoshop however, and how well the other paint apps conform to the proper PSD format. I don't know if it's a can of worms or not. The biggest drawback is: It is a propheritery format. Other than that: I can't see why you should not make a feature request for it. We will see what happens. Till then you may want to try this: http://games.greggman.com/game/tga_thumbnails_for_windows/ See you *Fuchur*

Are you asked if you want to save 16bit, 24bit or 32bit-version? I am only familar with Photoshop CS (I think v8) and up where it worked always as it should for me. See you *Fuchur*

- A gas "simulation"-like animation (some of the stuff other software can do with pyrocluster / cloud-generators. There have been quite nice things on the forum already like that... but not moving as far as I know.) - A light paint-animation (glowing growing spiral-like lines which will fly around. (have a few ideas how to do it... but I am not sure if it really will look well) - Do something like this: (this one is not too hard, but it looks cool) See you *Fuchur*

You may want to use PNGs (I hope those will work). See you *Fuchur*

Sorry about the following, but this is quite complex and I would need too much time to translate this to english properly... I may do it later... [offenglish] Ich interpretier es so: Sozialkritik am Massiv-Konsum der westlichen Gesellschaften (besonders Nordamerika und Europa). Damit "schlägt" man den Kindern auf 2 Arten ins Gesicht: 1.) Zukünftige Generationen müssen sich mit z. B. Müll, Verschmutzung, etc. herumschlagen. (deshalb die übertrieben schwarzen Rauchwolken beim Auto und die hiesigen Kinder denen man ins Gesicht schlägt) 2.) Kinder in Afrika und anderen Ländern ohne Konsumgesellschaft / hohen Lebensstandard zahlen im Endeffekt mehr Geld für Grundnahrungsmittel weil die Produktion davon z. B. vom Ölpreis, der Konkurrenzsituation und natürlich sowas wie der Bio-Treibstoff-Produktion abhängt > Bio-Treibstoff kann z.B. aus Getreide hergestellt werden oder (viel schlimmer) Bauern fangen an weniger Lebensmittel anzubauen weil mit Bio-Masse für Treibstoff mehr Gewinn zu machen ist. Das verknappt dann das Angebot an z. B. Weizen, wodurch der Preis steigt (denn wir kaufen dann aus anderen Ländern zu, in denen sonst z.B. afrikanische Anbieter eingekauft hätten was die Preise massiv erhöht, etc. > Im Endeffekt läuft alles darauf hinaus: Die Erde hat nicht genug Resourcen um alle Leute auf der Welt so leben zu lassen wie wir in Europa und Nord-Amerika das tun... und um so mehr wir im Überfluß leben, um so weniger haben andere noch übrig... (deshalb die Weltkarte mit den ganzen Kiddys und das "Mehr Konsum"-Zeugs, etc.) Und ums noch zu erwähnen: Nein, ich wähle nicht die auf Teufel komm raus die Grünen .[/offenglish] See you *Fuchur*

Happy Birthday Marcos! Keep on rocking! See you *Fuchur*

I doubt that is true anymore. The CPUs are quite different now and A:M is coded to take advantage of them now. On a straight comparison of equal CPU speeds the intels are doing better. Making a cost/benefit comparison is a bit more complicated. It would be interesting to see what AMD has with its new Trinity-APUs which seem to be quite fast (they were released today, so no good benchmarks are available for now) and it could be very interesting with the new huma-interface and stuff like that. Currently an AMD system cannot compete with the fastest Intel-Chips (which are much more expensive). The "AMD is faster than Intel for A:M" statement was true till about A:M v15/16 (keep in mind: if a Intel CPU is 15% faster than an AMD-CPU it was on par with AMDs performance). After that, Steffen used a new compiler which was specially optimised for Intel and the performance boost for AMD did go away, since the compiler is one from Intel. Still you can get a very good system for MULTICORE applications OR netrenderer with AMDs FX CPUs for a quite low price, but the intels are faster if you are not looking at the money. Currently it is more interesting to see what the APUs from AMD are doing. The APUs from AMD are much better (based on GPU-performance) than anything Intel has to offer at an equal or quite a bit more expensive level in the fake-APU-area, especially with the new APUs from AMD. CPU-based, AMDs APUs are not that good than Intel CPUs / GPUs-combinations (real APUs are a little different, but it is more or less the same for the customer) but the combined performance is better. AMD's APUs are especially well suited for low- and mid-level-gaming-systems and are for instance used in the PS4 or Xbox One. For rendering we will see how they will do. If A:M would someday in future receive a huMA optimation (enabling the computer to use GPU and CPU at the same time for any task needed), they very likely will outperform classical CPUs by far, but we will see what will happen there. See you *Fuchur*

try xnview or irvan view or try using png files. See you *Fuchur*

Hi Developers, now the A:M v18 SDK is available at the FTP server of Hash. It can be found here: ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/Sdk/ or AM180SDK.zip and of course on the website going to "Support & Contact" > "FTP-Server". You will need MS Visual Studio 2010 (or up) to use the SDK. Hope you'll enjoy it and come up with some cool stuff . See you *Fuchur*

Hm... tried it yesterday with a model and I've got the option in v18. See you *Fuchur*

Do not forget the "Average Normals" feature which may help alot too. See you *Fuchur*

Very strange, but maybe a version "problem"? I have the latest (testing-)version installed and you do too, if I am not wrong. It may have to do with that. It can not be OS language settings since I've got a German Windows here and that should toggle that too if it would be that way... See you *Fuchur*

Very likely... is it in your A:M version too? See you *Fuchur*

More or less . The void = Die Leere. See you *Fuchur*