Fuchur

This time around we did create a little bit of a different design to better suit our mini campaign around christmas presents. That means this time around the image isn't created with A:M. As always you will find our Christmas Calendar here: https://advent.3we.de But I started to create a goat in 3d anyway and got already pretty far, so I am working on it still to get this look back ;). (Do you know that moment if you did a great job and then you are just not able to get the same look back after changing a couple of things to make it even better? That is exactly what happend here with this one...) Hope you like it ;). Best regards *Fuchur*

Actually in the interface you can. It is at Tools > Cusotmize > Appearance and in the Dropdown you can find "Control Points" and change its color. But is there a reason why you did post this here? Best regards *Fuchur*

That looks very promising Dan . Keep up the great work! Best regards *Fuchur*

Oh then I missunderstood that. It is called Distrotion Mode or Box in A:M. There is a modifier in Actions which is called "Distort" which should do that, but I never used it before... It has to be added to the action and you will have to have a bone in your model with attached CPs to define what is manipulated I think, but I am not very deep into that topic currently. I am pretty sure Robert can tell you more about it. Best regards *Fuchur*

1.) That is a little tricky and one of the biggest problems with Smartskins. The easiest I know about is to only use "default" rotation angles like 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, etc. That will help you a lot. But if you did not do that till now, the way I found is this: a) Open your smartkin so there is the temporarily open in which you can switch to muscle mode (F7). b) Select the CP that is behaving badly. c) Find its number. Easiest thing to find it is by just activating "Show manipulator properties". It will give you an overlay which tells you anything about the CP. Be aware: You have to click on the CP, not do a rectangle selection or something) d.) In the PWS you navigate to your model and than to "Relationships" till you see your Smartskind. Open "Splines" and search for the CP in there it is called "CP #20" or something like that. Below that you will find "Translate" and than different keys, which will tell you at which rotation degree the CP has a keyframe set in the smartskin. Yes I know, it is annoying but the best I could find till now. That is the reason why you should just go with default angles and the fewer the better ;). 2.) That is normal. Just save the material to a file (RMB > Save as), embed it again then (click on the small arrow next to the material in the PWS > File Info > Embedded = On). Now I would rename it to for instance "cheveux_color" and after that reimport the file and do the same with it but rename it to "cheveux_bump". That should give you a copy of the material. Use one as color an one as bump and it should work. In the end it makes sense, since you can like that use all the different options of the material (combiners, noise, gradients, etc.) to create a bump map (which is a greyscale map) and do something different for color and so on too. Switching on Bump or Displacement will just tell A:M: Do no longer use this as a color material but as a bump material. Can you increase the size of the material window? I am not aware of a possibility but I'll ask Steffen if that is possible to integrate... I often run into that but never came around to ask for it... in the end it does not make much sense that you can zoom in but not increase the visible view size there. 3.) Yes you can animate close to all properties of any material in the chor. For that you have to activate "Show more than drivers" on the Shortcut to the model in the chor. It is the outer left icon on the right side which is by default inactive / crossed through in red. 4.) Yes, that should be the default behaviour. Otherwise you would have to use a projection map material. That one would stay the same relative to the viewport / camera and the arm would slide over it so that the same part of the arm would be colored differently on a different place in space. Best regards *Fuchur*

Just amazing and well deservered :). Well done and I really love you work! Best regards *Fuchur*

Try using a slighty blurred displayment-map... and if you are going for a gradient, use for instance an EXR image. Best regards *Fuchur* PS: I do not know if it is meaningful here, but the name of the decal suggests something there... DPI isn't a meaning full thing here... it all is about pixels here.

Uh, the big guy: 5950x ;). That one is a beast :). I am pretty sure that the zoom meeting was close to not mattering at all for a 16 core machine like that ;). You would have to run Netrender with at least 15 slaves (maybe even 30 or so) that it would make a big difference ;). Best regards *Fuchur*

Very nice :). Looks great and I can't wait to see it in an environment :). Best regards *Fuchur*

Looks VERY detailled and very nice :). Just great – can't wait for a fly through when you are done :). Best regards *Fuchur*

Just played a little bit around and created this pearl mother... The seamless tile feature is pretty amazing. Best regards *Fuchur*

Nice looking textures... I'll have a look at that. Best regards *Fuchur*

Except of cause you are givin a lot of data and usage rights to YouTube aka Google aka Alpha. Hosting it on the Hash server is a lot less problematic. I can understand if you do not want to create an account. Then you just should upload it as an attachment here if you are concerned about that. Best regards *Fuchur*

You can get it here: FTP server is working, but you will have to get something like Filezilla to access it because many browsers are dropping FTP protocoll support. Best regards *Fuchur*

Than it might be a bug. You might want to file a report than. Best regard *Fuchur*

Are the normals of the outer one facing out or in? Best regards *Fuchur*

There have been attempts by Steffen to solve that I think, but in the end: If you can, hide the other side of the surface. If it is a prop, move the point after you have put it in. In most cases it jumps to the right one. It might have to do with normals, but I am not sure about it. Best regards *Fuchur*

What is it saying if you try to attach your video here? In general you should be able to upload it as an attachment here. If There is a problem with the file type, you might want to zip it and upload that. It will not be directly viewable here, but we can at least download it and have a look at it. Best regards *Fuchur*

That makes sense but I never would have guessed it ;). Best regards *Fuchur*

There are two main advantages: - Data safety (a NAS is especially useful if you have one with 2 or more bays. Like that you can put them in a raid easily and let them mirror the data. So if one of the drives fails, you can just replace it and the NAS will re-mirror it from the other drive automatically (or depending on the RAID version you are using different other things) - access over the network with different devices. This means having your data available on your laptop, you desktop and the tablet of your wife at one central place. This is even possible over the internet, if you are willing to make it available via internet (but you do not have too. It is of cause more secure to just keep it in the LAN) - pretty good automatic backup solutions are available, the NAS will keep track of your disc health and tell you if you need to think about changing the drives, etc. - you can handle access rights very easily... so for instance one user is allowed to open one folder, the other one isn't and so on. The result is: - your computer can die and you still will have the files available. - (at least) one of the drives can die if you have a 2- or more bay-system - think of rendering with A:M... just put your project on the NAS and open A:M on each of your computers to render from it. The disadvantages: - it is a little less fast than a drive in your computer (at least as a SSD if you are "only" using 1 Gigabit-LAN / ethernet... if you have more like 10 or 50 and a fast raid configuration it will not make a big difference anymore). Anyhow it is still pretty fast and for most things you won't notice a difference. 4k video editing or something like that might be one of the things you might not want to do with a normal NAS, but other stuff isn't going to be noticeable slower. - you need two drives (or for instance 3) and will loose 1/2 or about 1/3 (raid 0/1 vs. raid 5) of the capacity of your drives. I am using a 4-Bay Qnap-NAS for all my data here for years now and I really love it and just recently have gone from about 5 TB of drive space to about 9TB of drive space because of video footage I am done with which is saved there. While working I might copy it to one of my SSDs and later the stuff goes to my NAS. 1080p material can even be edited on my NAS pretty nicely. Best regards *Fuchur*

Hm... I am using a Qnap NAS and save everything on it. It works with v19p without a problem. Do you use a different user for your NAS than the one of your computer (meaning different name and password)? Did you try to first open the explorer and "activate" the NAS network drive and than save with A:M on it? Best regards *Fuchur*

Sorry to hear that you have trouble with finding a link to the software, but I think with the options I showed you, you should be ready to go, right? But I can see, that it might be more convenient to get the link by the mail too. I'll ask Jason about it. Best regards *Fuchur*

Hi Bobby, I just tested it and you are right. I asked Jason about it. Thank you very much for the catch :). Best regards *Fuchur*

Latest Version download links can be found here (last one is hard to say because it changes quite often... at the moment it is 19.0 p): https://forums.hash.com/forum/2-latest-info/ - it can be found on hash.com directly at "Get it now! > Download latest version" (see attached image) - you can just go to the forums, first entry at the top. (see attached image) - you can see the installer on the store page itself (see attached image) I think that is pretty straight forward and at several locations and should not be that hard to find. If you are talking about the process to get your licence key if for instance the email got blocked by your spam filter or you need to updated from trial to full version, there is a step-by-step guide available here: https://www.hash.com/renew-subscription-44-en (see attached image on how to find it on the website) Or is it something else you are looking for? Best regards *Fuchur*

"Distribute to passes" : Passes render an image a couple of times and combine them after that to one for different reasons like better anti-aliasing, etc. If there is a process (like for instance reflection levels or ambient occlussion or radiosity) that has in itself several iterations A:M will normally re-render each of those iterations for each pass, resulting in a much longer rendertime. Passes are combined at the end anyway and then that will not result in a better image quality but much longer rendertimes. By distributing those iterations to the passes, which will be blend at the end anyway, the rendertimes go down (a lot) and the image quality (at the resulting end image) will be the same. If you look at one of the passes seperated however, the pass will look pretty noisy. (because it really is only "one" iterations (or the amount so it can be distributed evenly to the passes). Best regards *Fuchur*