Fuchur

You 're right on track there Stefan. Keep on moving See u *Fuchur*

Hi, I just worked my way through some trouble with Video-Codecs and I found some interesting things which apply to A:M too. Many think, that you can only output uncompressed AVIs with Windows-Versions of A:M if you want to export a video-file. Since Apple dropped the support for Windows 64bit-Quicktime-Output, it seems hard to output directly to a video format from A:M (which still applies for MOVs), but it really isn't. What you need to understand is, that A:M 64bit is a 64bit-software and like that it can only use Codecs which are 64bit-compatible. (and if you use A:M for 32-bit on Windows, it can only use 32bit codecs.) I just tested it and A:M can export for instance to this looseless codec (no quality is lost and the resulting file is still much smaller than uncompressed AVIs) which is available for 32 and 64bit Windows: Lagarith Lossless Video Codec. And this seems to be true for Xvid-Codec / Divx-Codecs and other stuff too. (just to mention it: A:M v18 crashes at the end for me, but the video-file is still written successfully and playable on my computer. I have written Steffen about that) > does no longer crash. After that you can use for instance MiroVideoConverter (freeware) to convert the file to MP4 files which can be opened on Windows and Macs and is useable for websites. Hope this helps some of you with your workflow. See you *Fuchur*

My 2cents on that: - For very simple movements, CP weights are working well enough. (for instance at fingers it is often enough to use them) - For complex joints you will like to use fan bones. (especially if you are setting up shoulders, etc.) - For movements which are not just meant to preserve volume but which will change something in shape (upper arm muscle, a bone which should look out if you move a arm, etc.) you should use smartskins. Often it can be useful to use fanbones and CP weights or SmartSkins and FanBones with eachother. I find that using CP weights and SmartSkins together can be hard to do in some situations, since they affect eachother too much, but in theory, this can be done too. See you *Fuchur*

Very nice! See you *Fuchur*

It alters the behaviour if you have more than 2 CPs in the hair guides. (otherwise you will not see the difference) One will manipulate the whole hair guide (with all the CPs in the spline) > "IK", the other one will only affect one segment of it > "FK". (if I am not totally wrong... I often confuses those two with eachother... ) See you *Fuchur*

Welcome back and happy splining . See you *Fuchur*

Do you have an example? Hair is working fine in Chor and Modelling-Window but maybe it is some sort of combination that is causing the trouble...? See you *Fuchur*

That really is an impressive setup and way to work . I learned a lot about how some things work with the relationships and installation-bones and I love how easy it looked and feel . Very well done See you *Fuchur*

Very cool article about your passion there and I absolutely hope you will succeed with your dream. For me it seems like the exactly right thing for you to do See you *Fuchur*

I am not sure if it really is a bug... it prevents the view from blocking the program by limiting its drawing-time. If in that time, nothing can be drawn on the surface, nothing is displayed... or am I missunderstanding that one? See you *Fuchur*

It will leave the current tool you are using (Scale, etc.) active after you have used it. Normally it will switch back to standard mode after usage. Leaving it of is the standard behaviour. See you *Fuchur*

Wrong guy => All done by Steffen. This one is in A:M and not referenced. Only if you click on the button, the website will be opened. But yes v18 is great... performance wise and for the export-features it introduces (like very high poly-export options, etc.) See you *Fuchur* Acutally, these things are OpenGL-Posteffects. They are meant to work as FastAO, but it is not the code of FastAO, which is included here, as far as I know. It renders a little differently too. See you *Fuchur*

Hoffe du hast es krachen lassen . Happy Birthday *Fuchur*

Hi Arthur, I am very happy to here from you and very happy about your offer . It would be super awesome to have a direct way to FBX. I am using Unity from time to time and there are many other occasions I could have used a exporter to FBX to import into other software! In my signature you can see the current workflow I used to get to FBX, but it needs other software and is not very straight forward. It would be especially awesome if it could extend the possibilities of the DirectX-Exporter (it can only export bone-animation, no CP-animations, etc.) but even if it could only export what the directx-export can it still would be great. There have been different requests for FBX-exporters (and Collada-Exporters but today it really would be enough to have a FBX-exporter) like this one: A:M FBX-Exporter Request I think there is a real demend for that plugin and it would be very very helpful to many people and to get more people to use A:M. See you and thanks again! *Fuchur*

Very well done Bust just to mention it: "Ist es nicht wahr..." should be "Sollte es nicht so sein, dass..." One of the things that are a little harder to get because the term "Isn't it true..." is not used in that kind of fashion in German . Anyway, to answer it a little bit: As far as I understand it, "Snap Group to Surface" is based on the normal-direction (or the negative normal direction, depending what settings you set in the "CTRL + Snap-Group-To-Surface"-Dialog) of the patches in the group you want to snap to surface. See you *Fuchur*

Very nice stuff... I would have given him a little more time till rising his arm in anger, but it really is great already . See you *Fuchur*

Hi serg, that is real german and does not sound like translated automatically. What translation programm are you using there? Its a little more formal than usual in this forum but very good anyway See u *Fuchur*

Much over 900 years since, if I remember right, Star Wars itself is taking place in a long time ago . See you *Fuchur*

Happy birthday steffen! Thank you very very much for all the great work and time you have put into A:M! I am very happy that you are doing what you are doing . Have a great day and celebrate! See u *Fuchur*

Just to say it: This character is really a great one! Keep up the terrific work! Love the style and with the style I do not think that the hands are too big... in general the hands need to cover the face if layed over it and I think that is working quite good. It may be that the boots are a little too big, but I do not see that as a problem... if she is a soldier (or so) she needs that kind of boots may. See you *Fuchur*

There are several programs in that direction. I think what you want to know of is MotionTracking (!= motion capture). A motion capture software which works with A:M is Zign Track 2 (or A:M Track 2) which really works quite well, but what you are after is very likely motion tracking. As far as I know, A:M itself does not have such a functionality. But there is software that can export A:M importable data like Icarus or Vodoo with ICAM by Zign Creations: - ICAM - Icarus - Voodoo Camera Tracker I have never really used this but it should work well enough. There was another software (something with Ph...oe in it) which could work with A:M too and worked quite well, but I can not remember the name, no matter how hard I try... maybe someone else knows it? See you *Fuchur*

Yes A:M has been used to do that many times. One ofthe projects i could think of is this one: Stian's raptors See u *Fuchur*

Thank you very much Steffen for all the support and all your hard work. I think if Apple does not support multiplatform development any longer, this is the only step you could do. See you *Fuchur*

Most other software companies do not think that way and include some sort of backup routine which will only be loaded if needed (and like that will not slow down anything noticeable but if at all make the installer a little bit bigger). You still can open old Illustrator files in Adobe Illustrator (or any other Adobe product I have used), you can still run software from Windows 98 on Windows 7, you can still open Word files from Word XP / 2000 (even better, they provide you a tool that you can even open Word files from Word 2010 in Word XP / 2000). All major browsers still support HTML 1.0 even so we are at HTML 5.0 level.... and we can go on with that list. In general it should be said that Apple does stop support for some things each and every version of the OS they make public, not only at a few occasions as other softwarecompanies are doing it. (for instance Windows dropped DOS support... but that was wenn DOS was mostly gone for 20 years...) We can argue about that further on and as I said there are certain reasons which can be a factor but all in all I would say these are the real main reasons for Apple behind it: - keeping backwardcompatibility is harder to accomplish and it is much easier to write code as you wish but to have to look for the backward compatibility, which costs Apple money. > bad for Apple - Forcing everybody to upgrade as often as possible will earn money. > good for Apple - keeping the keylock at Apple gives them a monopolistic kind of power. > good for Apple This makes sense from a corporate point of view but is bad for customers, because they have to put more money into that, even if the hardware / software they have would be sufficient for their needs. It is like buying a new car every week. Yes of course you always have the newest car. But is the old car that bad? No. And with all the money you are spending for them they will do it gladly again because they can and want more money. And while they are at it, they will change for instance the music-player on the updates too... and first they will drop support for CDs, than for USB-drives and tomorrow for the Cloud-stuff and so on. And each update will give them more money and cost the customer (you) money. I am developing an own CMS and I have to look for backward-compatibility often. I do it, because I could not give anybody a good reason why s/he should pay for something that worked perfectly a day before and is not working at all today while they did not do anything to cause that. "Sorry Sir... your toilet does not work anymore because I did not like the color of the tubes to connect it and we just got rid of them... if you want to get it running again, buy a tube in gold next time. But be aware that I may like blue better tomorrow and you will have to change the tube again, but today we will just go with gold... and like life plays: I have gold tubes here... do you want to buy some?" See you *Fuchur*

Just saw that it is not even a major-version-update from the OS (10 > 11). That is quite unlucky if you ask me... in general I would assume that at least till 11.0 they would have had a backwards compatibility preserving structure in the code. Two minutes back I have received a newsletter from Mirye (Shade3d) that they now have an update to support the new OSX version. This update has not been available at the release day too... Anyway, I have send Jason an email to put a note in the store to tell people that MacOSX 10.9 (Maverick) is not (yet) supported. I can see that that makes sense and should have been done a few days before, when the confusion about whether it runs or not was finally solved. See you *Fuchur*