Fuchur

It may be something different: If you create a new pose by yourself and you already put your character into a chor you sometimes have to click first on the Tab in the Pose-Slider-Window ("All" for example) to see it. This is a refresh-thingy and doesnt mean that something is broken. *Fuchur*

Steffen Gross is the main-programmer of A:M nowadays and although created the Resurface-Plugin. You very likely downloaded the plugin from his website. (have a look at my signature) However I dont think that he has the time to port the plugin to v13. It is possible that this plugin is only available for v14 and up. I would commend to get the new websubscription (v15 and it will very likely include v16). See you *Fuchur*

make sure you use the right version... v15-plugins are slightly different to the once for A:M v13 *Fuchur*

Have a good day and celebrate a little (or more)! Happy birthday! *Fuchur*

Go to your imagefolder and have a look at the properties of this folder. You will find a property called "Preview Resolution". Make sure you dont have set this one or that you set it to a higher value tahan your rotoscope, See you *Fuchur* PS: Just had a look at the imague you provided... that one wont give you better quality....

A note like "Please use AI-Format 7 or 8" (or even But since we are now at something like AI 15 with 16 near I would not say that it is necessary to tell too much about it... People with AI 5 will try it anyway and People above should just save to 8 and the problem is gone. It may not be 100% accurate, but it works and doesnt give any problems. So why bother... *Fuchur*

It is another demo he saw... not Dead Fantasy... What are you missing with the ocean-rig? It does a very good job if you ask me... OceanRig mtpeak and eric did some amazing stuff there. And if you dont need an Ocean but a beach, do it like many computergames do, using images with a transparency-map / alpha, etc. Fast to render and can look very well. *Fuchur*

So you wanna create a new Final Fantasy-Animation... I just can say: You will need many exercises and a huge amount of talent... if you got the talent, there is nothing that stands agains that... But keep in mind: final Fantasy-Animations or movies are created by many people in quite a long time... I would say: Just get started... there is no use in asking again and again if somethung is possible... the answer you will get frm us is always the same: Yes it can be done but you will need talent, will and time. If it wasnt like that the market would be crowded with people doing top notch-animations. But you will have much fun, I promise *fuchur*

Yes it was... modelled, animated, lightening and rendering in A:M. *Fuchur*

Most stuff is modelled... that is the crazy thing about that model "No cheating..." It has a patchcount that is more like a polycount. But by doing it in several models and combining it in the Chor he could work with that... *fuchur*

Adobe Illustrator artwork 15.0 is the file it is pretty simple. do I need to save it as a different file, and How do I do that? Thank you You have to save it as a legacy-file. AI 8 is the right one. Just select in the save-dialog that you want to save it with that version (there should be a drop down). Dont use Groups! After that it should work. *Fuchur*

Damn agep... where do you get the patience from to generate something like that? Everytime I look at it I just think: Amazing! *Fuchur*

(Just to mention it, although it is a bit against this philosophy: A:M can be used with Postproduction-software (as any other software which creates images they can handle) to create effects which would be much more complicated to archieve or which the user didnt think of before. A:M can do all of that, but sometimes it is less timeconsuming doing some stuff in the post. For example: If you need 2d-text-slides animated or color-correction of your final renderingimage, you wont get around a post-production-software, although it would be possible to do that in AM too... *Fuchur*

Of course it can be created. For a experienced user it should be no problem to create something like that. In the end, EVERYTHING can be created in A:M. C4d is not the easiest 3d app in my experience... it is on of the easier once in the poly-world so. This is very subjective... this means: any user will say something different about that, but A:M is one of the easiest around and I think it is the easiest if you want to create animations. 25 min of animation is MUCH. Dont expect to create something like that in a few days / weeks. As a single person you will very likely need a few month (without the time you need to learn the app. Again: This is true for any 3d programm and highly depends on the quality you want to archieve... simple models and animations can be much faster. A comparision for you: A very good Pixaranimator creates about 15 seconds of Animation a week. This is ONLY animating the character - not creating the character, the backgrounds, the models, rendering, etc. ONLY animation. But they create the most advanced animation available.) It depends what you can wrap your head better around... poly or patch/spline-modelling. A:M is very effective and easy to learn if you are new to 3d. If you have poly-experience you have to be open minded and dont resist on what you already know. I work with programms from both worlds and in my experience A:M easily outperforms most other software in fun and ease of use especially for creating animations with a toon-look. See you *Fuchur*

You should have a look at A:M Stills and search through that... I think A:M can very easily (easier than other 3d-software) create such styles. It is on you to get your models look right so... Toon-Example 1 Toon-Example 2 Toon-Example 3 Toon-Example 4 Toon-Example 5 More realistic Example More realistic Example 2 Mech-Example You can do nearly everything if you are able to do it... See you *Fuchur*

Nicely done! I liked it, because it was very well suited for the song and just working. But why 4 girls? I only saw 2 *Fuchur*

I'd say, get a 4-core-system with high GHz-specs... One of the best performance/money-ratio has the AMD Phenom II 955. It is overclockable without anything needed to about 3,5-3,7GHz (boxed) and with the right cooler you may even go higher with it. If you want something newer you could get the AMD 6-core-CPUs (2 are available, one with 2,8 GhZ and one with 3,2 GHZ each core) which are nice too... they are way less expensive than Intels 6-core-cpu but although not that powerful... (but we are talking about 1/3 of the price). It doesnt cost the world to built one. It is DDR2/DDR3 compatible and since DDR3-RAM is very expensive in these days (twice as much for the same product compared to a few month ago) I would recommend to get DDR2 which is much cheaper and doesnt have big performance-decreases compared to DDR3... DDR3 however can be good if you want to update later... but till now it is not worth the extra-money. I would get a mid to high-end gaming-graphic card (maybe a HD 5850 or 5870, which is very fast)... Motherboards are not too expensive and I had very nice results with my 790FX-based one... although there is a newer platform available you want to check out. In the end: The more RAM and the faster the CPU the better. 64bit Win7, 4-8 GB of RAM and a 4core / 6core-system should do it... I would not recommend to buy a 2-core-system anymore... yes they can be a bit faster for single-core-operations, but in the end in Rendering they just suck against 4 or 6-core-systems. And these are capable of much too nowadays... All these I told you about are available for about 1K Dollars or even a little less. See you *Fuchur*

Material Combiners are procentual created materials using several inputs to create an output... the most common one may be a chess-board but there are much more complex things possible... (DarkTree-Materials are often resolution-independent Combiners, for example) These are available in most 3d-programms and result from mathematical algorithms to combine different inputs... but dont be frightend... you dont have to do the math... you are just telling A:M what to do. The biggest advantages: These material-combiners are resolution-independed and very easy to map on a object distortionless. "Texture-Combineres" is not a A:M-related term, so A:M can do that by using for example Projectionmaps as combiner-input. Decals can be for example blended together... but I am not aware of for example Multiply-Operations or such things... in the end you dont need that anyway, because it is faster to create these stuff in Photoshop and import it as a texture... In short: So it is a tool in A:M. See you *Fuchur*

Looks like you used a PatchImage to specify the eye-color. Dont do that here. Use a decal: 1.) Go to your Model-window. 2.) Hide everything but the eyes. 3.) Rightclick on the model in the PWS (or click in the modelwindow in an empty space) and choose "New > Decal". 4.) Position the decal so that the eye-geometry is covered by the decal /image and double-click on the decal / image. Yes the Rig (bone-structure, etc.) can be transfered from another character. (more on this later). *Fuchur*

Damn you are really good *Fuchur*

You can render it with the Progressiv-Rendering-Button. Just scrapp through the timeline to see the effect and use the Progressiv-rendering-Button. Only Final-Rendering (blue button) and render-to-file doesnt work. *Fuchur*

Hm... seems to be a bug... I tried it and it works in Preview-Rendering (Progressiv / Green Button) but not in Final. I'll write a bug-report for that. You may try it with the material-possiblity... sorry. See you *Fuchur*

Hi, this is an example with an material-effector and the lightening2-model. Hope this makes it clearer. See you *Fuchur* material_effector_example.prj

It sounds like you are confusing Shortcuts and the actual objects (may it be a light, model, materials, forces, etc.). The actual model / material / etc. is first created. It will be the place to manipulate anything at first. After that you use a Shortcut / Link / Reference of these models / materials / etc. to assign them to for example a chor or a model (models can be put in chors, materials for example can be dropped at models / groups). If you change the material itself, all the shortcuts will automatically update themselves too. This is true as long as you didnt override the values of the material on a shortcut. A shortcut itself can be manipulated to create for example an animation (ie animate surface-color from blue to red). If you did this in the chor (for instance) the model-properties will be overwritten by the shortcut-properties. In Short: As long as you didnt change anything other than position / rotation / scaling in the chor, the properties of the object will always be referenced by the shortcuts. This is very useful if you need to change something in the middle of the process through all your chors, etc. (actually this is although true for position / rotation / scaling but these are most often changed in the chor...) You created an alien which has a green skin? You already animated it in serveral chors (because you spot will take place in several places, etc) and so on and now you think "It would just look cooler if it was red..." No problem: Change the model itself and all the shortcuts used in your chors will update. You dont have to set the color for all your chors each by itself again. However: Lets say in one of the chors your aliens head turns from green to yellow (because he is jealous, or so)... Now you have overwritten the basic color of the model in the chor (or a pose...) and you will have to update this chor manually. It is very logical if you think about it: Anything done before is as long referenced till you change it in a later productionstep but you can go to any productionsstep in your process again and change something there. So in many cases: The first appearance of the property (let it be surfacecolor or something else) should be changed unless you need to do it later (for animation-purpose). Hope this helps *Fuchur*

It is very cool One thing it laggs so is a "material effector list" (so you can specify which objects are effected and which are not, like a Lightlist does for lights...) In these situation where you have to do that you will need to animate a gradient-material. Gradientmaterials are less not that well to handle and cant be positioned with the mouse-pointer (and cant effect several different objects) but they can be used at only one object. The best thing possible would be a materialeffector with a "material-effector-list" and one that could be specified like a boolen cutter, so that you could give it any kind of shape. With that it would be one of the most powerful tools... today it is very handy too, but we will see what can be done in future... I have written a report for that. *Fuchur*