Vong

I can see him missing all kinds of things... All new animated series, "The Adventures of Stormy"

I love this little animation. YouTube popped it up in one of those "You Might Like..." sections before I saw this thread. Wonderful work!

Let me preface this by saying that I have not used A:M for quite a while. I do keep tabs on it though because it does hold a special place in my heart, I've still got a few buds around here, and I'm still seeing kick-arse art made with the program. Let's begin... ----------------------------- CPU+GPU rendering was a way to increase render speed for the Cycles render engine inside Blender. Now that EEVEE is coming on the scene and is basically a game render engine, Cycles will probably be used only for specific tasks that EEVEE can't handle (yet), such as caustics, etc. I don't know what went down when trying to get A:M to render on a GPU, or why there wasn't much of an increase, thus I can only speculate. If A:M is still converting from splines to polygon's at render time, perhaps that has something to do with it? (If you know, please inform those of us who weren't around! ) Would faster render times in A:M be appreciated? Sure. Nobody likes to wait for a render. I don't care who you are or what you actually say, you hate waiting, it's human nature. --Especially those that are on a deadline, whether client or self-imposed. And this is where things like the Advanced Viewport in MODO or VPR (Viewport Preview Render) in Lightwave can come in handy. Turn them on and let the render iterate a bit to get an idea of your texturing/lighting. Something that A:M could use, but will most likely never get, again based on having to convert splines to polygons. Yeah... I think to get a lot of features added into A:M that users have asked for (even in this thread) would mean releasing A:M as open source and bringing in the hobby programmers to try and add the features. A:M doesn't seem to sell enough* to cover the cost of hiring 2-3 more programmers to add some of the functions. Steffen does a great job, but to cover what everyone wants, you need a small team. ^Do note, I'm not suggesting or pushing that A:M be released as open source. Like John Bigboote says, he noticed huge increases in render time when exporting from A:M to Element3D. Which makes me think that it's the converting of splines to polygons that is the issue with rendering in A:M. I don't know how the render engine handles things right now, but if it has to convert from splines to polygons for EACH frame before rendering, wouldn't/couldn't it be possible to convert the entire animation to a cache file of polygons and then render that out? Would/Could that make GPU rendering a more accessible feature? Again, all of this could have been looked at when looking into GPU rendering, I'm not sure. And please, don't think that I'm saying rendering in A:M is a big issue, it's not. Rendering is what it is... And as soon as we can all afford the quantum machines that can render in real time as we think these things up will be the best day of all our creative lives! Just to give an idea of what some former A:M users have talked about... Since the Big Exodus**, there are a few of us former A:M users that have talked amongst ourselves and said that if A:M ever went to a polygon based format, quite a few of us would return. A:M has a simple straightforward way of working. Does the UI/UX need some updating? Yes, but that happens to all programs (Just look at Lightwave). The one thing that us old users talk the most about, is A:M's animation tools. Some of its features were waaaaay ahead of the times and some programs today try to emulate or imitate, but still don't hold a candle to how A:M does it. So, if it were possible to integrate polygon/sub-d modeling, while still keeping splines intact as they currently are, you'd probably see a few old faces popping in again. You'd probably also solve some of the render talking points and probably be able to add all new functionality. A pipedream, but one can dream, right?! Sorry for hijacking the thread... * - This is based on an outsider looking in point of view. Looking at how active these forums are, as opposed to how active they used to be. ** - For those that started using/joined the forum after 2006 -- (Mako Voice) -- But that is a tale for another time... -- (/Mako Voice)

I really enjoyed this short film. Good work Tore. I am curious though... How long did you work on this? The earliest post that I can find (not hunting hard though) is from January of this year.

USB keys are a thing of the past. More and more companies are trying to ditch hardware based keys. Foundry currently has standard MODO license setup as a login based system. You install the software and then login from the software using your Foundry account credentials. It allows you to login from up to 2 machines at the same time. If you want to login from a third machine, you need to deactivate one of the machines from your Foundry account on their website. Foundry's system also lets you keep a copy of your credit card info online, so that the maintenance or subscription can auto-renew, without you having to do anything other than make sure the CC info is current. There's always the LW and old MODO way of licensing... Use the license file and when starting the program, check to see if the program is already running on the current network. If it is, then you don't allow the instance that was just launched to run and throw up an error screen informing the user that the software is already running. (Good for if you only want to allow the user to run the software on one machine at a time.) If it's not running elsewhere on the network, then the software launches and the user goes about their business.

Looking good Rodney. Now I wanna see this story...

This is pretty awesome. Makes me wanna come back and do some stuff in A:M. Looking forward to the next and future tutorials.

It's a Torkey!

Former A:M'er Joe Cosman was one of the unlucky ones let go. I wonder if they hired him back! :-) From what I could tell back when they were shut down, it seemed like pretty much everyone there was sent packing. The studio shutdown made most of the local news casts the day it was announced. This seems to be Avalanche getting back to their roots. Good to see that you can't keep a good company down!

Wow... I haven't talked to Jeff in a few years....Last I heard he was still trucking on out there in Reno, NV. William Eggington's C4D tutorial for fastMDD had more to do with folks trying to use Messiah:Studio's fastMDD plugin to get stuff out of Messiah and into C4D. In the video you came across, he mentions using a trial version. William is now a Blender user... I miss some of the old users.... (Myself included!) :-)

Loved it! One of the problems I keep running into, is trying to make things simple and look good. You've really pulled that off here! :-)

Continuing down my road of memories while I pack for the big move.... One of the first "Third Party" training books for A:M... And the Pro Series Videos, for all your learning needs... If I come across anything else I'll post some pics up. I think I might still have the boxes from when I first purchased Martin Hash's 3D Animation Pro (before combining the "consumer" and "pro" versions of the software using just the name Animation:Master, which was the name for the "pro" version originally).

Rob, it was! :-) Rodney, you're welcome! I've got more stuff that I'll be posting shortly... As I'm going through and packing things up, I'm hanging on to all my A:M stuff, but sending the Maya books to the be recycled or donated. :-)

So, I'm getting ready to move and as I pack things up, I'm coming across some old (older?) stuff.... Here is what the printed A:M Manual to v8.0 (circa 2000) looked like. And here's how thick it was...

Digital Tutors is pretty selective about what programs they will do tutorials for. With them being acquired by a new company, they are expanding the programs they release tutorials for, however I don't think A:M fits in with their audience. It wasn't until they were acquired that Blender and Lightwave were added.