aaver

As I said, this is only a simple muscle animation in an action; very static. The use of it is shown in the chor example. What is it that you want to do with it?

Sure. Help your self Mat.zip

Just muscle animation in an action. Nothing fancy.

Sorry about that. It is an MPEG-4 movie on 175 kB. Try this one instead (Sorensen3 363 kB): Movie02.mov

This is what I came up with. Anything you can use? Movie01.mov

*Sorry! bad post...*

I'll add it to my ToDo list They get added together as they should, but I realize it's not easy to see in the animation. Try to make your own rain effects with the plug-in and I think it will be more obvious.

I have played with the SDK for A:M for some time and so far it has resulted in a plug-in for simple water effects. See the attached movie if you want an example of what it can be used for. I hope you don't mind the green color. It was supposed to look like poisonous goo... The plug-in is in an early alpha state so please read the disclaimer before you use it! It is only tested in A:M v10.5 so please let me know if you have problems getting started. Poison01.mov

If you blur a bump map, as Yves suggested, you will get a nicer result, but you should see bumps even if you don't. I think you still have a problem with the key color. If you apply a decal image that you haven't imported to the project, my experience is that the key color change doesn't have any effect on the decal . The solution is to close the project and reopen it. A better method that works for me is to import the image first, set the key color and then apply the image as a decal. The first image is an example of with your unmodified bump map and the second one is when the bump map is blured:

LOL. Yes, you are probably right and using Thom to illustrate something very large and heavy, might not have been the most intelligent choice in the first place

very nice, William! The Balrog is amazing!!! WOO HOO!! *pointless rambling deleted*

I have posted an image and a movie with a more realistic environment at the showcase forum.

Not for a method, but for the 'Ocean Generator' when (if) its ready If you like to play with this you may download an A:M project file for the first frame. The whole movie project is to large though. You'll have to wait for the 'Ocean Generator'...

Thank you all for your kind words! Actually there isn't much more to show for now. I could render a movie from a different view or even with a new set of decals, but it wouldn't be fundamentally different. My ambitious goal have been to make a user friendly tool to make realistic oceans in A:M. I also have ideas of how to add buoyancy dynamics and object-water interaction effects like ripples, splashes or foam, but I'm not sure if I could find the time to make this effort if it's only you and I and maybe some more that find it useful. I will post any progress on this forum, but it might take some time before I have anything interesting to show.

Now I've finished a short ocean movie. It loops nicely, but the period is too short to give a natural look. It's no fundamental problem to make the period longer, though. I believe it's a rather encouraging first test however. What do you think? Is this anything that could be useful?

Yes, I know and I guess the water will be even more convincing not having to fake the Fresnel Equation. Thank you for that Yves! I'll have to concentrate on the animation part first though...

Please be patient I'll post the animation in a couple of hours... I hope... -The water is a flat plane with displacement and bump maps. -The frame took about 10s to render. The problem is calculating the map images. -The gradient material is the 'standard method' in A:M to fake the Fresnel Equation. In my image I have only reflections and no refraction. With both reflections and refractions together with a sky dome and something interesting floating on the water I think it might be rather convincing

During the last couple of weeks I have done some experiments with realistic Ocean Waves in Animation Master. For now there is only one image to watch, but I'm working on a short animation that I hope to be able to show in a day or two. (The image is rendered with the simplest possible environment. No sky sphere, one single sun light and a simple reflecting gradient material.) Click here, for more information on this (The page will be updateted as the "project" evolves.)

What can I say?! Simply amazing! Now, please let us know what you could do in 48 days...

I think this could be done rather easily with cloth. Also, any thoughts on how to animate the water?

Sorry about that I realize I'm not doing a good job explaining this. However, if you accept that there is a standard method available which solves something called the "2D wave equation", what I am saying is that this "2D wave equation" approximates a dynamic water surface, visually - meaning that the result looks somewhat like water, which is all we want in this community.

I guess you are referring to this. (Thanks to Fabrice Favé for letting me use his Caustics setup.) For a thorough explanation, I will probably need to write another "tutorial" and open a new thread, but the short answer is that I used the same technique as for the footprints, but with a different processing script. True fluid behavior is described by the 3D Navier-Stokes equation, but this is very hard to solve and it requires massive computations. On the other hand, for most situations the full equation doesn't have to be solved. What I have tried is to solve the 2D wave equation instead. This isn't describing water at all, physically speaking, but it appears to do a reasonable good job, visually. The 2D wave equation is easily solved by a number of standard methods. I have chosen to implement a finite difference solver, which took me less than an hour to derive and implement. If the programmers in this forum want something to toy with, they might try out the following iteration scheme: // u0 and u0' are the initial values for the position and velocity respectively // k is a material dependent parameter U[1] = u0; U[2] = u0 + k*u0'; for (int n = 2; n<N; n++) { for (int i = 1; i<Ni-1; i++) { for (int j = 1; j<Nj-1; j++) { U[n][i][j] = U[n-1][i][j] - U[n-2][i][j] + 0.25*(U[n-1][i+1][j] + U[n-1][i-1][j] + U[n-1][i][j+1] + U[n-1][i][j-1]); } } saveFrame(U[n]); } For calm water, u0 and u0' will be zero all over. Without further explanations you could feel safe to set k=1. Needless to say, I'm only experimenting with this so far so take it for what it is.

Thanks, Yves and Vern for the suggestion to use Photoshop for this effect. I had a similar thought myself, but since I only own a dated version of PSP (v.5) , in which the scripting capability is very limited I settled for Matlab instead. If someone could write something on how to do this in Photoshop, I think it would be appreciated

For those who are interested, here is a short "tutorial" on how to make semiautomatic footprints in A:M. Here is a short test movie using the technique.

And this you have done with A:M? Why doesn't Hash document the obvious existence of a the Talent, Humour and Timing Buttons. Check "Show advanced art properties" under Tools|Options|Global if you want to be able to do stuff like this... Seriously, I'm stunned!