John Bigboote

Rob- what is your method for the mass-duplication?

E Thanks! I hand over 1 big quicktime with HAP compression- which is optimized for GPU smooth playback. It is played as 1 big file on a Mac with special presentation software called Millumin. There is some 'play' available in the screens placement, as well as the projection software has a degree of 'warp' it can provide to help stretch or shrink edges to where they need to be. The preferred method tho, is to get the animators/artists to nudge their work and re-render. A funny thing happened while on the setup day and things were not quite lining up as far as the projected video to the screens. The guy with the machine that controls the projectors announced that he was as close as he could get and that our video's were all "off" and needed to be nudged(by how much?) and rerendered. All of the video providers follow the same template so everything (days worth of programming) would need to be re-conformed to a new template. This was not good news, because we didn't even know how to generate a new template using 'eyeballs'. While the various videos were playing and everyone was scratching their heads I noticed that the LIVE video cameras were over-shooting their marks as well, and we have NOTHING to do with that. I pointed it out to everyone which shifted the focus(blame) off of us and back onto the guy who's job it was to make sure everything was projecting right. He was not happy with ME, but with a few more hours of turning his knobs... had everything looking 99% right. When you are dealing with THAT BIG of a projection area, and a human element of screen placements, air conditioners blowing air that sways the screens, and a video signal going thru multiple switchers and machines... you will never get it perfect.

I am about to finally give this rig a test whirl... stay tuned!

Because the video was mostly still images, they were looking for fancy transitions to get from one to the next. I came up with a 'rubics cube' 3D idea, and they asked for a different variation of it on each screen- which became a little bit exponential because each transition now was 9 separate transitions. Big job, went well, glad it's done. Thanks for the interest. Imagery property of USFoods. USFoods anim rubics.mov

Here are the curtain transitions... every time they wanted to use it in a scene I would have to rerender with switching-in the new still image. This was done by making a fine mesh grid (still coulda been finer) for each side, then- following Holmes Bryants tutorial on connecting CP's as control CP's for the cloth, I made 'hanger' CP's that would function to keep the cloth from falling to the ground. I attached those CP's (about 20 on each side) to bones and then animated the bones to follow a path with offsets. That tutorial is a KEEPER! Every time I go to use cloth I need to refresh myself of this info... Thanks Holmes Bryant! USFoods anim curtains.mov

Well, mostly stuff that was comped in AE... since the job was 75% AE and 25% A:M. Aside from registration issues with the edges(don't want any overspill from screen to screen, and there were 9 screens.) I also did a lot of the daily programming videos too... there were 2 day with unique shows, TONS of powerpoint but my 'curtain transition' was a big hit, so they kept dreaming up new places to use it.

Oh yeah... about 9, 3 for each third and then redundantly doubled for ultra-bighness(making some 18 projectors). The reason I was there was because once they got the projectors all calibrated and registered, they would play the animation and find tiny nuances that were not visible on my monitor- among other things,

Thank-you, and to Rodney for moving this to it's own thread... I will show some of the other cloth effects as well. The 'cool' thing about this was that I was working with another animator who uses maya/c4d and the task of creating the cloth effects fell on his plate. While a great designer and quite capable animator, he had never tried any cloth simulations so he went in cold on it... and there is- not a lot but a pretty deep pool of knowledge to learn in any app... I had worked with cloth on and off over the years and with a refresher tutorial compliments of Holmes Bryant on placing control CP's I was able to manhandle the effects in A:M quite handily... movies to come...

SOULCAP!

Thank- You, Rodney. Any idea why these are simply not included as a feature in A:M? It is a good thing this topic comes-up so new users can be informed of this powerful feature. EDIT- Oh, I see it was graciously donated by Willi from Soulcage. I'm sure he wouldn't mind... ALSO- When I did a forum search for matcap- nothing came up...

SPIROGRAPH! Fun toy! Great use of A:M! Worth the DL just to see how you made it!

I recently had done a 'clean-wipe-reinstall' to my HDs... I do not have the plug-ins and don't remember where I ever got them from (WHY on earth are they not included with A:M V18???) Where do we find them again?

A little show-n-tell... Last month, I got a chance to put A:M to a big test... needed to make a field of falling tangerines that would wipe the screen, and some various cloth effects at an obtusely hi-resolution... 12,000 px wide by 1280 tall. I used Newton Dynamics for the tangerines but they are simply shaped. My 1 minute opening video(Rife with Hash animations) showed before an audience of 5,000 at the US Foods convention in Orlando, I was lucky enough to attend as last minute changes happened. USFoods anim tangerines.mov

Cool, yeah- who would think to use cloth? Had you tried this in Newton with poor results?

How do you implement MatCaps again? I thought I knew how... just went to try it... drew a blank! I THOUGHT it was in an available option under a groups properties in the Diffuse Render Shader- Specular Render Shader - Ambiance Render Shader lists, but I don't see matcaps as an option anymore... is it a shader I need to install? I am on latest V 18.0N 64bit.

AWESOME, Nancy- That is the look I am after, and I don't think you can ask for much more than that from AO. SO- you render out the AO pass separately and then combine in post?

Test did not go so well... PSD and EXR failed to render whereas PNG renders fine... gotta figure that out... BUT A rudimentary QUESTION REGARDING SSAO... Can you just turn ON SSAO and it is good to go, or do you also need to turn on the depth buffer, the 'apply camera's post-effects to renderings' option or the plugin shaders option to ON...?

Tell us more about this! Hmm... let me compose myself and I will... it most likely is redundant info that the forum has already eschewed...

I see that A:M now supports Photoshop PSD... does that work like EXR in that each buffer would be placed on a separate layer? (I'm testing!) What is the advantage to EXR...? Floating depth point thingamagig?

Yeah- it's like the programmer figured 'no-one should ever need more blur than this...' -and in truth... a camera shooting in real-life limits the DOF as well. Both MP and standard AM render limits the amount of blur... in MP you can add more passes, but that just smooths the blur with more offset iterations- it does not enlargen the blur amount. 'Doe AE not allow you to use an OPENEXR depth map? A:M can make those' - I will test that! If it's a matter of an object entering from out of the frame, you could widen the camera view by a number of pixels equal to the width of the blur and then crop the render back down to the desired size. -What-who-where? workaround to the workaround power! I need less workarounds and more functioning features. I keep playing with this TRYING to find the holy-grail of settings or a method that 'bing' I understand. Yesterday, I had such a 'bing' moment with SSS, which I feel is now rendering swiftly and can be controlled quite nicely and is a GREAT FUNCTIONING A:M feature! Just like A:M NetRender... FANTASTIC FEATURE!

UH-OH! Google nor A:M forum search brings-up any contact for our JENPY... should we shine the bat signal over Japan? JENPY, WHERE ARE YOU? Has Jenpy ever fixed his AO GPU?

Wull- more comparing the 'fast GPU' varietels(there are 2 I know of, Jenpy's FakeAO CPU which is a post effect, and A:M's own 'Screen Space Ambient Occlusion' TO what I 'think' is A:M's real AO generator, available as a list item just over the SSAO option in the render/Options dialogue... When it comes to DOF, since the 2 GPU AO methods(Jenpys AO CPU and A:M's) are added post-render, they are not affected by the DOF blur operation, so you can have non-blurred AO effect over blurred imagery, which can be bad and cause banding- other issues. My question, is does the other 'regular' AO get calculated into the DOF... since all 3 options are available in standard A:M render OR multipass render ( I know that both renderers go about DOF in different ways.) This is something that I would need to test to get to the bottom of... and since I don't ever see any noticeable result with the standard AO (plus- it has very little controls... ON/OFF and graininess.) testing would be difficult. I think AO(and DOF btw) is a very important feature in 3D rendering, and an area where A:M could improve. Jenpy's Fake AO GPU is FANTASTIC, however useless due to apparent size restrictions(and only 32 bit version support)... I would LOVE to see it fixed and incorporated into A:M. After playing with both DOF and AO in Element 3D (GPU) and seeing how both features can be PUSHED and controlled deftly, keyframed and GPU rendered with no wait.st A:M's way of controlling DOF is very intuitive with the 'focal areas' start and ends clearly defined and keyframable. BUT- what if you wanted to push the amount of un-focus to more obtuse degree (more blur). Some people will say 'render a depth map and do it in post', which-yeah is a fine solution, you CAN push the blur as far as you want in AE... however there are quality issues with the image results due to the depth maps 256 color depth, edge issues, and if your camera is moving thru the scene or you don't have a set background object in view other problems arise- making this approach mostly useless as well. A true solution, is to generate and apply both features within the 3D render. To A:M's defense, DOF(animation) is very difficult in 3D packages, and Maya/Max/C4D/modo users are frequently complaing about their renders as well. Element3D has a great handle on both features, I've found, and by seeing your results in real time without setting up and awaiting a render is priceless. Has Jenpy ever fixed his AO GPU? Good question- I am off to find out. If I remember right, you could 'push' the effect with greater control and faster renders than his CPU version. It just had a size limitation, a 720 X 486 render would work great, but a 1920 X 1080 would only have the AO rendered in part of the screen.

There may have been some speed improvements to the REAL ambient occlusion feature... may be worth a try. It may be included in the DOF operation whereas anything 'fake' or 'post' would not be. I think to use that one you would need to open the Choreographies properties and turn-up the AO setting there as well as turn it on in the render settings... I am confused as to why there are 2 controls... maybe Gerald knows.

Somehow- thru reporting a bug in CC2015's Flash tablet feature, I got signed-up for the beta-testers of the next version of Flash (pre-release) and I get included on all the email threads of converstions amongst the Flash elite. Very interesting and looking to a bright future- the problem being that Flash is trying too hard to be all things to all people at the moment... and simple features like drawing with a tablet are not working. This is what I (and many others) get when trying to draw with a pressure-sensitive wacom tablet in Flash- something that traditionally has been a very cool feature and has become broken in CC2015. You go to make a stroke with the brush or pen tool and your stroke is offset by a constant margin and the distance between where you wanted to draw and where Flash puts the stroke is stroked. It feels strange talking about non-Hash bugs on the Hash forum!

Things seem to be going from bad to worse for poor Flash.