John Bigboote

Oh-NO! Will's birthday? I didn't have time to SHOP! Have a GREAT day, Will!

This is gonna be one hot ride... am I seeing some weird splineage at the bottom of the door, or is that reflections?

I seem to remember you need to keep 'upping' the force value until you see effect... are you 'up' to around 4,000 or 5,000 yet? Great animation!

You can download some great models here on the forum... to sort of 'backwards engineer' how they are made.

YES, you have the general idea correct!

What's weird is that they appear fine initially, then degrade and stay degraded. Perhaps a glitch/bug. It has never really bothered me- I figured it was the app being tactile.

Would it help to turn OFF and ON the 'show decals' button... page up down a couple of times and give the spacebar a good 'whump!'...?

whoosh! THAT is fantastic... you did that in A:M??? Can we get Jason to put this on the Facebook page?(if Roger does not mind) I was wondering too, if this was going to be a 'prop' in your railroad project. Looking at old 'creampuffs' like this, it always strikes me... isn't that too much car and not enough tire? You have something going on with the windows... like refraction or a transparent decal to fog it up... or something, whatever it is- it WORKS! And the reflection on the bumpers, nice! Great work Rodger, thank-you for showing it! I'm going back to drool over it for a while now...

Yes. If a picture is worth 1,000 words... an animation is worth... I dunnoh- you do the math. I have BEGGED image contest winners and placers in the past to PLEASE do a slight camera move on your scenery. We all work so hard to produce 1 image... when... while we are sleeping the software can actually produce thousands of images that can make MUCH better use of our hard work.... and NetRender is great, but you don't really-really need it to render a simple sequence. I hope more people will take your lead. Anyway- Thanks, I enjoyed that.

Are the hot-dogs done yet? Cool effect! There seems to be a grid pattern at the beginning... but that is probably the nature of the beast.

AND- being from Windsor, ONT in the heart of the 'rust-belt'... you know all too well about rust holes and salt corrosion!

That's what I was referring to, when I said 'sometimes a visit to AI is necessary'... I could not remember the tool... but to open-up your 'islands' (as I call them, like the inside of an 'o' or 'e') you do need to use that pathfinder tool, as Fucher says.

Gosh! Screw the dents... show us the whole taxi! They look great, technically they are dings- not dents.

Sometimes, the dynamic constraint will change itself unwarranted... and the 'Simulate on the fly' setting will become OFF instead of ON. Just go back to wherever you applied the DC, and check that setting- at the very bottom of the properties for the DC...

I'd say you still got it!

pngs are lossless... should be a step above jpegs...

That back alley scene is looking GREAT! Should help to spur many an idea!

Very creepy...while very preppie!

I use the ai wizard all the time, extremely useful. You can also make paths in Photoshop for use with the ai wizard, but to a degree. Other programs include Flash and Inkscape. Always remember to save to the legacy illustrator 8 file format for importing to A:M.

STELLAR! Is that Myron?

LOVE IT! That is one of Steve Millington's models, right? I plan to put her thru my hair process soon, too. My only recommendation would be to smooth-out the camera zooms... and put something in the back area behind her- even if you put some lights back there with lens-flares... would make it seem more 'glitzy'. A trick I do for easy lens flares (not saying its hard in A:M tho... A:M is an incredible lens-flare generator... better than Knolls) Is to make a new image in Photoshop filled with pure black, and use the lens-flare filter on that... save it as a jpeg/tga and import it to A:M... put it in your chor as a layer with flat shading.) I hope Mike Branch likes this!

Yes, Nancy's test is very illuminating... note the moire in the texture on her thigh(and noise in general on the upper legs) that disappears at 16+ passes... and is not there at all on the 'no pass' image... but there IS a lot of texture noise... Fucher is right about the lower passes for animation... I do supervised animation sessions where the client looks over my shoulder while I work. I explain that the initial sequences from A:M(quick renders) are 'low-res' and will be replaced with a higher pass count later on for better anti-aliasing... most of the time, the clients say- it looks fine just the way it is. Good discussion! I need to try that post-effect trick from the reference manual... set to zero, interesting! (below) 4. Soft Antialiasing - The multi-pass render can be set up to have a different averaging mechanism used for combining each pass. This averaging technique slightly softens the image but gives the appearance of smoother antialiasing especially at lower passes. To invoke this softening effect use the Blur post effect on the camera with a softness value of 0. Note any softness value larger than 0 will invoke a true blur on the rendered image. Blur Post Effect See Post Effects for information on how to use them. Blur Softness Use a softness of 0 to only invoke the Multi-Pass softening pass averaging technique.

OH--- and another feature that only works with multipass is the hair feature called 'jitter'...

I have an alley? I think I know what you mean...MJ. Watch for mine too...

It is a different renderer... with different strengths, and weaknesses. For instance, if you need a nice fast test render... use 1 pass. The more passes you add will 'comb' thru the antialiasing better and better...you can see it getting better. Compare the standard A:M renderer to a 16 pass MP. The standard renderer does not render your displacement maps- and I don't think it can make use of the FakeAO plug-in, but it can be a fast renderer too and in certain situations be faster than MP. They both do motion-blur completely different too...and DOF.