John Bigboote

Yeah! Bigtime thank-you!

Hats-off to you, Stian! May you long continue to spline!

If there is nothing dynamic going on... and you need to bake... set the chor length to 0:01 and just bake 1 frame. I would attempt a render in Netrender to see if you even need baking at all, chances are...no.

Yeah... delete the default floor and model your own floor plane with a much-much-much denser mesh.

Hey Kombow... hope you can stick around. Most of us can't help you with your exporting and gaming needs but we can help you figure out your modelling and the rest from there... I am interested in your progress- keep us informed as you learn.

I see you are frustrated with the hair feature which is supposed to have 'collision-detection' but alas it passes thru the geometry... Could be your keyframing in your animation... kinda quick... hair needs time to react... if all is fine on frame 10 and then on frame 11 you moved the geometry so far that it immerses the hair, you have essentially nullified any collision-detection ability. Try to smooth out the keyframes and retest it.

Let me ask this again... is there a specific need for baking at all? Is the grass blowing in a 'force' wind or is there any sort of dynamic effect at all in place? If no, don't bake... or just set the chor to 1 frame and only bake frame 1. If there is a need for baking and I missed it above due to my lazy reading habits, sorry.

Looking at your image Rob... it looks like some sort of valley with some 'grass roof' houses... Are the material groups different for each emittor? Meaning, is the material(hair) for house 1 different(seperate) from house 2 and the stuff that populates the ground? It should be or else you are confusing the system and will get... stretchy glitches. Do a save-as multiple times to your material and make sure each has a unique name.

I don't know if 'drag-n-drop' works from model to model... maybe I am wrong- I never did it that way. What I do, is use copy/paste. So- copy the headband from the source model- and paste it into the destination model... you 'should' see the geometry in the model window AND the group(s) appear in the destination models PWS. Also, the paste operation typically places the geometry 10 units lower in Y space... so dirctly after your cntrl-V...do a shift arrowUP. Save often when copy-pasting.

Could you set a longer render and come back to it on the next shift or day?

Great explanation, Nancy. ALSO- baking of hairs(and particle systems) is highly recommended if you plan to use NetRender... because the processors can solve the hair dynamics differently and give you 'flicker'.

Yes, I've discovered you CAN use 4 on a quad core computer. Open up more by finding the Render Messenger icon in your hash installation folder (C:Program Files/ Hash Inc/ V16/RenderMessenger.exe) and clicking on it 'should' activate another processor for your cause... Rob says Netrender renders FASTER with all 4 going... there is a Task manager trick too... to save some OS power... lower the priority on the 4th core...?

Yes, the baked info lives in a par file... watch out- they can get BIG for long scenes. If you are not using the 'dynamic' feature for the hair you should not need to 'bake' at all.

Standing ovation! A well told story with beautiful imagery.

Your tests are always so short... I'd like to see the flowers resolve themselves! Very cool animation!

Great! Keep going!

Looking good so far... it needs DETAILS!

SO--- If i was to buy the V16 CDRom and install NetRender on a bunch of those Render Farm CPU's and had one of our whizz-kid IT guys hook-up all the network gozindas and gozoudas... would I be able to start rendering on more than X processors? Or is there a limit? I wish we had clarification on this. I could SURE use more render power.

Here is my tutorial on NetRender:

Hi Shawn! Here's my experience, I'm sure any misinfo will be corrected. Your new Version 16 comes WITH a new utility called NetRender. I have been playing with it at work on my Win XP system, but last night at home on my Win7 machine I saw it on the desktop where the installer had left it and decided to give it a whirl. I was quite happy to see that there was a WONDERFUL installation process (with nice illustrations, by the way) that quickly and easily did all the 'footwork' of finding the IP address of my machine and the numbers for both processors... I don't know if it was a Win7 thing or what- but that installation was brain-dead easy... the way I like it. I went into HashV16 and setup a test project to render, saved and quit. Then, went to NetRender to render it out. When you 1st open the app you need to wait while it locates and connects with both your processors. You will see them appear in the bottom window, hopefully with an 'on-line' status. Then you start a 'pool'(pooling allows for more versatile/multiple project setups) and place your project into it to render... double-check all the render settings- and drag and drop your processors to the middle window to activate the render process. The statistics and feedback it gives you is way more than the Hash renderer gives you... I did have my render 'stall-out' at the start, and found the detective work was easy to figure out why. I found a menu at top that says 'show errors' and saw in the error readout that my path to save my finished files was incomplete. I reset it to a proper folder, and right-clicked on the pool to remove the errors and re-enable the processors- and tried again... it worked! NOW--- the question on everyones mind is... CAN I GET IT TO WORK WITH MORE THAN 2 PROCESSORS??? As far as I see, currently...no. UNLESS you have multiple machines on a network and a legal license(subscription or disc) for each machine. Holmes documented success with that in the NetRender forum... maybe this is the way it is meant to work... I have heard talk of an 'unlimited processor' subscription at an increased cost- but nothing has materialized at this early date in V16's life. Maybe it is as simple as buying the V16 disc for $300 and you (and your IT guy) are good to go on a huge render farm... no? On the other hand... you can still get up to 3 instances of A:M running on a typical quad-core machine (leaving the 4th for the OS) Also of note... there is talk of a 'futuristic' plan (already being utilized in Blender-Land) to use a simple browser window (FF, IE) to 'lend' your idle processors to people you trust... allowing a much larger pool of processing power culled and delivered from around the world by peoples idle processors... here is a link to that discussion with some great input by the guy who wrote the Blender app (and is a former A:M guy 'Adam Spline'... we should be bribing him to code one for us!) http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=39743 ALL OF THIS is more and more pertinent every day... I was just awarded a nice job that is a 'render-dogger' and needs to be done by mid week NEXT week... I havent even started it yet and I am sweating the render-time details...Version 16 has made some great improvements in render times and features such as texture baking, 64bit support and FastAO are helping BIGTIME, but the world has gone HD. MEANWHILE I am sitting next to a render farm(60+CPUs) that is used by my Maya colleagues who have finally deemed me worthy of using it due to some of the KILLER stuff I am able to do with my little A:M. I will try to provide a step by step for setting up a render in NetRender...

Happy Birthday Paul! I'll have a beer for you tonight, let you know how it was tomorrow!

It looks as if it is mechanically not built to move laterally... so thus the unnatural look. You need to add some sort of rotation-ability to the legs... not only in your rigging but you need to sell it visually as well with some sort of gear or swivel in each lower leg...

Didn't say I dint like it... just could throw one of my treatments at her for an option,,, I set hairstyles to a pose slider, so they can alternate. I like her hair, kind of a Debra Harry thing!

Awesome! Have you guys seen how DAZ Studio is marketing their software? Basically, they give away some poseable models and then sell clothes, accessories and actions for them. If WE were to make a model like this available to the general public, complete with multiple characteristics (hairdoos, clothes, accessories, settings etc) there would be A) increased sales of A:M revenue-generating opportunities for established users as content providers. Mark- great work... a true labor of love. Her hand may be a little long compared to the fingers as Rob noticed. Her hair... I'd like to volunteer to work on some hair-do's for you. Have you animated anything yet? Link to DAZ's girl4 video:

AHA! I stumbled upon it! The problem (I am having) is when a 2nd instance of an object that uses SSS is brought to the stage, it renders as black. (See image) This would have many potential effects when using multiple objects, like a crowd scene with multiple instances of the same character with SSS... or even a holiday Advent wreath or Jewish 'menorah' with several candles (oy-vey! a perfect usage of SSS) which are all the same model duplicated in the choreography. BEFORE I submit this, can I get someone to test my project to see if it happens to them as well? SSS_trubbs.prj