John Bigboote

Talking renderer's... I remember buying a $50 3D program called Impulse Imagine before I tried A:M... way back in the mid-1990's. I did a modeling tutorial (a torus!) and then wanted to see it rendered so I put it in the render module under the camera... nothing- black frame. Every time. I shelved it in frustration. I did not know what I was doing wrong until I tried A:M and did a similar test with my 1st A:M model and saw in the chor that a basic lighting setup was already provided as default... it hit me- I had never added lights to that scene! I was rendering pure darkness! What a newb! Today's renderers sort of take it to the next level, they start you right off with a nice Image Based Lighting setup, easily modifiable... a robust library of PBR materials are drag-n-droppable and with very little effort- you are making great renders. Want to add a light? Easy. There is a lot less of the 'you got a lot to learn, kid' mentality and more of the 'look at that amazing image you made' thinking, which is far more inviting.

Interesting discussion. I have had opportunity to delve into GPU rendering of late using a little software plug-in that works within Adobe After Effects called Element3D from Andrew Kramer of Video CoPilot. From time to time I share my findings here on the forum. E3D is lightning bolt fast, and excels at uber-high resolution 3D work. The company I am with does video presentation for conventions and shows which typically have projected screen resolutions of 8,000 pixels wide(=/-) by 1080pixels high and to render animation frames out of any 3D CPU renderer would be prohibitive... E3D has a limited feature set... it is not a modeler at all- tho it can extrude AE live type with nice bevels. It has animation features that rival to a degree Cinema4D's mograph feature... so you can duplicate and warp your creations in nifty arrays. It does allow importation of obj and obj sequences which is cool because that bridges it to A:M nicely, and offers a sort of an 'alternate renderer' to A:M and because it is a GPU renderer.... fast! Things it can-NOT do are many... your hair and A:M particle effects are right out... reflections are 'faked' which is a big negative in my book- but it sort of fakes them nicely. SSS is faked, tho nicely... refraction is faked via phoney offset, and even shadows are not as easily controlled as in A:M because they have to work in conjunction with AE's lights- which are half-baked and clunky. Ambient Occlusion has 2 varieties (SSAO or raytraced) but with a great deal of flexibility and speed for both so that is a PLUS. Here is a test I did recently with an A:M render that I put some time into making nice. I like A:M's DOF, and the floor reflection falloff in A:M and fog feature is an easy favorite of mine. Other programs just don't 'get' reflection falloff as illustrated here. They want to confuse it with 'Fresnel' effect which does not get you this look- which I like. Also fog... you would think it is such and easy comprehensive feature... similar to depth mapping... but they can't get it like A:M does. Look at the fog falloff in the E3D render- sort of 'all-or-nothing' whereas the A:M fog is gradual. Nice. The rim in A:M was a high density obj prop, I simply applied my material 'Chromanence' to it... I could not export it via obj so I used another rim in E3D and hand-tracked it to the motion. ALL the materials in the E3D render are drag-n-drop PBR materials... the type was an afterthought added in AE and matted there. The volumetric light was added using Trapcode Lux which is a nifty AE filter that makes AE lights volumetric... Final note: I did not make note of exact render times... the A:M render was 864 X 486 and took minutes per frame and went overnight. The E3D render was 1280 X 720 and took 2-4 seconds per frame while I waited and the 6 second clip was finished within 2 minutes. tire render comparison.mp4

Thank-You for the pictures, looks like a grand time!

Thanks Tore!

Can we get an editorial opinion from Jason Simonds on 3D-Coat’s voice ? I've never seen such a thing in CGI circles afore. There is a bit of a snag(disadvantage) using A:M and then submitting an .obj as they bequest... when I open an obj in C4D that I made in A:M, there is considerable rebuilding to get it halfway presentable, and I am sure there would be work to do as well down the line if you opened it in Maya or Houdini or Max... plus the fact that some of the cool A:M features would need to be reinvented altogther or just forgotten- like A:M hair or SSS...

It worked! Pretty cool as well... I will attach my tire and project if anyone wants to digest it. BASICALLY- there is a bone and a null in the tire model... the null is placed at the very top of the tire to be used as an aim-at target. The bone is at the 0,0,0 as a rotation axis. I made an action for the tire, and selected New Distort and then selected the tire bone as the target- which conformed the distort to the shape of the tire nicely. I added a 'aim roll at' constraint to the distort's main bone(aiming at the null at the top of the tire) to keep it from spinning as the tire turned. Then- brought the tire into a chor... added the action... and animated it's position and eyeballed the rotation to match (I suppose this is where the stride length feature would help...) https://giphy.com/gifs/SiGHN0yXafUYEKgmDy/html5 TIREforPRESSURE.mdl TIRE pressure.prj tire (1).mp4

Moved. I had not found it... actually I found it in V18... huhm. Guess it makes sense, THANKS MARK!

HEY! Where has the AI wizard gone? Moved? Missing? EDIT- I see the font wizard is there...

I like it! When I 1st saw it- I thought... COOL- an animated distortion box! But then I saw the wireframe was not rotating... good trick! I am going to attempt the other way... hope to have something to show shortly. INSPIRING!

Looking good! I like the Canadian Tonto idea... Dan- make it Tontoronto! I see you went with the 2008 rig, does it have a good feet-to-the-floor binding system?

Wow- looking good Rodger! Hands look better now- amazing how the eye is drawn to hands. I will always add 2 poses to my characters called FIST L and FIST R... 90% of a hands motion is simple opening and closing, with these poses you can simply keyframe variations and it keeps the hand from looking 'karate-chop'py... or dead.

I will... right now I may have figured it out... I had a wide camera field-of-view (25) so I changed it to a 90... from a fisheye to more of a zoom- I think that may have resulted in more correct volumetric effects... I hope.

I have a render situation where I am using volumetric light(klieg) shining at camera thru a .png sequence with alpha channel of little doors opening and closing. I am noticing the effect of the volumetric seems 'incomplete', unless I am seeing an illusion. There are areas close to the matted opening where the light does not appear and I feel it should. I have tried many various settings, Zbuffered vs RayTraced etc but as the sequence renders sometimes it looks right and sometimes the light appears cutoff like in the attached image... Known issue? Bug? Am I misusing the feature? Same results in V18 and V19.

Looking good! What is the hair plan?

Great horse... a horse like that makes me think you have some silly or outlandish locomotion planned for his walk, gallop etc.... something that defies logical horsemanship. My eye is drawrn to the bottom of his torso where the predictable roundness flattens-out... don't know if it is good or bad.

OK- NEVERMIND. I updated from V19.0C to V19.0D and the option for Bullet physics is working! Onward I delve! Pays to stay CURRENT on your softwares!

I see Steffens webpage has instructions... I got snagged at step 1. The 'Simulate Bullet' option is greyed-out... unavailable. http://www.sgross.com/bullet/BulletGlobal1.html

Rod- I DL'd the links from Steffen you posted... looking at the 1st one... softbody anchor.prj... I see in the models that bullet physics have been set- how do I activate the simulation in the chor?

As I open and work with certain model files, I notice a 'buildup of rotoscopes'... which are easily deleted and pose no real nuiscance... I'm wondering if anyone else gets this oddity in A:M... pertains to no real version- has been happening to me for years.

I'll keep an eye on this... old-western time-period stories are a favorite... really loved 'million ways to die in the west' with Seth MacFarlane and currently watching 'Godless' mini-series... saloons and whorehouses! You could have a hotel/barbershop called 'Bed, Bath, and be -----.'

Funny. TOO true! What rig to use on him?

Smartskin?

and then- I exported everything over to Element 3D to see what it would look like rendered from a different renderer in After Effects... I also added a little 'commercialism' to it. You will notice I had trouble controlling the cone for a smooth animation... not every animation program is as easy to make things move as nicely as A:M is. The nice thing about E3D... 2 seconds per frame at 1920 X 1080 full frame image...! HashHut_IceCream_E3D.mp4

AND--- my image took 2nd place. EXCELLENT! Thanks ever-buddy! I've been holding-off on posting these 2 movies... of my ice-cream cone. I'm the kinda guy that once an image is all set and lit and awesome... I've gotta do an animation of it... even just a camera fly-by always excites me. I remember when the great A:M user Jim Talbot had made his 'jungle queen' image with the tigers, I begged him to do a camera move thru it- and he did! Here, I did a little animation on my ice-cream scene in A:M: HashHut_IceCream.mp4

What an amazing production Rob makes of this... always entertaining and well worth the wait! He even had 2 wonderful entries himself. Congratulations to Mark and Bruce!