largento

Has it been less than a year yet? My nephew cornered me this weekend asking if I had it yet. I told him about it when I won and he was so enamored with the idea that I was getting a "real" medal that he's still thinking about it and, I gather, told all of his friends at school. My cred with my nephew is in jeopardy here.

Very nice, Matt. The "low poly" look reminds me of folded paper art.

Big congratulations to the winners! I don't want to mention them by name, since that's part of the fun of Robert's excellent video. Well-earned, all!

Not quite that simple. Apparently if you have a later OS than I have and the latest version of Photoshop, you can import the image from your phone (like importing images from your camera) and the depth map is in its own channel. I've also seen an application that uses a command line to write them to a file. Apple bought a company in 2015 that developed this process for using the two lenses to build a depth map. Assuming it still works the same way, it actually creates only 9 layers of depth and it obviously works better in some conditions than others. The image seems to be a much lower resolution one than the actual image, which isn't ideal. There are iPhone apps that seem to let you isolate the depth map, but the two free ones I tried failed to work. I gather the iPhone X and XR are much better than the 8+ I have.

Yeah, that's how I first did it was with my iPhone. It's hit or miss, though. Some would figure it out, but if it was too complicated, you ended up with weirdness. In order to get Facebook to recognize it as a 3D photo, you had to use "portrait mode," which is what the iPhone uses to allow you adjust lighting and focus settings on a photo after it's taken. Presumably the phone is generating a depth map to accomplish this.

That's really cool! I gave it a go with and old cover to one of our graphic novels. You could easily spend many hours working on it. They definitely get your attention when your scrolling.

Hey Aetheria, I'm not sure about the exporting, but if you can use the UV map that you make in A:M, there's a tutorial on using the UV editor by Will Sutton on YouTube here. Hope that helps!

So could you stick a giant model of a spaceship to a place with this thing and then wander around looking at it life-size through your phone?

I've been afraid to update to Mojave for this very reason. Ah well, as they say, "All good things..." I'm going to hang back updating until I finish this latest Stalled Trek, but then I'll have to cut the cord. To paraphrase the 11th Doctor, "I'll always remember when A:M was made for Mac."

Hey Robert, any ETA on when we might get them?

Great news, Walter!

Well, HXT files are mini-applications on the Mac. They contain data that can be accessed by right-clicking on the icon and selecting "Show Package Contents". There does seem to be some advice on how to fix them. I saw one that said if you compressed it and then replaced the ".zip" with the correct suffix it might fix them. Worth looking into. It might work to repair permissions, too.

Try this, Walter: Select one of the HXT folders and Get Info (cmd-i) and look at the Name & Extension section. Make sure the Hide extension box isn't checked and then in the Open with: section, select Animation Master. If that works, there's a Change All button.

Mine's exactly the same, Rob (just pointing to the 19.0 folder.)

Hey Walter, did you install any new software recently? This is a shot in the dark, but years ago, I couldn't use any of the shaders in A:M because I had an application installed that used the same suffix for their files. Uninstalling the application fixed it. I don't know if there are any apps that you HXT, but that's a possibility.

Hey Walter, what version of OS X are you running? I'm running Sierra (10.12) and my plugins are still available in the menu. I know my work computer is running High Sierra (10.13) and I ran into some issues with not being able to see GUI elements in the Open window (specifically it would ask me to find a missing file, but not display the name of the file that was missing.) There was a note in the latest release that they weren't supporting newer versions of the OS.

One thing I've used to find normals that are flipped is to apply the Porcelain material. It will give you black areas where there are conflicts with the normals.

That's understandable, Steffen. I've known for a long time that we Mac users are living on borrowed time with A:M. 🙂

If they handle it like they did the intel switch, I would assume all of them that want to remain current. I’m quite sure that a path for native Mac written apps to convert will be set into motion. Myself, I don’t use many apps that aren’t part of the Adobe CC. The access to the voluminous trove of iOS apps would likely have the effect of there being many more apps available than ever before.

Windows on the Mac is probably a days are numbered thing as well. Apple is making its own chips and promising to integrate iOS apps with the Mac. Once they drop Intel, that’ll be all she wrote.

Agreed.

Hey Steffen, I see that I could get a late 2012 Mac Mini for about $400 US. It would be a little steep for me right now, but if we could get some of the Mac users to chip in, we could probably swing it. Do you think you could use it to support the Mac through to 64bit and the new OS or is that still not possible with your porting software?

AMAZING! Fantastic job!

When you get the new computer, send Jason the MAC address along with the request. He'll need it to transfer the license.

Email Hash support and include your PC's MAC address. Not sure if they are still selling that license anymore, but if it's just three years, it would be cheaper to buy the subscription for three years.