largento

Great job, everyone!

Thanks, Rodney!

Merry Christmas, Jim! Very nice!

Very cool, Robert! Always enjoy these musical performances.

Thanks, guys!

I haven't done a Christmas animation since 2008 partly because I never think of it until too late in the game and it always seems to be a nightmare to finish in time. This year, I didn't let that stop me. :-) This one was really rushed. I came up with the idea on Saturday, worked up the audio and started putting it together. Animated it Sunday morning and then waited 21 hours for it to render and finished it up this afternoon. My original plan was to do it like an old Christmas special and have fade-ins from other camera views, but the initial pass took so long to render, there just wasn't the time left to me. Oh well. :-) qJ6im6A4dDU Happy Holidays!

Sounds like Gatekeeper. Check your security settings.

Awesome! Very excited for you!

Here's something cool and useful. This guy has drawn skeletons into cartoon characters. Interesting to see where he has placed the joints and something that could be handy when you are thinking about rigging your character.

If you select the dome in the cho, go under options in the properties and set "Flat Shaded" to on, the lighting won't effect the dome. Turn off receive shadows and cast shadows, too, since you don't want it to do either.

Have you checked the options for your skydome? You don't want it to receive or cast shadows. A couple of things I'd suggest for lighting. It looks very flat. Bring in a light to cast some shadows. Don't be afraid to use ambient lighting. Here's a quick go with lighting and post work: I may have overdone the effect a little, but when I see something like this and think "old", I think of George Pal-type stuff. What I did here was have a klieg light as my keylight, which is lighting the truck and casting a shadow. I have a strong rim light (orange) which is putting some highlights on the truck, although the color of it doesn't really lend itself to being well-lit. I somehow lost my fill light, but there is one there. Then, there's a bulb set up to illuminate the background. The choreography is using color ambient lighting (a kind of pink-flesh-tone.) I always think about what I want the viewer to be focusing on and then I try to take everything else out of focus. I have the foreground lit brighter than the background, so that the background doesn't seem important. I'm using depth of field, but I've also taken it into photoshop and set up selection masks so that I can make gradual blurs that keep the important element in sharp focus, but softens everything else. I also use those selections to slightly darken the edges. I also put a blurred copy of the image on top of the normal image and set it to overlay blend mode and bump down the fill. This gives everything a kind of bloom effect. I like to break up large flat areas of color. Here's the rendered image before postwork:

Happy Birthday, dude! Hope it's a great one!

Looks good, Kathryn! Nice big image. I did note a spelling error (the bottom line says "staring" instead of "starring.")

No, I didn't use that since it's not part of v17. I hadn't thought of testing v16, but since I did have it, I tried it out and the result was: 10:50. I know v16 was unbelievably faster than v15. I'm still running OS X 10.8, so there might be a difference based on the OS.

I just put in a new graphics card in my Mac Pro. I'm going from a ATI 2600 with 256MB to an ATI 5870 with 1024MB. I wondered if there'd be any difference in render times. I don't think it had any effect, but just to share the results. This was a VGA size render with 16 passes and 60% Ambient Occlusion. No reflections, no hair. Mac v17G = 8:43 Mac v18beta2 = 8:45 Win v17G (running under Parallels) = 7:23 That's a pretty big advantage to running the Windows version. I'm not sure if it would make any difference to change the allotment of resources to Parallels. Right now, I'm letting it use 4GB of RAM and 4 CPU cores. I also gave it 512MB of graphics memory. I don't know if I can give it everything without causing problems, but I would think those were pretty good specs for a Windows computer. The thing I was most happiest, is that I compared all three images using the "Difference" layer property in Photoshop and there wasn't a single pixel of difference. That's huge, since that was a big concern back in the day.

Super-stylish and VERY cool! Great job, Sebastian!

Haven't really done much updating on this thread, but this is something I shared on Facebook, so I figured I'd add it here, too. Dull's RV: It is, of course, a Mark-abago. :-)

Disney is a corporation that makes billions based on being a family friendly corporation. It's purely a business decision. This way, the press dubs them over-cautious (or sensitive), rather than there being headlines that read "Disney Encourages Children to Smoke, Spits on WW II Vets"

Awesome!

I'd certainly hope that nobody is attempting to fault Steffen for any of this ...and if they are/were, they were clearly proceeding from ignorance. I gave this a lot of thought in September when the harbinger of this came to me and I think the only real option would be if a company was interested in developing it under license from Hash or having bought it. It's just too large a job and we would be back to the days of feature-envy where one app could do one thing another couldn't. Knowing that it would take two years of investment before they could even have it up and running, would be a huge obstacle, too. Not that we've gotten any indication from Hash what (if) there are any future plans, but that doesn't seem a likely one and in the current 3D space, who would want to try to come in with something new? Personally, I made the decision to have Windows as a back-up and once The Wobbling Dead is finished, I'll start over again with something new. It will be beneficial to learn how the other guys do it and who knows, maybe it'll get me some work and I can climb back over that cliff I jumped off of 4 years ago. :-) I certainly won't regret the time spent using A:M. It's been a blast, and as long as some version of it still exists, I'm sure I'll still be supporting it.

Thanks, Steffen ...and I agree. I wrote a long post I was going to put on the fellows board, but stopped myself, waiting to hear what you found out. Short of getting a new developer who can basically work on a second app, it's not viable to continue. Your time could be better spent on your own life or improving/adding to the Windows version. It's disappointing, but it makes the most logical sense.

Guys, we're just spinning our wheels here. Let's everyone back off and wait for the verdict from Steffen.

Yeah, but that last minute patch almost entirely dealt with the Mail app. 9to5mac.com published a complete list of what was different between the two builds. One iCalc file was changed and an XML file involved with OpenCL bridge support changed. OpenCL was never implemented in A:M because Steffen ran into problems with differences in graphics cards and incompatibility with the A:M renderer. Steffen has already identified the problem: "It looks like Apple has changed functions/entrypoints in the libstdc++" I wish I knew anything about such things, but even googling this just brings back an ocean of silly string that I can't make heads nor tails of. :-) I did see this, which might be something: "OS X 10.9 Mavericks is the first version to use libc++; previous versions of OS X used libstdc++" This page seems to discuss the problems, too. Specifically, it says this: "For every new package you install or update, you will have to re-install any of its dependencies that you previously installed on a previous version of OS X. This is because libstdc++ has been removed in favour of libc++, and things compiled with one aren't compatible with the other." This would seem to jive with Steffen finding that A:M would run with old files in the library.

I do, too, but like you say, there aren't enough of us to justify the expense of writing it from the bottom up, even if there was a willingness or desire to do it. And if Steffen can patch it up, will it still work a year from now when the next OS is released? As Sebastian said, the future of A:M on the Mac is looking foggy. What we're talking about missing in the OS came with plenty of warning. Apple switched from PPC chips to Intel in 2006. It's now 2013. Even Steffen has been warning for years that the day would come when the Mac version would be kaput.

As a consumer, I'm not so interested in whether they are "developer friendly" or not. Clearly all the tools are provided by Apple, so it's really more a case of whether or not the developer has the resources or wants to commit the resources to writing and maintaining the app. I think it's a terrible time for software companies, because nobody really wants to pay for the software anymore. Consumers expect it to be free or dirt cheap. This "one ring to rule them all" perception is inaccurate. Apple wants the consumer to have a trouble-free experience. Presumably software companies should want the same for their customers. So it stands to reason that Apple wouldn't want to have tons of legacy code and have the consumer running unreliable applications. I think we've seen here that when there's a problem with the software, it's Apple that is going to be the one getting the complaint. They don't want complaints. That's the point of the Mac App Store, too. They're encouraging consumers to only purchase apps from the store because that way they can confirm that they don't include any faulty code or malware. I suspect Windows is going to move that direction, too. Given all the bad stuff out there, the average consumer (the ones who mostly bought their software in boxes) doesn't want to download applications from various websites. Frankly, whose fault it is that A:M no longer runs on the Macintosh doesn't matter at all to me. I'm not angry, I'm sad. If you are a Windows user, clearly this doesn't effect you, but were the tables turned and the Windows version had stopped working and the only alternative you were given was to switch to a Mac, I suspect you would be far more vocal in your disappointment than we have been. For many years now, I've been an A:M enthusiast, not just a user. I fell in love with A:M so hard that I quit my job just to spend more time with it. :-) It may not effect you, but it sure as Hell effects me.