largento

That's great!

Might not be helpful, but if you open Console in your Utilities folder, there should be User Diagnostic Reports and System Diagnostic Reports. If you turn down the triangles on these, you should see reports of your crashes and hangs (crashes end in .crash, hangs end in .hang). Selecting one will show the report. Select an Animation Master crash report and take a look at it. It's mostly gobbledy-gook to me, but there might be something there.

Largento's Barber Shop, Yes! You just know it is some mobster's favorite barber. Awesome work! Very cool to be immortalized in it!

I'm at a loss. Maybe some kind of conflict? I can't imagine what it would be, though. Do you have any third party apps that maybe use one of the same 3-letter extension? I had Shade installed at one time and it used the shd extension that A:M uses for shaders. Daz and some of those apps had the same conflict. It didn't cause A:M to crash, but it did make the shaders unusable.

Is it possible that at start-up, A:M is looking for a project file that may be corrupted? I know I always set my options so that A:M does nothing at start-up, but I think it defaults to opening the last project. Maybe something in that project is causing A:M to crash? Do you know what the last project was? Maybe you can move it somewhere else and see if that gets around it.

I'm with Sebastian, I can't see anything you are doing wrong. Is this your first time using A:M? You should be getting a box you need to type your activation code into. Does the icon disappear from the Dock when this happens? I would expect if it were quitting suddenly for a dialogue box to come up with an error code and acknowledge that the app has crashed. Is that happening? You say you have trashed your preferences and reinstalled. Did you completely trash the A:M folder first, or reinstall over it? I'd try doing that if you haven't.

Just thought I'd update a little. Have finally started to make real progress in animating this. "Real" jobs really get in the way of doing what you want to do. :-) I've been doing a lot in the Windows version now since the Mac version seems to choke whenever hair is involved. It's working amazingly well for being virtualized. I'm using the 64 bit version and I've set it so that it can use 4 GB of RAM. The render times are better on the Windows version, too. There is just so much more to this in every way when compared to Stalled Trek. Stalled Trek was more confined and it was story I knew backwards and forwards and had drawn as a comic book several times. There were some bits that required new staging and there were some shots that I had to restage for lack of ability to do the hard stuff, but for the most part, I already knew exactly what it looked like. This one has a lot more challenges which require me to figure out how to do the shots and make them so that everything works. There's still a little guy on my shoulder yelling "What have you got yourself into?!" ...but I'm starting to figure out how to tune him out. :-)

I was sent an email by a Adobe awhile back about this. All I could really do was change my password and hope the sensitive stuff stays decrypted. The same thing happened with Sony Playstation not all that long ago. The concern is that they now have the source code for these apps, meaning they could find more exploits. There have been a lot of issues with the Adobe Creative Cloud. They jumped into it too quickly. I really don't know if I'll continue with it after my first year discount goes away.

If I'm understanding this, he doesn't want to have to re-weight the CPs. Each CP would have it's own bone. To give an example of what Will's talking about, there's this thread where Mark S. placed his face rig into my Wannabe Pirates models and ran the same zign track action on each of them. You can see that differences in the meshes did play a factor. Part of that was probably due to the neutral expression of each model and how big their proportions were.

I ended up with Windows 8 OEM. According to what I read, this qualifies me for a free upgrade to 8.1 and apparently 8.1 will not have an OEM version. I've heard 8 is getting a bad wrap, but to be honest, I've been having an easier time with it than I did Windows XP back in 2007. The way I figure it this gives me the option of upgrading for free if it becomes necessary. When Apple transitioned from its PowerPC chips to Intel chips, it kept support for the PowerPC in the OS. So, there was awhile there where the OS had to run on both chipsets. Many apps were released as Universal Binaries that worked on both platforms. This was in 2006 and they kept support for both until Snow Leopard in 2009. There was still a Rosetta translator that would allow apps written for the PowerPC to work, but that was dropped in 2011 when Lion came out. (That's when we lost support for the plug-in, which was presumably written for the PowerPC architecture.) Mountain Lion was released in 2012 and Mavericks is releasing this fall. I don't really understand the particulars, but I guess Mac apps have to be compiled in Xcode and there are issues with Xcode being updated and meaning that more and more parts of the A:M are needing to be rewritten to work with it.

All true, except the comics never drew a following. :-) That one step breaks the whole chain. If The Wannabe Pirates had ever drawn a large audience, it wouldn't have been too hard to monetize it. The ads would have paid decent, I'd have gotten decent sales from the books and possible other merchandise. I had lunch with a couple of other cartoonists last week and we were talking about that daily grind of creating a strip a day. We had all done it at one time or another and all of us had only lasted about a year to a year and a half. Hats off to Schulz for doing it for 50 years, but I don't have it in me. Plus, I like stories with beginnings, middles and ends. The idea of doing an open-ended story that just bounces from chapter to chapter, doesn't have a lot of appeal to me. It's fun at the beginning, but then you realize you are forever trapped in the middle of the story. Right now, I'm focusing on finishing the Wobbling Dead. I've run into too many obstacles and now just need to forget about everything else until I reach the end. After that, I'm going to take a long, hard look at what I want to do next. There are many things I've thought of doing and I'll be free to explore them. Right now, I'm feeling like one of those slaves chained to the oar of a ship. Every time my mind wanders off from the task at hand, I get a whip across my back. :-)

I kind of went that route with The Wannabe Pirates and Greyhawk and the Starbucklers, Paul. The original sites were built ontop of Wordpress, using the comicpress plug-in. I did my advertising through Project Wonderful instead of Google Adwords, but the results were pretty much the same. Small page views equal small advertising returns. Add into it they were mostly images (the comics themselves) and I found that I needed to go back and transcribe every strip in order to show up in search engines. I worried over it for awhile, using tools in Google Adsense to find keywords and terms to try to improve things, but the bottom line is you gotta' have lots of eyes on your page to make that model work and my stuff wasn't attracting them. I tell you one thing that is frustrating, YouTube won't put ads on my Stalled Trek video because they don't believe I own the material. It's not so much the money, since it hasn't garnered that many views, it's that they are in a sense, accusing me of wrong-doing. I suppose I could try to push the matter with them, but it hasn't seemed like a high priority.

Well, I'm finally up and running with A:M on Parallels! What is the most incredible improvement over my experience in 2007, is that all my files and folders are instantly recognized by Windows. I went to open a model and I was immediately in my Documents folder. In 2007, sharing a file required creating a shared folder and placing everything in there. This is so much better. The Coherence behavior is a bit odd. Sometimes instead of refreshing, the screen appears to slide off to the left or right with a new screen following it. Opening a model file that isn't linked to a material file will sometimes toss the screen aside just to show you the dialog box. I'm happy to say, though, that at least so far, I've not encountered the greyed out box problem. Most likely because it's using the Windows interface. Speed-wise, most everything seems to run as well as it does on the Mac, but I do notice a flickering during tumbling, as if the screen isn't refreshing as quickly to make it smooth. Bringing in a rigged character, I found that posing bones was about the same as on the Mac side. There was a notable difference in 2007 with the virtual Windows version being faster, but subsequent versions of A:M greatly improved the performance on the Mac side. That was ultimately what caused me to abandon the Windows version after all that expense and effort. The Mac version was suddenly fast! I did a test render. A frame from the Wobbling Dead rendered in 1:40 on virtual Windows and 2:52 on the native Mac version. Flipping between the two resulting images, showed no difference in the image. That's a significant difference in render speed. And encouraging, since part of my reason for making this switch was so that I could re-render Stalled Trek in HD. I'm working on a series of shots right now and am going to try a few in the Windows version to see how they go. I don't think I'd recommend the expense to another Mac user, but on the initial try, it at least is an option.

Y'know, Jost, I'm coming to this conclusion: Everybody thinks that something on the web should be free. Especially short films. I do think that feature films have a better shot at some kind of pay on demand, but it's hard to price a 15 minute movie. If a 2 hour feature is $10, does that mean a 1 hour film should be $5 and a half hour film be $2.50 and a 15-minute film be $1.25? Even if it's only a tiny cost, they won't pay. Yet, if it's tangible, ie exists in the real world, they will consider paying large amounts for it. I think for The Wobbling Dead, I'm going to continue the DVDs in person route.

Janice was exactly what I DIDN'T want to do. :-) I always thought this female puppet from the ballroom dance sequences was a better solution:

If you have, Sebastian, I never get tired of hearing it. The females don't have giant mouths because I find it makes them look like men in drag. :-) I get this a lot and always point back to all of the cartoon precedence for male characters having big mouths and women having tiny ones. Unless the female character is supposed to be unattractive. Just imagine how ugly Wilma Flintstone would be with Fred's mouth.

The Windows interface becomes kind of moot with Parallels Coherence mode, Ken. You can launch Windows apps directly from the Mac Dock and they strip out the Windows background, so that you just see the apps windows over the Mac interface. I haven't received another activation code yet, so I can't say how well A:M will run with it. I'm not saying anything pro or negative about TSM2, just used it as an example of things I can't do with the Mac version. Apple seems to be on this kick about upgrading the OS every time you blink (the next one is rumored to be coming out this month) and every version seems to chip away at the Mac version of A:M. Having the Windows version on my Mac as a supplement will hopefully shield me from further issues. It will also help as a transition in case one of the new Mac updates renders A:M unusable right in the middle of a project and the Windows version is my only hope.

The plugin stopped working a couple of OS updates ago.

I'm with you guys on the cost, but I'm really down to no choice. I have things that use darktree filters that I need to be able to render and I've got to get this movie done. :-) I found having to reboot into Windows or Mac a pain. Also, there weren't great implementations at the time for sharing files. Especially since I was using external hard drives that had been formatted in such a way that Windows didn't recognize them. I just loaded Windows 8 into Parallels this time. So far, so good. Waiting for the activation code to run A:M, but the basic stuff and Internet Explorer appear to be moving at normal speeds. My Mac Pro is fairly beefy (2 quad core Xeons with 14GB of RAM), so I expect it to run well.

When I did this before, I ended up with two installations of Windows. The one I installed through Parallels and then another in a partition to use Bootcamp. Like Sebastian, I was wary about going all-in with putting Windows on my Mac. I had to call Microsoft for the second one and explained the situation. They told me as long as it was the same computer, it was okay and gave me another code that activated it. So did Hash. Why would they now suddenly refuse? And not to make an issue of it, but my investment is already quite large just so that I can get parity with the Windows version. It's not like two people can use the app at the same time. The only benefit I get is being able to do what the Windows version does that the Mac version cannot.

A new activation code on the same computer is not a new license.

I really love this look!

When I ran it before, it was using the same license. I had to get Hash to email me a second activation code, but I had no problems. After all, it's just one computer.

I'm basically thinking future savings with going with 8. The price difference was nominal and since this will allow me to upgrade to 8.1 for free, it should keep me solid for the near future. I try to stay up-to-date on my Mac, but it only costs me $20 to do so! Robert, I've run A:M via Parallels on my Mac before and the experience wasn't bad at all. And that was on an iMac with an early version of Parallels running XP. They've been steadily improving Parallels all along and they are up to v 9 now. When the hard drive crashed on my iMac (back in 2008), I didn't see enough of a good reason to buy a new copy of Windows and install it on my new Mac Pro. If I recall correctly, the only issue I had was that images that were rendered out of my Windows copy didn't match the ones rendered from my Mac copy. Remember, though, that we're talking about five years ago and everything has changed significantly since then.

Thanks for the replies, guys. I'm going to run it through Parallels, which allows you to run Windows in the background in Coherence mode and launch apps as if they were Mac apps, so I'll spend very little time actually interfacing with Windows itself. My impulse is to go ahead with the Windows 8 oem. I won't have to violate the eula and it will offer a free upgrade to 8.1.