AndyDavis

That's been a legal filename for well over a decade.

That was it. Arrrrrgggggg. Thank you for taking the time to help and finding the needle in the haystack!

Here's a simple project that demonstrates what I am talking about, again thank you so much to all that have tried to help me with this. Loser.zip

I can get this every time with brand new stuff. New Project Import the Cube from the Hash library. Decal one face It looks good. Save, close, reopen. Image file pointer is reset, and I cannot get it to save again. Here's the image I'm trying use:

Scratch that one off the list. Same result, works great all the way up until I save and reload. Image sequence imports properly and still shows ccorrectly after the save/reload. The decal image just seems to lose track of what image it is supposed to be displaying. Getting back to Rodney's suggestion, in the tree under my project, I have an images folder and under that my imported images. The imported images have settings for Filename, Start, End, and FPS. I don't see a 'Timed' anywhere. Am I looking in the correct place? Ultimately, I do want to use a sequence and use key frames to advance through the sequence. The idea is that I will change the images when the face is not visible. I think I need to get over this more immediate hurdle first.

Again, thank you for the replies and assistance. I am running V13 on XP. I have not tried this on my Vista machine. I tried Caroline's sequence and it worked great. That is until I saved the project and then reloaded it. Then I had the exact same problem. It is OK to use a sequence of TGA files, correct? My sequence is simple while I work out the animation, it will become actual photos as the project progresses. Should I use a PNG sequence instead?

Thanks for the replies. Everything is on the hard disk. I made a copy of the model that is local to the project. The images are .tga files. It was originally a sequence, but I backed off to a single file when I started having problems. I did apply the decals to each face with everything else hidden. At one point, it actually looked like the cube was correct. When I update the image reference, I do get an asterisk. When I hit save, it goes away. Unfortunately, so does my image assignment. The image type is set to color, although the file reference is being reset, so I doubt it would matter if it was bump.

I'm stumped. I have a very simple animation. I am using the Hash supplied cube model. Each major face has a decal with an image. (Think of a )photocube. I get my decals applied, but the image associated with the image object keeps getting reset to 'None'. I run through the six faces, and re assign the images, then pretty shortly thereafter, I'm seeing a gray cube again and all of the images have been reset. It seems that as soon as I save, the image reverts back to None. As you can imagine, this is very frustrating and any clues would be very welcome.

Yes, I think that's it, thank you. And now it pops up when I search, I think technology hates me today.

A few months ago I read about a new title for A:M, I would swear that I once held it in my hands at the local book emporium. However, I can't find it by searching and it's not on the Hash site. Does anyone have any idea which book I am talking about?

Thanks to all for the replies. The accidental distortion was caused because I was trying to spin my point of view so I could select the backside faces.

OK, did the simplest thing and lo and behold, it worked. Just drag the groups up and down to create the order.

I'm trying to work my way through some texturing and I'm getting stuck on two things. As a basic excercise, I'm trying to make an animated Photo Cube. To start, I am simply using the Hash Cube primitive and I am going to assign some named groups that I can use for both the frame and the picture faces. The Hash Cube is not just 8 CPs, it is 6 major faces with a nice bevel at the corners. The patches that make up the bevel are the 'frame' The first thing that I have encountered is that it is really easy to accidently distort the model when you're spinning it around and trying to select all of the faces. Is there any way to lock the geometry, but still allow the creation of named groups? The second thing that is giving me heartburn is that it doesn't really appear that I am assigining patches/faces to a group. A:M appears to infer the patches from the CPs that are part of the group. This works most of the time, but does not work for what I am trying to do. The 'frame' of the photo cube includes every CP in the model. If I assign a color to the frame, it really should go everywhere but the 6 major faces. Unfortunately, it goes everywhere. Is there a way around that? Can I arrainge the order of the groups so that the face groups are on top of the frame group? Bonus puzzlement: When trying to create the faces, I accidentally created two groups that had the same CPs. When I deleted the extra group, the contents of the correct group were also cleared. Is this a bug or am I off in the weeds? Andy

I wasn't just being flip. It isn't so much a matter of figuring out what your programs can do, it's a matter of figuring out your production pipeline. As an example, consider how you will deal with a decision that a certain clip of animation needs to be 20 seconds instead of 16. If you have already spotted a bunch of sound effects to the track, this could end up being a major PITA. Those moments will certainly arise, but a good process sohuld accomplish two goals: 1. make those moments infrequent 2. lessen the pain of those moments

Start small and figure out your production pipeline. Not all programs will do all things, those that try usually do most of them badly. I use Sony Vegas Movie Studio to comp together movie clips. I have a version from a couple of years ago which allows three audio and three video tracks. I think the latest version has increased those numbers. Vegas Movie Studio is also adequate for very basic audio work, you can also drag acid audio loops onto the audio tracks so it doubles as a low rent compositional tool as well. There's a demo available on the web. For serious audio work, I would agree with BrainMuffin and recomend Cakewalk's line of products. I have the Sonar 5 product and it even supports a video track. Start small and figure out your production pipeline. Not all programs will do all things, those that try usually do most of them badly. Oh, and did I mention...Start small and figure out your production pipeline. Not all programs will do all things, those that try usually do most of them badly.