ArgleBargle

Thank you very much. It was great fun to watch that again. And thanks for the FTP reference. I'll have to see if I can get some to play.

Years ago when I was working regularly with A:M, I watched a video in the A:M showcase with two swordsman on an island. The style was like flat animation built from 3D. Anyone know where that can still be found? The current showcase only has some 200 videos so I know the ones from 6 years ago or longer are not around. Any way to see the archived videos?

I desperately wish someone had let me know this when I started with A:M. I think I've lost weeks from not knowing this. These days, I use After Effects. I can't see doing sounds any other way. It's a bit of a pain, but the results are better.

Well, darn, Caroline. Finally a question comes along that I can answer and you beat me to it. Good response. I've had some fun with flashing/blinking bits of models and it's not too hard to do. It's surprisingly satisfying to see working.

What a great trip down memory lane. Your quote looks dangerously close to one of mine: "you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever."

You know, the mind boggles with potential comments about that. Frankly, I'm so overwhelmed, I don't know where to begin. Though, practically, get ahold of some porno or some anatomy books. Personally, I get embarrassed and don't make anatomically correct models.

Your Newton splash looks like it had the same problems I had with marbles. Your liquid seems to be oozing through "holes" in the plate.

Actually, I had a bit of a black-dot problem appear on both of my Windows machines when I updated to one of the later v12 releases. I had no change in video card or drivers, but if I'm in shaded wireframe mode, sometimes the dots are black and I can't tell what I've selected. It's not real consistent, but I'll have the problem typically if I've shifted to a direct view (like press a keypad number). No problems in wireframe mode. While the problem could definitely be driver issues, nonetheless, it appeared between revisions of A:M. Cool... I see that the special item stuff works on the forum now. Someone staying busy over Christmas? Or did Safari just get some brains?

Actually, I finally punted on that concept and went with the Newton engine. You can specify frame ranges to simulate with it. I had a lot of fun with that one and got some good results. Oh, and when it finished it topped 12,000 frames. I was kinda pleased, but it was definitely my longest. (Steve, that's the one I showed you when you dropped by.)

I really doubt you'll get a conclusive answer to your question. I've run A:M on numerous computers (Mac and PC, both) and never gotten random sounds. I suggest the following: The problem is really outside A:M whatever is producing the "dong" is tied to an event in windows. Go look in your sound settings and match the noise to the event(s) and maybe that'll give you some clues. Not much in life is really random... even with computers. Something consistent is happening to make the noise. Be alert for patterns. If something is really wrong, maybe look into driver problems (usually video) that a driver update might fix. Await some suggestions from others.

Yves, that's the best description I've read of that. It's tough to wrap your head around a 4th dimension (and I'm not totally sure I have it perfectly) but that clock analogy was great.

Here's a suggestion: save your project, then consolidate it (on the Project menu) to a temporary folder. You might find you have a lot of things in the consolidated folder that you don't actually have on the other computer you're trying to move your work to. Anyway, if your goal is to do a render on another machine, that might be the option you want, anyway.

It's bigger than the first and 3rd rooms I had as a kid and smaller than my 2nd and 4th. I never got a rug. I'd say it's just about right.

If you ever do give it a try, on one of the A:M Extra CD's I donated a generic freight car chassis (frame, wheels, couplers, etc.). So you'd only have to build the bodies. And somewhere there's a diesel locomotive model that Jeff Cantin donated. I found those already and have considered what you were suggesting. Also, the other day I asked who used A:M in eastern Oklahoma and I've already had a phone conversation with someone (Steve Shelton) here in Tulsa since making that post. He turns out to be a model railroader as well. This makes me wonder if there would be any fun in a collaborative effort on an A:M model railway. It makes you wonder what Model Railroader magazine would do with photo-realistic train pictures of models that don't exist in the real world.

Nothing other than the basic model bone. You don't get much choice about that one. If you load up the projects, you'll see the problem. Oddly, it's not deterministic. I got the marbles to roll around in the jar in the successful project, but later, I loaded the same project and the marbles fell through. Re-run the sim, some fall through, re-rerun again, it works, fine. Try again and get more random results. Physics isn't supposed to work that way.

That's just fantastic. Very nicely done. The aforementioned quibbles are correct, though. I keep a midi keyboard on my desk and a glance at it shows your black keys should be about 15% narrower. Also, the model train enthusiasts will tell you that the bends in the train track are too severe. They need to have a much bigger radius. And the parents around here will tell you that you need peanut-butter smears on the wall, rotting fish-sticks under the bed, stains of inexplicable origin on the bedsheets, candy wrappers inexpertly hidden under the dresser, and several broken things.

FABRICATE DIEM, PVNC - "I think it means 'to protect and to serve'" -- Sgt. Colon I think the trick is to take things seriously, but don't take yourself seriously. For me, it's work to use A:M. I like a humorous response sometimes. Life gets too tedious otherwise.

That's truly excellent. I also checked out your models on your website. When I first started using A:M I thought "wouldn't it be cool to build a model railroad in A:M". I guess you've been at that for some time. Maybe someday I'll get the chance to give it a try. Do you have many completed scenes for your setup?

It's definitely difficult to write good well. Your website was one of the first I discovered when I got A:M and I learned a lot from it. (Though you're one of those people who get me envious over their ability to draw hot women.) IIRC, yardie was the one who thought Newton was badly documented. After you exclude the language barrier thing, I thought it was quite well documented and I had little trouble figuring anything out about it. I think I write well, but if I had to reproduce my own work in Spanish, it would turn out a bit like the Newton documentation: correct, but a bit irritating to native Spanish speakers.

I've lathed a jar that's supposed to hold a bunch of marbles one of my characters later pours into a dish. I figured either the rigid-body thing or the Newton plugin would do the job. I went with Newton. Marbles are clones of the 32-patch sphere and are used as Dynamic Sphereobjects [sic]. The jar is "Static with Action." I put 24 marbles in a semi-random vertical stack over the jar and ran the simulation. The marbles all pooled at the bottom of the jar in a likeable fashion. So far, so good. Later in the chor I lifted the jar and, to my horror, the marbles all simply fell through the bottom of the jar as if it wasn't there. This included the marbles that were sufficiently above the surface of the jar due to resting on other marbles. Experiments with one marble only confused me. The jar would lift and rotate to dump it out and, depending on how fast the jar was rotated, would: 1) roll out of the jar as expected 2) catch for a moment as it passed partway through the inner surface of the jar 3) roll right through the wall as if it wasn't there. So far, the things I've tried that I hoped would cure the problem (but didn't) are: * Updated from v12 to v13 to get the newest Newton (and everything else, but I'm not really seeing a difference in anything except the new version control stuff) * putting a sharp edge to the inside edge of the jar * making it bowl shaped at the bottom * Increasing patches * Decreasing them * Enabling the "Scale world" option [see note below] Since my project is fairly large, I stepped away from it and tried a blank project and new objects. Actually, I copied and pasted the jar splines from my big project to the little one as a test. I couldn't reproduce the problem on a small scale. But "small" also occurred to me. My jar in the small project was roughly 3 times larger than the one I had problems with. That's the reason I resorted to switching to v13 to get the "Scale world" option. According to the docs, the scale option increases things x10 if you're using "small" models. (What qualifies as "small" isn't described). Having said that, I went back to the small project and tried shrinking the jar to the dimensions in my real project and the problem manifested itself. I'll post a followup to this. (I'm writing this from a mac annd the project is on a PC.) So, my question: how can I make this work? As previously mentioned, increasing patches didn't help, nor did "Scale world." I'm at a total loss and can't figure another way to make this work (other than blowing weeks of work by re-scaling everything else in the chor). Here are the projects. The working one: [attachmentid=23101] The non-working one: [attachmentid=23102] rollaround.prj rollaroundbad.prj

How do you do limit what frames to do the rigid body simulation. I've got some 8000 frames of choreography with a bit where I need some marbles to pile in a reasonable fashion, and then tip over some 6000 frames later. How do I limit the simulation (which is slow) to just the frame range where change occurs?

OK, I sorta answered my own question. I had the force keyframe mapped to a key and totally forgot about shift-clicking the force-keyframe button to come up with the extended dialog where you (sometimes?) have the option "Also add keys equal to constraint results." I didn't see that come up in the training video I watched (it used v13, so I'm not sure why not), but I saw it on mine and used it. Is there any way to map the dialog version of force-keyframe to a key?

I've been a bit confused by this myself. I'm not sure what the rule is, but under some circumstances, it seems that surfaces of zero thickness don't cast shadows. I built an office chair that was a single sheet thickness, but had an edge that was an extruded tube. The edge cast a shadow, the surface between did not. I could go for an explanation myself.

FWIW, the hash FTP site has the Mac updates stowed in .ZIP files. How do I know this? I finally decided just tonight to grab a copy for the Mac. The company bought me a new Intel Mac a few weeks ago, and we had a 2nd copy of A:M we got some months back, so I decided to go dual-platform. :-) It's kinda freaky to run software on two platforms and have it look identical. The software we use for installers (Installer Vise... and it wasn't my decision) doesn't merely look a little different between platforms; I can't really tell they came from the same company except to check the name in the About box. Frankly, Safari and Explorer look like twins in comparison to Vise's installers.

I've got a bone with a kinematic constraint to a null. After the bone has followed the null, I need to have it let go and continue on an alternate path. However, when I set the enforcement to 0%, I find it popping back to the angle it had when I set enforcement to 100%. I can find no way to key the bone where it is just as I release the constraint. I find myself having to copy and paste the values found in the X, Y and Z rotation values in the properties window. (FWIW, keying the bone essentially does nothing as it records rotations at the time the constraint was enforced, and if you enable compensate mode, the angles all go to 0.)