ArgleBargle
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Posts posted by ArgleBargle
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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?
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Some comments from someone in SecondLife who is also an A:M user:
I hopped back to this forum to see what others might be doing with A:M in SL (gotta love these abbreviations). I've been meaning to take a shot at using A:M just as this topic discusses. Some explanations are in order.
Animations
Yes, A:M exports BVH files, true. However, you've got to have the right bones, including names. There was someone (I forget his name) who had made something a couple years ago that worked with an old version of A:M. It didn't work with my latest version. Apparently, the bones need to be skinned or the actual poses/animations won't get saved to the BVH file. I surrendered at that point because I had other projects that demanded my attention.
Sculpted Prims
Last year, SL introduced sculpted primitives (fundamental objects in-world) and the general concept is that a bitmap is used to offset the surface of an object in 3 dimentions using the R, G & B values as X, Y and Z offsets. Here's a sphere, for example
I suspect there must be a good way to automatically generate a texture for any shapes. I came to the forum today to see if anyone had made such a thing yet. It doesn't seem like it should be too hard. Then bake the texture and export it.
A:M & SL
I'd prefer to be using A:M for doing my work. In part, I'm more comfortable making shapes with it. Blender, the common alternative, sucks beyond all measure and I'm not going to go out and buy Maya, the other major alternative. The alternatives for animations are either Poser (which is expensive for what any SL creator would want to use it for) or QAvimator (which is free, but very awkward to use), and neither of those support rotoscoping if you want to trace any motions.
I'd think A:M would be the best platform for both platforms if someone ironed out what needed to be done.
In world, I'm Aargle Zymurgy. Feel free to visit my island of Zynadu. And for those wondering abou the whole Second Life thing, it's at http://www.secondlife.com.
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I really liked that. Actually watching people using A:M -- whatever the task -- is always instructive to me.
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An important lesson hopefully learned.
NEVER render out large scenes to AVI, MOV formats.
Render out to TGA format and then collect them again into AVI or MOV formats.
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.
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Hi, qube - I just saw your post - I missed it amidst all the festivities, I guess.
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.
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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."
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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.
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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?
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I'm sure there must be a way to isolate the simulation but I know not. Sorry.
8000 frames!!!
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.)
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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.
- The problem is really outside A:M
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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.
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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.
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The motions are good, but the eye focus is wild. I briefly tried to feel exasperated (I have teenaged children... this is easy). While I didn't want to focus on the offending individual, neither did I want to look at every place in the world. Can she focus her eyes the same way she focuses her voice? That is, 1-2 places in order to feign indifference yet try to figure which of 2-3 ways to respond.
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Hi,
Nice room. The bat looks a bit too big to me and I think the room needs a rug.
Lori
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.
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Maybe someday I'll get the chance to give it a try
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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If YOU ever come out with a book for A:M, then you might appreciate the amount of work is involved. But until then, I think my opinion of you will be that you are an ass....
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.
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Looks pretty good. What a fun scene. The scenery is gorgeous.
The thing that bothers me a bit is that Woot looks like he has superman flying powers rather than looking like some bucking action of the cow propelled him into space.
I normally wouldn't throw in my $0.02 on this since I haven't really been following TWO too closely, but I'd suggest getting his feet in the skydiver's position (legs bent, back arched more) and that way he'd be doing less of a Superman/Peter-Pan motion then the launched free-fall he's doing.
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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]
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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?
Old Showcase
in Open Forum
Posted
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.