ArgleBargle

Well, if I've got 3 different actions, each with their own sound, and apply them to the character, I can scrub or play in the choreography and hear all the sounds. However, if I repeat an action (either manually or by setting the repeat value) the sound is only heard once. Further, when rendering to something that has sound (e.g., AVI) all sounds are heard correctly. It appears simply to be an interface bug.

I guess I'll report this as a bug. The sound is produced when rendered, but not while doing choreography playback while editing.

If I create a simple action that has a sound effect associated with it, the sound plays in the chor when the action happens... but only for the first occurrence of the action. Subsequenct actions are silent. Am I not understanding something here? or is that a bug?

It might be possible that your index file is set to read-only. Look at index.i and make sure it's not set to read-only. It's an install problem I think.

So, nothing involving snatching a virtual pebble from someone's hand?

I prefer to learn from others' mistakes rather than create my own, so I'll pass on my mistake in this regard. My mistake was pressing the keyframe button when no channel existed in the action for the item in question. For example, you have done nothing with the head bone so far, then you select it, then you set a keyframe by clicking the relevant button. This is a bit twisted, but since you've done nothing with the head-bone so far, then no key frame is recorded for it. A few frames later, you move the head bone and you then get a keyframe and A:M is obliged to set one at frame 0 for the head. Hence you rotate from frame 0. What you have to do is create a channel in the action for the item in question. Simple method for what you described above: got to 06:00 and press the up and down arrow keys after selecting the bone. Now you have a channel. Advance to 06:10 and turn the head. Now you get what you want. I'm sure someone will give alternate (and hopefully better) advice. And this advice seems a bit irritating initially. To me, after I dealt with it, it made sense. You can't have A:M going around keying every single bone/spline in an action when you hit the keyframe button. That would cause more problems than it might solve. If you want a bone to do something, don't start with the keyframe button; start with moving (then un-moving) the item in question as a base point. You can then position as you see fit in later frames.

I've had A:M in my hands for over a year now ever since our Man with the money met (I think) Martin Hash at a trade show and came back with the software and told me to check it out. I regret that I've failed to take advantage of this forum the way I should... ditto with contributions. I'm trying to make up for lost time. Anyway, to the point: when I started out rendering, I went directly to AVI/MOV files. I've since realized that's wrong. I'll skip the long stories about how I learned them, but here are things I've learned: Products like Sorensen Squeeze (or Divx products) do a heckuva better job as a post-process product than any part of a direct render output. I wish otherwise, but it makes sense to me. Rendering directly to avi files uncompressed is highly prone to failure (mostly by the power company, not A:M) The "right" way to do things is to render to Targa images. 8000 RLE Targas take up less disk space than the equivalent uncompressed AVI. A:M does have bugs when producing videos over 2G in size. Any attempt to render an AVI that size produces a corrupt video. I'd report that as a bug, but I'm learning that's really a mis-use of the product. Stick with a targa sequence. (As a computer programmer, I kinda know why, but that's moot, too.) Many people seem to dislike dope sheets for mouth control. I'm not sure this is good. I think dope sheets have a bad rap due to A:M's implementation. I think some some minor interface changes would help this. After considering the videos I've been creating vs the videos I've seen on the Hash website, the amount of dialog in my videos gets a 10 rating while 95% of the rest get a 1. The music videos (e.g. Alien Song) get a 2-3 rating. Doesn't anyone own a mic? Bottom line questions: Those of you doing character voices, where do you add audio and how do you re-sync if you don't synchronize in A:M? Would anyone besides me find a "render to audio only" option handy in A:M? I find dropping sound effects into the chor very handy and workable despite having to render to Targa. What does everyone else do? Finally, I don't think you can use A:M for serious purposes without some program like After Effects. If I'm wrong, please, someone correct me. I'm open for clues and methods.

Head to the "Tools" menu, then "Options", then "Global" tab and turn on the "Show Property Triangle" option. I like to turn on "Show advanced" as well.

Without seeing the project, it sounds like the enforcement has been changed at the wrong time. No, some other complication is at work. Hmm, the project where I found the issue is pretty big, so I made a tiny one with Eddie and a sphere. It's attached. Frame 0: Focus left where it originally starts with the model; the sphere starts to follow the path. Frame 15: Focus manually moved to Eddie's lower left. Frame 30: To his upper right and hold Frame 40: Constrain focus to the sphere, but enforce at 0% Frame 41: bad juju. (See next paragraph.) Frame 45: Enforcement at 100%. Focus is on sphere. The kicker is frame 41. At that point, the focus has leapt to a point about 20% from the model's original focus location and the target. I may or may not be doing this right, but at least I'm reproducing it consistently. focusconstraint.zip

Yeah... whatsit called in theatrical terms? An "aside?" Essentially that, but it's a children's educational video. The child is very often addressed in the video. That's precisely the thing being moved: the focus null. It's been a while since since I looked at how I built my characters, so I did my own follow-up to my question. Enforcement for the position of the null is relative to its original position in the figure. While I suspect I could do what you suggested (or my other idea below) I punted and just moved the focus null to intercept the moving camera, then constrained it to the camera at that moment in time. It looked good and now I'm happy. My other thought, and one I may follow from this point out, is to constrain all the focus nulls to either parts on other objects, or strategically placed nulls in the chor. Then do like you outline above. I originally avoided this technique for a different reason. I tried sliding constraints to move the camera from one location to another. Considering this involves camera orientation as well, it was a catastrophe and I abandoned the method. I guess I shouldn't have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

Here's the box I put myself into: I have a character looking at another and eye focus is manually placed on the 2nd character. The camera then starts to move in on the first character for a close up and character turns to address the viewer. The camera is still in motion as the character looks at it. I figured I'd be clever and translate eye-focus to the camera. However, so the eyes would move somewhat naturally, I'd go to the channel for enforcing translation and changed the type from hold to linear. Well, sure enough, it sorta worked... but not totally as I expected. As soon as enforcement rose above 0%, the eye focus immediately leaped to a point just a bit in front of the character's face, then made it's transition from there to the camera. Am I to understand that less than 100% enforcement of a bone/null position is always going to be relative to the bone's original position, not relative to any subesequent positioning in an action?

Maybe not even that. I recall it is possible in the channel editor to "animate" what frame an image sequence is on. You can hold, reverse, skip. Don't ask me how. Turns out it's not too hard. Just so I knew what direction to take, I just grabbed a targa sequence I had laying around and put it as the rotoscope. In the choreography, go to the actions for the light, open up the deails on the rotoscope and the image inside it and set the frame number like you would any other keyframe. As I wrote this post, it occurred to me that I could maximize my overhead projector effect by taking a flat image, decal it to a sheet of paper, animate it by deforming like a sheet of plastic and lifting off the overhead "surface" with depth-of-field set very narrow. I think I could get that classic overhead projector look after that blurred image is put on the light.

slaps self on forehead OK, so I just need to replicate the image as many times as I need frames filled with the still and then cycle to the next. I suppose I could manually make a couple frames (the one in the first pic done in Corel & Photoshop so I could continue that trend) that were blurry transitions of an overhead yanked off the surface.

I've had good success using a Klieg light with a rotoscope on it to fake being an overhead projector. However, I need to switch to another image during the choreography. I've put multiple rotoscopes on the light, but only the first one turns up. I've changed the order of the rotoscopes. Again, just the first. I've changed the transparencies of the rotoscopes. Still nothing. I've tried changing the "on top" setting. Again, no change. Stranger still, in the choreography, I get a group of blank oddities. They are attached. How do I make this work right? Is there another way to do this. I don't need to go as fancy as faking sliding an overhead sheet off the surface, just switch in another. Attachments (in order): overhead results workspace oddity

Hm... mystery solved. I asked about that in another thread.

You could also get the camera to circle using expressions. Something similar to: Transform.Translate.X = 200*Sin(GetTime()*5) Transform.Translate.Z = 200*Cos(GetTime()*5) Obviously adjusting numbers appropriately. And if the null moves: Transform.Translate.X = 200*Sin(GetTime()*5)+..|..|..|..|Shortcut to Null1.Transform.Translate.X Transform.Translate.Z = 200*Cos(GetTime()*5)+..|..|..|..|Shortcut to Null1.Transform.Translate.Y I just tried that for fun and it looks pretty cool if you animate the null and move it around slowly.

"Preview" mode is a term encountered when the render panel does not have "advanced" checked. It equates to "final" render with multipass ON and set to 1 pass. Shadows are enabled. "Real-time" equates to shaded mode, which cannot do shadows. I misunderstood, then. Regardless, shaded mode sure renders a lot faster now in 12.

Having just experimented (and come up with a reportable bug) with this today, I'll comment. I'm running a dual 3.4GhZ Dell and I just upgraded to A:M 12.0. By "preview" mode I assume you mean "shaded" or "wireframe/shaded" mode. Doing a render with the maximum in shaded quality (set with Page-Up/Page-Down) is a bit on the slow side. I found that 11.1 is much slower than 12.0 for that type of render. (I've only recently gotten 12.0 so I haven't gotten to compare "final" render times.) From your render times, I was going to guess you were rendering some hair. I saw in later posts you were. Hair density makes a difference. I've got hair in the render I'm doing, but it's very un-dense leaves on a small tree. That said, kudos to the development staff at Hash. I took the same .prj file and loaded it into 11.1 and 12.0 while I wrote this post. I started a render (relevant details: 640x480, hair on with the hair being leaves, Polys per patch = 1, shaded render, decals on) in 12.0 and estimated complete time after 30 seconds was 35 minutes. Abort render, save project; re-open in 11.1 and re-render. After 30 seconds, estimated render time was over 6 hours. I'm a programmer, and my professional opinion is: that's a helluva good improvement between versions. Wahoo! If you're concerned with speed in rendering (I am, considering my project at hand), upgrade to 12.0 for "shaded" renders. Avoid calculated materials like the plague. They are very cool, but cpu consumption is wicked. Use that for photo-realism, not quick-and-dirty animation. I've swung to decals for results in that arena. For a segment I did that needed some fruit, I bought some objects to save time from Eggprops (yes, it's a plug), but I stripped the materials from them. Why? The calculated materials pushed final renders upward to 3 minutes per frame. Ack! I'm doing nearly 10,000 frames per vid. I thanked Eggprops for the models, then removed materials and did simple coloring. It looked fine in the animimation. Speed? Avoid hair and calculated materials. Speed and quality? Use decals.

Well, since I'm posting here a few times, I may as well introduce myself. I'm a programmer mostly, but the head of the company I work with found A:M and said (in summary) "this looks good. can we use it to make new products?" I had to agree and suddenly I found myself an animator. I'm currently in the process of trying to animate a dozen 5 minute educational videos. It's been a challenge. Part of the challenge is figuring out what paths to take. Some of the debate here makes it hard (start a religious war by asking about dope sheets). Frankly, I have nothing to compare A:M to, but I'm happy that all the files are text. I've already had some fun writing programs to do some repetitive tasks in changing the files.