KBaer
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A couple more films have just been posted to A:M Films. Shaun Freeman has a facial animation test using v11 control point falloff. Also, Zachary Brewster_Geisz has posted his award winning Esc film.
Later today I'll be posting a clip from the original Apprentice tutorial tape from 1987. It's a true piece of Hash history.
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Martin and I have dug a little deeper into the Hash video archives and found this very interesting interview. It was on a local cable access show called Computers: The Future of Art, and Martin Hash talks about the company (Hash Enterprises at the time), our 3D character animation product, Animation:Apprentice, and what our goals were (and still are). The show is broken into two parts, so make sure you watch both so you don't miss anything.
It's important to understand the context of this interview. The year was 1988, and computer graphics and animation were mainly available on very expensive hardware, and the software that took advantage of it was also very expensive. There were VERY few 3D programs available for personal computers, and most of them did not do animation. The very few that did were very limited in what they could do, and most people that used them made simple animations with primitive shapes. A bouncing silver ball on a checkerboard plane was considered an accomplishment, so storytelling with character animation was not considered something that personal computers were capable of.
And there was Martin, showing that not only is it possible with his software, but this was the beginning of something big, and we were going to empower artists to tell their stories. There's even a clip of him working on a 7Mhz Amiga 2000. It's interesting to note that in the interview, he mentions that we were waiting for the PC to overcome its 640k memory limit before we could port to it. At the end of the interview he mentions that we were working on Animation:Journeyman, which was our first version to use our spline/patch technology that is still used in Animation:Master.
I'm pretty excited we found this interview. I'd totally forgotten about it. But it demonstrates the continuity that Hash Inc. has had since the beginning. We make software for an artist to tell stories with character animation on an affordable personal computer. It was true then, and it's true today.
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Doug,
Arcticpigs is unlike any other 3D Web technology out there. It allows you to view 3D objects and characters in a web browser (IE for PC), and interact with them in realtime. Unlike all the others, which are based on polygon data, Arcticpigs is built on top of Hash's spline mesh models, and also incorporates Hash's Actions, Poses, Constraints, and Choreographies. The objects are drawn using adaptive tesselation, which means that the faster your machine is, the higher quality the models can be shown. The data itself is extremely small compared to the polygon equivalent, or a regular QuickTime file. The biggest problem with delivering 3D content on the Internet is the bandwidth. The machines are increasing in speed at a much faster rate than the Internet pipeline is. Therefore, it is best to make the data small without sacrificing the quality. Another bonus is that if you make content for AP, it will look better as machines get faster, and not be limited to the lowest common denominator like all polygon based data. And these days the machines are already very fast.
AP works with Javascript so that your animations and characters can be interactive. You can have moving hotspots. You can turn, move, and zoom as animation is playing. You can build your own 3D controls into your pages. It can be used as a 3D version of QuickTime. It can be used for training for dance, Tai Chi, Fencing, yoga, or anything where you want to see a pose or motion from many angles. Looking forward, it could even be used to deliver Pixar quality movies that are interactive over the Internet. It really is a big deal. But, this is just the beginning, and it is important for users to play with it, experiment, push the limits, and spread the word.
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It just goes to show that you never know what cool things you'll find by exploring A:M Films. Tell your friends. We want everyone to know that A:M Films is THE place for cool CG films.
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Well, I think we've identified our first A:M Films hit. Alien Song is still the overall leader, but it it's looking like it will lose that position soon because Joe Williamsen's Huntress Dynamics Test animation is getting tons of views from all over the world. The link is showing up in many diverse forums and on the front page of several web sites.
Congratulations Joe!
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I updated the banner for A:M Films, if you want to link to it from your site. Help spread the word.
This link is http://amfilms.hash.com
Make sure to check out the new films going up every day. And use the Email To Friend button to share these great films with all your friends.
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Make sure you check the Studio Spotlight on Avalanche Software. It may answer some of your questions, and you may have not seen some of their other work. Yes, they rock!
BTW - they are very busy on Tak 2 now, and there are new commercials coming.
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My favorite part is the Electronic Theater, which I call "The Big Show". And, if you get the DVD, there are often things in the Big Show. ILM usually have an effects reel showing before and after of live action, and live action plus CG. These are usually from films that haven't made it to video yet, so they can't put it on the DVD. They get better every year.
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Yeah, I met the guy who runs the QuickTime site and the email newsletter at MacWorld. I contacted him and put together what they needed to get that up there. We've been getting a lot of hits from it.
The ultimate success of A:M Films will depend on how many people email film links to their friends. So, keep checking out the new films that are getting posted to the site every day, and send the ones you like to your friends.
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For the record, I have personally sold A:M to a number of celebrities over the years. They include:
Sinbad (the comedian, plus several upgrades)
Kadeem Hardison (from the series A Different World)
Michael McShane (Dr. Swanson from the movie Office Space, one of my favorite movies)
I sold one to Rosie O'Donell's personal assistant,
and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting right now.
And, that's just at the trade shows I've been to. James, Heath, and Greg have been to a lot more than I have, so I bet there are a lot more celebrity sales I don't know about. But, it's pretty fun when a celebrity tells you they're a fan of what you are doing. Of course, that's nice to hear from anybody :-).
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We strongly recommend that if you want to download something from the FTP, especially a large file, you should use the Mirror site at ftp://ftp.hashmirror.com/pub/. It's much faster and can handle a lot more bandwidth.
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The submission system for A:M Films is still going through some last minute fine tuning, but it is functional, so we would like to see people submit their films. It will be helpful if you name your file similar to the name of the film, before you upload it. Also, make sure that it is a QuickTme and using a cross-platform codec like Sorenson 3, and that it is saved with Fast Start. You can ensure that it is saved with Fast Start by loading it into the QuickTime Pro player and saving it as a self-contained movie.
We would like to see your new work, and also older films, commercials, and cool tests.
Let's get this ball rolling!
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Are you going to have exhibit passes available again?
I believe that we are supposed to get those again. When we do, James will probably announce their availability on the Forum. The pass will get you into the trade show, and I think the art gallery, but not the courses, papers, or electronic theater.
The party will be near the convention center, but you won't need a SIGGRAPH pass for that.
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SIGGRAPH is the annual conference and trade show from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) for computer graphics. Hash, Inc. will be there for the 17th consecutive time. Once again, the whole company will be there, and we look forward to seeing many of you face to face.
Let's hear from all of you that are planning to or thinking of attending this year. The show is in Los Angeles, so attendance should be good.
We are planning another Animation:Master User Reception (also affectionally known as the SIGGRAPH Hash Party :-). It will be on Wednesday night (Aug 11). The location hasn't been confirmed yet, but I will post the details when they are available. We will again be showing new films made with A:M, so if you have something you want shown, contact me (baer@hash.com). We would prefer all films to be in DV resolution so they look good projected on the big screen. And, by popular demand, there will be food and drinks this year.
There are still a few open spots for tutorial demonstrators. If you are coming, and are interested in doing a tutorial for the upcoming training series, let me know.
So, let's hear from you. Who's going?
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We just got the full version of the film "Swing Out" from Japanese animator Masaru Kakiyama. We had a low resolution clip, but we now have the entire film. If you like Anime and A:M's toon rendering, this is one of the best examples. The dialog is in Japanese, and we haven't gotten it translated yet, but we hope to update it with English subtitles some time in the future.
Check it out here.
And check out his web site
http://www.angel.ne.jp/~kakiyama/
Great work Mr. Kakiyama!
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Ahh, the power of the press release. :-)
They didn't include the credit for the screenshot which should be Fabrice Fave.
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SIGGRAPH is like our Mecca. Hash has been going since 1988, and my first one was in 1987. There's just nothing like being in a room with thousands of other people that love CG and animation as much as you do. The show has changed a lot over the years as the CG market has changed. It used to have massive booths from SGI, Apollo, and Sun, and PCs were almost non-existent on the show floor. Now it's all PCs and Macs. In fact this year, Apple will have the biggest booth space.
As an exhibitor, we usually get a bunch of free passes to the Exhibition we can mail out to our users. I don't know if we have those yet, but I'm sure James will make an announcement when we do.
You should definitely come, it's a great time!
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These are really great. You should consider posting them to A:M Films. I really like the flower one.
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There are still some spots left to demonstrate at SIGGRAPH '04. I need to hear from you if you're interested. It's in LA this year, so there should be a great crowd.
Please email me at baer@hash.com if you are interested.
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We are excited about making A:M Films work around the world. We are hoping to make the interface work in several languages. We already have the About page translated into Japanese.
We would probably have to stop short of translating all of the film descriptions, but the nice thing about our interface is you could still search by category and view films based on their thumbnail.
Keep spreading the word about A:M Films, and send those film links to your friends.
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Yes, it's true. A:M v11.0 is out of Beta testing and officially released. I've been so busy telling the rest of the world, I haven't posed it here yet. I figured you were all keeping up to date with the Latest Info forum.
Here's where to get it:
Here's the press release:
Hash, Inc. Releases Animation:Master Version 11.0
Vancouver, WA (May, 1, 2004) – Hash Inc. announces the release of Animation:Master version 11.0. This major new release of their flagship 3D character animation product includes new features related to work flow, modeling, rendering, and ease of use.
“One of the new features we are most excited about is our new hair tools,” said Ken Baer, Hash Inc.’s Director of Marketing. “We have worked closely with our users to develop tools that allow artists to easily create realistic hair and make it easy to style and comb. It also works with our dynamics and collision detection so that it is easy to get believable secondary motion without having to hand animate it.”
Grooming mode allows users to interactively brush, lengthen, change density, or even manipulate individual hair controls. The new hair features can also be used to create grass, plants, trees, feathers, and scales, just to name a few. Image maps can be used as follicles to create realistic leaves and feathers. All of these features are included with the Animation:Master v11.0 and do not require additional plugins or costly upgrades.
Also, new drag and drop features make model placement in scenes with existing geometry more intuitive. Improvements to Animation:Master’s world-class renderer include soft reflections and reflection blending.
Animation:Master has become the tool of choice for many artists who want to learn animation. The product’s design revolves around the premise that the artist should have powerful, but intuitive tools that are easy to use, and affordable. Hash, Inc. has always focused on character animation, and providing tools for telling stories. This has led to breakthroughs in organic modeling with spline meshes, re-usable and layered motion resulting in the first commercial non-linear animation system, and powerful features designed for an artist rather than a technical director. This combined with a large and very active online community has resulted in a solid and supportive environment for anyone wanting to create animation for fun or profit.
Hash recently added a site called A:M Films for users to showcase their animation and films at http://amfilms.hash.com. The site allows users of Animation:Master to post their work to a fast server free of charge. The films can be viewed by anyone with a browser and QuickTime.
Animation:Master has established itself as a multi-platform standard for creating organic, true 3D patch based objects and characters. Channel-based motions give users the degree of animation control that is required for quality character animation, eliminating the problems associated with polygonal systems. The program sells for $299. Version 11 is available now for Windows XP, and will be available soon as a native Mac OS X application.
Hash, Inc., founded by Martin Hash, has been marketing software tools for 3D-character animation since early 1987. The company continues to design and build affordable software tools for artists and animators for use in independent and commercial production.
Girl character courtesy of Fabrice Favé
Orangutan courtesy Avalanche Software LLC
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I just posted great example of Anime made with A:M by Hiromoto Akinori (aka Hiropon). It's a great film too. Check it out here.
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I just wanted to alert everyone that Apple's QuickTime web site has a link to the A:M Films site.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/whatson/news_entertainment/
Help keep spreading the word.
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I'm watching.
Keep those positive comments coming. A few more testimonials wouldn't hurt either.
Original Apprentice tutorial tape clip posted
in (2003-2004)
Posted
Recently while delving deeper into the Hash archives, we found a copy of the very first tutorial videotape we ever made. This tape came with the original Animator Apprentice version 1 in early 1987. Martin made this tape back when it was a one man company, and Martin was working out of his garage. It was meant to be an informal tour of the software, and a way for Martin to encourage new users.
Here's the link.
It's important to understand the context of this tape. This was the very first 3D animation product to ship for the Commodore Amiga. The only other 3D products for personal computers on the market really only made primitive shapes like cubes, cones, and spheres, or were very simple CAD programs. Most of them had NO interface, meaning that modeling and animation were generally done by typing scripts, then you would render for hours, and only then would you know if your camera was pointed in the right direction. Commercial 3D was done with very expensive workstations and supercomputers costing from $100,000 to millions. The only commercial program with features for character animation was Symbolics, which was a workstations product that was tens of thousands of dollars. Apprentice was the very first program designed for character animation with modeling, animation, and rendering for the consumer personal computer market. It was a brand new concept, and that's what Martin is introducing on the tape.
This clip does not include the entire tape, which is 2 hours long. I cut out all the how-to stuff, included mostly the general stuff about the concepts. This was also long before most people had email and web sites, so Martin wanted to get users to call him and send in their work so he could improve the program.
And finally, towards the end of the video, Martin shows an example of one of the rendering features called "Saturday Morning" mode. It's the earliest version of a Toon shader that I am aware of.
Even though he doesn't say the exact words "One man, one machine, one movie", it's clearly implied in his motivational speech. I hope you guys enjoy this look back at the beginning. I love finding evidence that we really have been doing this since we started. Most 3D programs added character animation as an afterthought, not as the central design goal. We never did 3D for the sake of 3D, we did it to empower artists to tell stories that would have been too hard and expensive to make with traditional animation.
One last thing. We made a more "professional" tape a couple years later, but it never had as much personality as this one. Even though parts of it make me cringe, I still have a warm place in my heart for this one, because Martin wasn't afraid to get out there and do something new.
BTW- I'll be very disappointed if you guys don't talk about anything other than his 1987-era haircut! :-) This is worthy of a long thread.