KBaer
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Posts posted by KBaer
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I'm trying to get JediKnight on OS X to connect to the chat.
What port number do I set it to?
I'm using irc.freenode.net and the #hash3d channel.
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I'll jump in here since Randy is out of the office for the rest of the week (he's at Apple attending a performance coding kitchen).
A:M for OS X is now in Beta and in the final stretch. We're now just ironing out any remaining issues, and tweaking the performance. We have a special forum just for the OS X Beta.
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showforum=16
That's where you can find information about downloading the Beta, and sending us feedback.
We'll make a big announcement when it goes Release.
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The idea of the New Users area isn't to segregate beginners. They are still welcome to post in the General area. But if the question is related to doing the manual tutorials, or just getting started, then the New Users forum is the right place to ask. We're hoping that people who might have been afraid to ask really basic questions in the General forum may be less shy to ask questions in the New Users forum.
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We have just added a new forum specifically for new users of Animation:Master.
You can read my welcome message here
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4475
New users are welcome to post here too, but basic questions about A:M and discussions of the manual tutorials should go there. And please, no cross posting.
All of you here are encouraged to go there and give encouragment to new users and welcome them into the A:M community.
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Welcome to the New Users forum!
The idea behind this forum is to provide help and support for users who are new to Animation:Master and are going through the Art of Animation:Master tutorials. We encourage you to post your Works-In-Progress (WIP) from these tutorials to this forum. You will learn a lot from the feedback you get.
Rodney Baker has gallantly volunteered to be the moderator for this forum and will be here to answer basic A:M questions. We encourage everyone to pitch in and give encouragment to new users. It's always exciting to see artists emerge from being a beginner, to next hotshot animator.
And don't forget, we have the New Users Page at
http://www.hash.com/support/newusers.asp
New users may post to any of the forums, but this is the place to ask basic questions. Everyone here started out as a beginner, so don't be shy. You will soon see how amazing the A:M community is.
Let's all help new users feel welcome, and excited that they made the right decision in buying Animation:Master.
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Those guys at Momentum rock!
(OK, they do deserve this accolade, but my main reason for posting this message is so my message counter will reach 100 :-)
But, they do rock.
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How about some accolades for the awesome team at Momentum!
Or has the sheer volume of work they have done left everybody speechless? :-)
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From: Armando Lagos <armando7@avantel.net> armando7@avantel.net
To see those "old" high quality animations in terms of humble hardware,
extraordinare software and attention to the principles of animation, makes
one feel proud of using Animation Master.
Back when those films were made, the Internet was just too slow for people to view them online. But, thanks to broadband, we can gather up these older films and many more people can enjoy them now. Because we've always focused on character animation tools, people have been telling stories with our software longer than most other 3D programs. 10 years ago or so, most of the animation you saw from saw from other packages were flying logos, space ships, or special effects shots, and very few stories. That allows us to dig deeper into the archives and find films that are still watchable today.
It's a good time to be an A:M user.
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Just a reminder to those that missed the posting, there is a new Studio Splotlight on Momentum Animation Studios in Australia. These guys do amazing production work with A:M. The article includes many films and commercials they have done in QuickTime format.
Check it out here.
http://www.hash.com/News/Articles/Momentum/
Make sure you keep checking the What's New Page on the Hash web site or on the A:M Community What's New page every week. There are links to all of the Studio Spotlights, and Lectures there, and other cool stuff you might have missed in the Forums.
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One of my favorites was way back in the day. It was "hammer" done for children's television workshop.
Then there was the super realistic head, can't remember the name of it.
Also, I remember Frankie was cool, I still have copies of the old training tapes where Martin is wearing an "inspector gadget" style trenchcoat.
Wasn't there one that was balls and a cube on a slide or something.
I remember the software came with training on the vhs, and shorts, anyways all of them made me happy I bought Hash.
Here's the link to "Cool Tools" by Will Vinton Studios.
Here's the link to "Killer Tools" by Rod Altschul.
The others you mentioned are going online very soon. I'll post links when they are up.
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There's a typo on the second resource page. It reads:
"Every year at the SIGGRAPH conference Hash, Inc. features a series of tutorial demonstrations in it's booth. "
This should read "in its booth". "Its" is the possessive, while "it's" is a contraction for "It is".
Otherwise, great resource.
I have eliminated the offending '. I have also done a little more formatting as well.
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Hey, thanks for this Ken--I had no idea that Timing for Animation was back in print!
And, apparently it has a new forward by John Lasseter (famous Pixar director, and the highest paid artist at Pixar, he makes more than Ed Catmul). We have the old one here, so I haven't read it. We used to recommend this book in the old Apprentice manual.
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We have added another page to the Hash web site for additional resources related to learning animation. Many users have been asking about book and video recommendations that will help in learning animation. We have put a page (actually 2 pages) with some good books, videos, and links that every A:M user should know about. Many of these resources are useful for learning general animation, but certainly apply to making animation with Animation:Master. We recommend going through the Art of Animation:Master tutorials first, and then exploring these books and videos. That way, all the things you learn, you can immediately apply in A:M, since you'll know your way around the program.
Back in the old Amiga days, we used to have a list of animation books at the back of the Apprentice manual, including many of these. We've always believed that core of great animation is not merely a technical knowledge of the tools, but a good knowledge of basic animation principles. Animation:Master is one of the best tools for learning animation, because you will spend more time actually animating and focusing on animation technique than on esoteric tools that have little to do with creating art.
http://www.hash.com/support/learnanimation.asp
This is another page that people should refer to when new users ask about learning animation.
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We now have a new page on the Hash web site for new users. This page will help guide users to the most useful resources for learning A:M, and help them realize that they get so much more than a CD and a manual when they get A:M. Please help us send new users to this page, and re-inforce what's on it. We want everyone to feel welcome, and have a good feeling about getting the software and be excited about learning animation.
Here's the link:
http://www.hash.com/support/newusers.asp
You can also get to it from the left panel on the Hash site by clicking "New Users Info" under Support.
Enjoy!
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I just made an improvement to the two web sites I put up on Friday. The QuickTime movies that in the Evolution of 3D Animation Tools lecture, and the Momentum Studio Spotlight, would not Fast Start using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Now they do.
So, if any of you skipped the QuickTimes, you won't have to wait for each movie to complete downloading before viewing in Explorer now.
The lecture "The Evolution of 3D Animation Tools on the Desktop" gives a general history of CG and animation software along with a history of Animation:Master.
The "Momentum Animation Studio Spotlight" shows the history and work of Momentum Studios and showcases the great work they have done with A:M.
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This Testimonial was sent directly to me, so I'm posting it here for Jeff Dates.
Day Off the Dead was completely modeled, setup, textured, animated, lit
and rendered using Animation Master. Now the short is traveling the
world and receiving all sorts of acclaims! The production cycle was
handled non-linearly, as was the animation in everyone's part-time.
This couldn't have been done without Animation Master! The workflow of
Animation Master gives you the power that other "professional-high-end"
3D softwares do, without the price gouge! All this with an artist's
interface, and no need for a technical background! With the talent pool
of Animation Master users that we could draw from, it's no wonder that
Day Off The Dead is doing as well as it is! I recommend Animation Master
for those users who want to ENJOY their production without worrying
about the technical aspects of it! Thanks!
Jeffrey Dates
Co-Director, Day Off The Dead
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Ken, this must be like a parent reading the newspaper and discovering their child's name in an article marked "Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced."
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Of course, it would be been nice to have known about it back then. It's a little late to do a press release now. :-)
Just for perspective, my development machine at the time was a 20Mhz Mac with 68030 processor. No PowerMacs back then.
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Several of you were sharing your recollections of the vererable Amiga recently after I posted my Evolution of CG Tools lecture as a web site. Well, while I was searching for something else, I came across a 1992 article about Amigas being used at Disney. And lo and behold, what should pop up in the middle of the article but Playmation by Hash Enterprises.
http://www.lysator.liu.se/amiga/ar/guide/ar216.guide?P1-7
The artist that the article talks about is Kelly Day. What's funny is that by the time I got to know Kelly, he was on the Mac, not the Amiga. In fact, I'm not sure if I even knew he used the Amiga version. I got to visit Kelly at Disney TV Animation back in 1994 or '95. It was after hours, so we were the only people there as he showed me around. We walked past several offices that had Macs which were normally being used for administration stuff, they weren't artist offices. But, what struck me was that every one of them was running RenderSlave and rendering frames with A:M over the network. Kelly was using all of them to render out 3D animation he was planning to use for bumpers around the commercial breaks for Gargoyles.
I ran into Kelly not too long ago at SIGGRAPH. He's not at Disney anymore, but I think he's teaching now. He's a great guy, and was one of my key Beta testers in the early days of the Mac version.
Anyway, I thought I'd share by discovery with all of you. I didn't even know Playmation had been used for this until today.
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Hi!
Ken - this is supercool! I didn't have a clue that you hashers wrote the FIRST 3D character animation tool for the Amiga. I got my Amiga 2000 in 1987 when I was 12, and I daddled around with Deluxe Paint a lot. Great time back then! I also came across "Videoscape 3D", "Sculpt Animate 4D" and "Reflections", but over here in Germany I never heard of "Apprentice" before. I didn't understand all those 3D applications anyway, guess I was a bit too young, but it all was so fascinating...
Big Up, nice nice nice!!!
One thing you might have seen in Germany that we were involved with was a Commodore Amiga 500 Desktop Video bundle. We made special version of two of our programs, Effects, and Titler I believe. They were part of a bundle that was packaged with an Amiga 500 and promoted by Commodore Germany. It was an interesting gig.
The Amiga days were great! We knew a lot of the key people in and around Commodore. It's really fun when we run into some of them at SIGGRAPH.
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P.S. It's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Yes, I'm a geek.
I stand corrected. I really should have known that, I used to be a pretty hard-core Trekker.
BTW - have any of you seen the Star Trek:Federation Science exhibit? It was a travelling science museum exhibit that was done at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). Anyway, I worked on it back in 1991. Just curious if anyone out there saw it.
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Yeah thanks,
this really is a great article.
By the way, does someone know where i can get Robert Abel Clips and Films?
You can find a bunch of them on some of those old computer animation compilation tapes and DVDs. They are usually in the special interest sections of the video stores. I have some old laserdiscs with some.
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It was fun digging up some of those old videos. Seeing the old Journeyman demo running on a 14Mhz Amiga was pretty sobering. I love how it ends. "Soon feature films will be made on the computer, and you can be a part of it." That was 5 years before Toy Story came out.
I was really glad I still had that Amiga promotional tape. I love how they say "an alternatitive method is spline modeling". At the time, we were the ONLY ones that were doing that on a non-workstation, and the others still ended up being polygon models at some point. It really was way ahead of its time.
There are some little factoids about the Hash 1994 SIGGRAPH video clip that are pretty interesting. That is indeed Greg Rostami doing the demo, the same guy who did the new web demo that went online a few weeks ago. I love how he explains why we don't use NURBS. That was right when NURBS were like the big new thing, and most 3D artists were just starting to learn about them. I love the part where he says "you have a problem." :-) The guy watching the Killer Tools film (Rod's head), is Darnell Williams. He's an accomplished animator who's used Wavefront, and a bunch of the other "big boys". He was also one of the best artists who ever used Animation:Apprentice. His best piece was a woman's head, and it was the closest anyone had ever gotten to a photorealistic human head with our software...until Rod Altschul did Bald Man's Corner, and Killer Tools. I taped Darnell watching Rod's head for the very first time, so his "WOW!" reaction was very significant. He was really in a good position to appreciate what he was seeing. He understood what was involved in making something of that quality. And the next to last clip in the video is of Allen Hastings, author of Lightwave and long time friend, in our booth seeing what was new. I originally met Allen at SIGGRAPH in 1987, before I worked at Hash. And we were both regulars in the weekly Amiga Animation chat room on PeopleLink from around '88-'90.
When I wrote the original lecture, I mentioned the live motion capture we did in our booth at SIGGRAPH '94, but it wasn't until recently that I found actual video of it. It was really big deal we were doing that with 90Mhz Pentiums. I'm really glad I found that video.
I grabbed some other videos I'll be putting online in the near future.
I really want to get some of the folks that are new to CG and computer animation to see what they have today (hardware and software) in perspective. What is available today is so far ahead of what we started with, I still can't quite believe it.
And the best part is that it's only going to get better. It's a really good time to be a computer animator.
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Absolutely, you may translate it. I would be honored!
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I have turned my "Evolution of 3D Animation Tools on the Desktop" lecture into a web site. Some of you may have watched the Camtasia video version in our Video Tutorials area. The web version is based on the original "long" version, that I had to cut down because it was too long to do live. I have also included QuickTime videos from what I call "the old days" on the Amiga.
We have been in the business of making 3D animation tools since 1987, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves how far we have come. These days, we tend to take it for granted that processor speed is measured in Gigahertz, and every machine comes with a dedicated 3D acceleration card. We started at a time when you were supposed to buy an expensive workstation if you wanted to do 3D. You would hear "you can't do 3D animation on personal computer, that's just crazy talk!" This lecture shows how 3D animation tools came into being, and how they have evolved over the years. Since we were one of the very first companies to make a 3D animation tool for personal computers, we have been lucky enough to know many of the key players in the industry over the years. We also have had some amazing artists use our software, and it's interesting to look back and see how much of the artwork from a decade or more ago still hold up today.
If you are new to A:M, this is a chance to learn about its rich history. And. if you are a long time user it's a chance to go back and see some great films you probably forgot about.
Here's the link:
http://www.hash.com/Lectures/EvolutionOfCG/
Enjoy!
"Blocks" or "Marbles" movie?
in Work In Progress / Sweatbox
Posted
It was done by Bob Terrell and Vince Backeberg. They were both with Will Vinton Studios, and then started their own company called Computoons (which did the Captain Quazar animations). I don't know what they are up to now.
They also did some short films for Hash, including Truckin', Voyager, and Nightwalk.