[Exporting models to Unity]

Hi all,

Does anyone know if there's documentation/tutorials on how to export models from AM to Unity? Anything you could pass on would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Depth of Field Render]

Hi,

I'm trying to do a rack focus and I keep getting these bubbles around the objects. In the example image I've uploaded, thats suppose to be an X Wing Fighter! You can see the X Wing but these bubbles appear around it.

I've set up the render in the options panel to "Use Settings From the Camera." I've tried to turn on and off motion blur, Reflections, and shadows. Anyone else have this difficulty?

[amxTex Export]

I don't think that v15j is available for the lab license network. I do have the web version at home that is v15j+ - I'll give that a try at home.

 

We have the lab license for AM 15h.

 

You really ought to do the free update to v15j+, to make sure you're not dealing with some bug that's been fixed and to get all the other fixes and updates.

 

However... there was a big change with v15f regarding how plugins had to be compiled. It *may* be that your AMxTex plugin really wants to be used in a version before v15f. You might install some prior version on one PC to try. Or that v13 you have a disk for.

[amxTex Export]

Thanks very much Wedgeguy. You were able to open the model in version 13 despite it being created in 15? I do have a disk version for 13; maybe we should be trying that?

 

Hmmm? Looks like you are using version 15? It did export correctly from version 13. I loaded it into Dark Basic and everything seems to look okay ... other then you will have to turn on back facing polygons or flip the normals on some of the model so that they are facing out. I have uploaded the exported version to see if it will also work for you. Sorry I can't be more help when it comes to version 15 ...

 

Bean.zip

 

I had to place the file into a ZIP file because the forum won't allow me to upload an ".X" file.

[amxTex Export]

We have the lab license for AM 15h.

 

 

Hi all,

 

I'm hoping some of you guru's might help my students out. We are using 3D Game Studio to develop a 3D game and AM for character development. When using AmxTex to export, AM crashes with some models; and some models it works fine with.

 

Even when we remove the rigging and strip down a model we still encounter crashes. I've attached a simple model (designed after Jeff Lew's Killer Bean) that won't export.

 

Any ideas on what we should try?

 

Mike

[amxTex Export]

Hi all,

 

I'm hoping some of you guru's might help my students out. We are using 3D Game Studio to develop a 3D game and AM for character development. When using AmxTex to export, AM crashes with some models; and some models it works fine with.

 

Even when we remove the rigging and strip down a model we still encounter crashes. I've attached a simple model (designed after Jeff Lew's Killer Bean) that won't export.

 

Any ideas on what we should try?

 

Mike

Bean.mdl

[simCloth]

Hi all,

Trying to create a blanket over a character in bed and having all sorts of problems with the mesh passing through the blanket. I've been reading through the forums and found reference to Solver Precision which I cannot find. Anyone know where that is? Also, the forums suggest changing the polygon modifier/Simcloth but when I right click a model in the choreography no option show's up under polygon modifier (that is, no simcloth option).

 

Any suggestions?

 

I'm still using v12w (yes, I need to upgrade!)

[treadmill action]

Because a treadmill track is fairly flat,

just animate the texture moving around it,

not the tread itself.

You don't even have to worry

about having a seam on the texture

because a treadmill has one.

 

You can make the track frames (including a pre blur)

in an image editing program like Photoshop.

Save the files out as sequential targas or a Quicktime Movie (animation compression)

and bring those (or it) in as a texture on your treadmill track.

 

You could have two layers,

one for the texture map,

another for a bump map.

 

Here's an old file with a moving texture applied.

 

topSpinning01.mov

 

Hey, Thanks very much all for your help! Really appreciate it! We are going to go with the sequential targas.

 

Thanks once again all!

Mike

[treadmill action]

Hi all,

I want to create a simple action to place on a treadmill model so that the treads rotate around. Unfortunately, the treads are not perfectly round so using muscle mode and rotation isn't going to work.

 

Any ideas for me?

 

Thanks,

Mike

[Front Projection & Alpha channels]

Hey Robcat,

 

Any quick tips on how to use the alpha channel created in AM as the mask in AE? All the tutorials I've looked at so far show creating custom masks using the pen tool - I'd like to use the image.

 

Thanks,

Mike

 

I think this requires a two stage solution.

 

render one frame of just the dummy geometry that matches your front projection material. Use the alpha channel from that as a mask in an AE composition to subtract out the parts of your spaceship render you dont' want to show.

 

Alternatively you could draw a mask in After Effects based on your live footage to clip out parts of your spaceship render. same result.

 

Actually... I'm wondering why you're doing the front projection stuff in A:M at all if your intention is to composite in AE. But that's just me.

[Front Projection & Alpha channels]

Actually, I had that thought while driving home (on the sidewalk, I should pay more attention).

 

I guess we won't be doing any front projection stuff really, it'll all be done in AE. I'm a little new to AE and this project is a bit of a challenge for me and my students but we're up to it.

 

Thanks for the help!

 

Mike

 

I think this requires a two stage solution.

 

render one frame of just the dummy geometry that matches your front projection material. Use the alpha channel from that as a mask in an AE composition to subtract out the parts of your spaceship render you dont' want to show.

 

Alternatively you could draw a mask in After Effects based on your live footage to clip out parts of your spaceship render. same result.

 

Actually... I'm wondering why you're doing the front projection stuff in A:M at all if your intention is to composite in AE. But that's just me.

[Front Projection & Alpha channels]

My students and I are doing an alien invasion of our school. Question: we want to compose things in After Effects so what we want to do is render out only the aliens and ships in Animation Master. How do we get the front projection maps not to render out but keep the models that pass behind them blocked?

 

For instance, when a ship passes behind our school building, how do we get the render to not show the portion of the ship passing behind the school (our front projection map) without rendering the projection map or it's objects?

 

I've been through these tutorials, Ed explains multiplane rendering but not this particular issue.

 

http://www.hash.com/users/ed/tutorials/fpm/fpm.htm

 

http://www.hash.com/Camera_Guy/lighting.html

 

 

Any help would be appreciated!

[Heat Wave]

Awesome!

 

Thanks very much - exactly what we were looking for!

 

Mike

 

did a quick try of an idea

 

 

heat.mov

 

 

heat.zip

[Heat Wave]

Hi all,

 

My students and I are working on a live action film with 3d aliens and spacecraft in it. Who knew school could be this much fun, eh? Anyways, we want to have the spacecraft land with that weird heat wave present. I thought I saw a forum topic on this year's ago but couldn't find it.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks!

Mike

[Snowfall]

Thanks very much Eric - that put me on the right direction! I've got exactly what I needed!

Thanks again,

Mike

 

Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier, I was in the Mohave desert over the weekend. There was actually snow in the Tehachapi mountains.

 

The snow on the roof and ground effect was achieved in two similar yet different ways. For the roof, I modeled the basic shape and then created a tilable jpeg of snow that I used to make a bitmap plus material. The jpeg below is what I used. You may use it if you like. The attached image was the large version. You might want to reduce it in size.

 

The snow on the ground was a bit trickier. Since I wanted the path to look like the snow had recently been shoveled, I thought I'd use a displacement map for that and then the bitmap for the flat areas. The problem was that the displacement decal and the bitmap did not like each other and came out all messed up. So, I rendered the ground with a different tileable snow pattern decal set to color. This gave me the main snow field which I could then use as a displacement decal. Now I had to incorporate the path displacement. So I opened up photoshop and created the path exactly where I needed it to be for the scene. Once I had the path in the snow field, keeping in mind that it had to be created with shades of black and white in order for the displacement to do it's work, I came up with the displacement map below. You may also use it in any way to suit your needs.

 

Hope that helps. Can't wait to see what you are going to come up with.

 

Btw, thanks for the kind words about my Christmas pic.

 

Cheers

 

Eric

[Snowfall]

I added the force from the side and the movement of the snow was even better!

Thanks Robcat!

 

particle "streaks" can work well too.

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...amp;#entry71545

 

Use a force from the side with turbulence added to make the flutter onthe way down.

[Snowfall]

I used the default snowflake brush from photoshop and brought it in as a sprite - the effect was exactly what I was looking for! Yeah!

 

Now I'm trying to make a snowy ground - a little more difficult than I thought it would be. Eric's image looks awesome. Any ideas on what I should try? Maybe a material or some sort of decal?

 

thanks everyone for your help!

 

These recently posted snow related topics might come in handy for anyone looking in.

 

http://johnl.inform.net/pages/thesnow.htm

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2341

 

 

...and here's a forum search for the word snowflake.

...and a search on the word snow.

 

Impress your friends and family with a little help from your friendly forum (and A:M)!

[Snowfall]

Awesome! The sprites worked allot better! How did you create the realistic snow on the roof and ground? Was that a material?

 

Great picture by the way!

Mike

 

Check out my Christmas contest entry, that was done with sprites. If I had used three or more different pics for the sprites it would look even better. Did not take much to render either.

http://www.hash.com/imagecontest/Dec07/03.jpg

[Snowfall]

Hi all!

I'm working with Jeff Paries' Blobby Snowfall:

ftp://www.hash.com/pub/Projects/V6.1/Snowfall.prj

and the particles are coming out like little ping pong balls. I know I have to change the surface attributes of the blobbies but I can't seem to find settings that look even remotely like snow (although the movement looks great).

 

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Mike

[Make him look old]

K, that was totally cool! The effect was amazing! Wow! I've seriously have allot to learn when it comes to this stuff (obviously).

 

Thanks very much for your help Jim!

 

If you want to avoid decalling at this stage, I think the easiest way would be go get a good texture map of a weathered material, you probably can find one for old bone in fact, and import it in your Images folder. Then create a New Material, change it to BitMapPlus, then in the options for BitMapPlus, select your old bone texture map as the image. Then just drag and drop this new Material onto your model. BitMapPlus will wrap this texture map around your model.

 

To add bumps or displacement effects, make a grayscale version of your texture map (keeping in mind that darker areas will look pushed in and lighter areas will look bumped out), then create another new Material, change it to BitMapPlus again, but this time select your grayscale map as the image. Then in the Properties of the new Material, give the Bump Percent a value for a bump map effect or Displace Percent for a displacement map (start at 100% then adjust it based on what you want). Just drag and drop this Material on the model too. The first one will handle the color, and this second one will handle the bump.

 

Hope this helps!

 

-Jim

[Make him look old]

Hi all!

I've got this skeleton I'm working on and I want to make the surface look older. I'd like to keep it simple and found some of the tutorials rather complex (like UV mapping). Anyone have a good suggestion on how to weather his joints? It looks like the weathering option is gone from version 13; is there something similar?

[Digital Video]

thanks guys for your responses here!

 

I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 to convert my video. I understand interlaced video (in simple terms that is) so I'm going to give that a try now.

 

Thanks again!

M

 

Wow...Rusty, you have OUTDONE yourself! Cowboys and Indians??? Get down to your local community college and start teaching! THOSE kind of analogies are PRICELESS! I love it!

 

I suppose this picture could be painted with 'cops' and 'robbers'...

 

Mschoenhals--- for most 'professional' results rotoscopes are usually left as guides in A:M and then composited in another app like AfterEffects or Premiere...Vegas...

 

IF you want to use A:M as the compositor you will obviously have to find a compressor that renders right...so experiment. Try 'No compression'...what are you using to convert your video compression?

[Digital Video]

Hi all,

I'm doing a project that involves rotoscoped video with animated characters. I've found that AM will not accept DV AVI's and when I use cinepak or indeo to compress the video, upon rendering in AM the digital video turns out terrible - get lines all across the screen.

 

Any suggestions on how I should bring the digital video into AM and then render?

 

Thanks,

Mike

[Which Game Engine?]

Hi all,

 

I'm a media and animation teacher and want to extend my course to include using student created models and environments in a game.

 

Is there a game engine out there that would be fairly easy to work with for importing AM models and modifying the game play (ie: level design)?

 

Thanks,

Mike