robcat2075

If anyone is concerned that this might be too complicated or take too much time... I've done the first third of this course previously and found it moves in very small steps that are easily accomplished. And if you don't get it... that's what the live meet up is for... to get us over the hump and on to the next goal! Aside from A:M there are other programs I use that have some Open Source or SDK availability, where I know what I want, i know the program is almost there already but I can't convince them to do it for me and if i only knew c++... i could get it done myself. You probably have those cases too and that's why you want to learn C++.

And there was much rejoicing.

We will not have Live Answer Time on April 20. Have a peaceful Easter weekend! April 20 is the 111th birthday of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton

I'll also note that you do need to have a solid modeled background in your image. Even one just big patch to cover the background will be enough. The default camera background is not able to create a proper depth map result.

Here is a clear process, using the OpenEXR format. Note that the screen capture compression makes the grayscale depth buffer look very banded. The actual render will be smooth. Note, also, that my choice of only 640x640 for resolution was a weak one. Although the final image is seen rather small on Facebook, a higher resolution depth map seems to make the Facebook 3D process work better and make fewer mistakes about near v. far. Thank you , Matt for finding this new FaceBook feature!

You got an email with an activation code, right? You'll need that. Delete the master0.lic file from your AM program folder, then run A:M. This should make A:M ask for your activation code. Enter it and you ought to be up and running. If not, come back and ask more questions. if you have other A:M installation, like previous versions, copy the new master0.lic file that just got created to those other AM folders and they will be enabled on your sub also.

Edit: see better A:M process in next post If you know how to extract the depth map from an OpenEXR render and scale it into a PNG you are on your way already. A perhaps more intuitive way is to temporarily set all the objects in your shot to full 100% ambient intensity white, no specularity. Set your camera background to black, turn fog ON, and set the fog near and far distances to contain the nearest and farthest objects in your scene. You should get a grayscale image approximation of a depth map.

Here's how i envision this study group working: Every week, on our own time we watch the assigned lecture and do the relevant assignment. At our live meet up, everyone shows their assignment running (most of these projects do what they do in about 5 seconds). If anyone doesn't have it running the rest of us can jump in to figure out why and resolve any remaining questions. Before we finish, we'll look at the upcoming chapters and agree on how much to take on for the next week. Rinse, repeat. That would be great, Serg!

It's real close now...

I think you should be able to just decal your models and have it come over... According to Fuchur's page on the .x exporters it includes decals in the export, so i would presume that if you are not getting decals there must be something going wrong between the .x and .egg stages?

I am eyeing May 1 as a kickoff date. I would like to find a weekly time we can all meet to resolve questions we encounter. The Udemy classes have a way to ask questions but I've found they don't always get answered or always get usefully answered. 😀

Martin, how would you rate authors as readers of their own work?

That would be great to have you, Justin. It looks like John Purcell who teaches the Udemy course is indeed using eclipse on his Mac so you would have the advantage of being able to do exactly what he is doing... and it absolutely should work, right?

Hello Uyen, perhaps you have the same problem noted here...

I have not abandoned this idea. I just need to get a couple Projects behind me before we embark on this. It looks like our candidates for IDE are Visual Studio 2015 (because it is what Steffen uses for A:M), Visual Studio 2017 (because it is the most recent well-used version), and Visual Studio 2019 (because it is the latest). I don't know enough about IDEs to say what the functional differences are? All are available for free but all require Windows 7 or later.