robcat2075

I'm looking at it. I've run into a constraint problem I need to figure out.

(may need to click to animate)

How exact do the treads need to be? Is it enough for each to go around the path? Does each link have to maintain exact connection with its neighbors? Can you show the model you want to do this with?

I think that fell on the Brady kids when they went to Hawaii.

Here is an overhead view of one lap around the object. A small bone in the center is animated to point outward and rotate 360° The large bone has surface constraint on it, so it sticks to the mesh wherever the center bone is pointing. It is also constrained to Aim at and Scale to Reach the center bone. If I Bake that action, the scaling of the long bone gets keyframed into the Chor. Only the Z scale is needed. I can strip that out in a spread sheetand convert that data into single byte values. That string of single bytes is pasted into a .TXT file, then saved and renamed to be a .RAW file which I can load into Phtoshop and resave as a TGA.

That was a TGA. It was easy to make an 8-bit RAW image out of the numbers then resave that as TGA.

Here's something I've been wondering about for 20 years... Could i use A:M to scan a complex model to make a displacement map to put on a simple model and give it the shape of the complex model? In this test case I used a surface constraint to measure the difference in radius between the left shape and the right one. With some text editing and spreadsheet jiggling I made a bitmap out of that data and applied that to the simple shape on the right. The "scan" was very lo res, just 30 pixels around the perimeter, and it has a glitch in it, but the basic concept worked. If I could streamline and automate the workflow a bit, the scans could be very high res and work in all dimensions

Mark, here's a sample PRJ that works in my Windows V19. in the Chor and do Simulate Bullet. If it crashes, this would be a case you could send knowing that it does work in Windows but not on Mac. Bullet_Die_Test.prj

Sounds like a good prospect for a bug report.

I enjoyed that very much, Tore! The look is very impressive, especially the body. I look forward to more productions!

What? It's done already?? I thought it would be rendering for at least another year! It looks great, Tore! You should post it in "Showcase" I didn't catch this right away because I figured it was just another update.

He looks fierce!

I've sometimes thought larger buttons would be needed for touch screen interfaces but I figure you still need a mouse to use A:M so finger-sized buttons might just be using up needed screen space.

This might well be a case where multipass gets you a faster result with comparable quality. There is no waiting for an anti-aliasing pass in multipass, you just have to wait for the multiple passes. If you had a long animation to render, i'd test a few representative frames in both modes, see which is preferred and go with that for the whole run..

If you have an example of that, it would be interesting to see.

I can recall an answer I gave to a similar inquiry... So, the difference between the first AA pass and the second AA pass can be as much as the difference between rendering 4 sub pixels and rendering 16 sub pixels (worst case).

Thanks for adding the example PRJ!

In my AO experiments I decided i didn't like the grayness of it. It is possible it is possible to set the "Ambiance Color" to something other than white for a bluish skylight or reddish sunset coloration.... However, I still wanted something less the-same-all-over. If we set Global Ambiance Type to "Image Based Lighting" we can use a bitmap to make the light different colors from different directions. Image based lighting has a "Mapping Type" setting. The simplest is "Latitude-Longitude" which basically stretches and wraps an image 360° onto an imaginary sphere around your universe. You don't see it in the background of your render, it just colors the global light. What follows are experiments with different images (seen on the left) and the lighting result (seen on the right) This uses a photo taken in my front yard facing away from the house... Similar but curves adjusted in Photoshop to make it lighter... Added sky at top and painted in some "dirt" color for the ground The previous one was i the ball park but too green and still too dark so i reduced the saturation in Photoshop, painted out some of the green and did another curve adjustment to overall brighten it. I regarded this as satisfactory. The Image Based Lighting doesn't make a dramatically different result on the flat surfaces of the house but I like how the slight variations on the round shapes of the character create a Subsurface Scattering appearance even though the skin is just a default A:M surface. These IBL renders were done with no Ground plane. The light or lack of it from below was controlled by painting black at the bottom of the IBL image.

That page is the first time I've encountered the "KiB" (Kibibyte)

You question is not stupid. I don't want to belittle you for it. But you have asked it... it's going to get an answer. What I can tell you is what I know about A:M's development and how i know the lack of GPU rendering isn't because it's not been tried and how I see rendering time in the whole production process and what i know about other solutions to rendering time that can be done now. My next suggestion is a very serious one. It is not meant to brush you off... Blender has the render features it has only because they recruited very knowledgeable people to donate a huge amount of their programming time and knowledge to make it happen. Those are not trivial additions. Recruit a similar team to do that for A:M. That is what it will take. It will take an enormous programming effort. I don't see anyway to make it happen except to find the people who can do it. I mean that very seriously.

What does this mean? Does this mean 2D motion graphics like you do in After Effects with flat images but no 3D objects?

I'll tell you why the render time isn't a big hindrance for me personally... The amount of time I spend modeling, rigging, texturing and animating is so much larger than the render time that even if the render time were instantaneous it wouldn't change the duration of the project much. The things that A:M does without me, like rendering, have gotten to be the least worrisome part of it. The stuff where A:M is waiting for me to do something is the big bottle neck that no render speed up will change.

If someone can program it, I'm all for it.

It depends, of course, but in average 3-5 minutes for a 1280x640 9xmultipass frame without hair/particles. You should get in a time machine and go tell 1987 me that the day would come when it would not take 5-15 hours per 320x240 frame with no hair or particles even if you wanted them.

How long are your renders taking?