robcat2075

Apologies for the delay. Jason is occupied with non-A:M matters right now. When he gets back he'll be able to make poll for us.

Can you send me that test project? I've been having some weird color things happen also.

Are the sprites supposed to be round also?

The displacement map effect is mostly independent of the patch density. One patch will work as well as 900.

Needs a piano.

Terry, try this... clip4091ImageSequenceDuration512.mp4

I tried it and it rendered. Then I tried it again and it crashed. I'm using a beta version of v19c. You'll want to save and include a .pre file to identify all your render settings so that Steffen is duplicating them when he runs it. Also mention that I only got the crash the second time after loading.

Indeed, he is on the ceiling!

There is the pesky difference between spline modeling and polygon modeling strategy. In polygon modeling you make the surface and add the hole while in spline modeling you make the hole and then finish the surface. I guess you know what your options are now. Since none of the options are perfect (especially at the price range you are looking at) you have to make a choice of which inconveniences you can live with and that is understandable. A:M has always been targeted as a tool for creating narrative character animation and to the extend that people can use it for other things that is great but they can't chase those other markets that already have substantial tools available.

A "Drivers" folder seems to show up under a model in the Objects folder when you change a parameter to something that was external to the model. For example, if you drop a green shiny material on model of a vase, your vase will become green and shiny. If you edit the color of that material in the shortcut that is in the model rather than in the original material in the Materials folder, a Drivers folder will be added to the model that seems to contain that custom change. Or does it? If I delete that Drivers folder, the custom change I made doesn't go away. For further confusion, these drivers sometimes acquire keyframe curves with values changing over time. What causes this when i am editing a model in the model window, which is basically timeless?

Welcome back, Terry! If you can export your video to a numbered targa or jpg sequence that will certainly import. In A:M's render settings I see five options for AVI compression settings. I recommend "Full Frames (Uncompressed)" for something you wish to use in A:M. Note that the file size will be huge.

I loved Deluxe Paint. I once had a job that was entirely doing things in Deluxe Paint. A few years later I had another job working for the same guy but in an all-Mac environment. He wondered why things took so much longer and it was hard to explain how things that were simple in 8 bit indexed color in one program were mostly undo-able in 24 bit color spread among several programs. Remember color cycling? That was very useful. Haven't seen it in ages. And you could pick up any part of an image and drag and paint with it.

Once again we have some eye-popping images to pop our eyes at! If your entry is missing from this pre-voting exhibition, PM me ASAP! I will lock this thread so that you may contain your "oohs" and "ahs" until after the voting has finished. The poll will probably go up later this week. Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe Wireframe The following image is exhibition-only and not entered for voting.

It's coming. Keep your patches on.

There is a new feature called "Snap to Surface" You import a model or prop and you can draw new splines on it. This would be a way to create a thin spline mesh on a dense polygon model.

A true boolean cut in splines is a bit of a moonshot proposal. If your ultimate goal is a model exported to a polygon format for 3D printing, may i suggest making your spline models and boolean cutter shapes in A:M, then exporting those to a polygon format and doing the cut as the last step in a polygon modeler.

Another laurel! Congratulations. Why are you not in IMDb yet?

I suppose a wizard could be made but it would have to deal smartly with situations where the number of CPs on one side was not equal to the other side. Fortunately, we model with thin meshes in A:M so the labor of manually connecting surfaces is not onerous.

result re-imported... If you want Quads-only, OBJ can do that.

Hopefully Ken Citron will chime in here. He's done a lot of 3D printing. When I was working with him on 3D printing the image contest medal he found that his software liked OBJs better. I'm sure it's possible to make a model that isn't ideal for STL export so perhaps the mileage varies depending on what the target app is. Here is a pic of the STL interface and an export. TrexTeeth4x.zip

I remember all the press about Warhol at the launch.

Wonderful entries have come in! I need to hunt down a wireframe and some renders that didn't have the right settings and then I'll put up the exhibition gallery.

I know that SS has been used successfully for imitating cloth folds in the past, so I know it can be done. We'd need to ponder a specific case to know more. I'm pressed for time right now, but my brief answer on "cloth" is that it can work well. It has many parameters that need to be chosen carefully. The defaults are really just there to stop beginners from trying to do it with everything set to zero. Again, a specific case is easier to talk about and give recs on.

I'm afraid there is no graph editing for the interpolation between smartskin keys. I believe the reason is that there is no linear time relationship between them, they are related to each other by the orientation of a bone and the bone can move among any of three axi rather than one time dimension. We would need a 3 or 4 dimensional graph that could show the XYZ of a CP for each XYZ axis that the bone can move on. Also, regrettably, there is no linear interpolation between smartskin keys that I am aware of. My typical strategy for smooth smartskins is to sculpt the shape for the bone's biggest deflection angle first. Then if more intervention is needed in the result between that angle and zero, I will add a key at the half way point or maybe at thirds. So I might make keys at 0, 90, 45 or 0, 90, 60, 30 but I wouldn't do 0, 10, 75, 90 Keys that occur at regularly spaced angles seem to interpolate best.

Fake AO is called SSAO in A:M (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion). It's a bit like a Photoshop filter that works on the 2D image as a last render step. It is fast but it has many parameters that must be set right to get a result that resembles "real" AO. You have to have a clear mental or reference image of what the goal is. The settings will be different for every shot. For indoor scenes within walled rooms it is the only option for AO effects since AO light doesn't reach things within walls.