robcat2075

For anyone following this thread... It did get done!

And when you say "seldom"... are there images that do work?

Was v18 better at this for you?

I have had that problem although I don't seem to be having it today. There may be some circumstance that does it.

I never saw this! Looks fabulous!

Not every wax seal gets to be on an Animation:Master Image Contest Certificate. These are some of the rejects...

Variations on the theme... Here is a render using just three lights carefully adjusted, no AO. This takes about 1 minute This is the three light render with SSAO (Screen Space Ambiant Occlusion AKA "fake AO") set to try to approximate regular AO shading. About 1 minute. This is the SSAO effect "only" About 1 minute (It should be nearly instantaneous but my graphics card doesn't seem to do SSAO right.) This is a flat toon-only (no lines) render (1 minute) This is SSAO Only + Toon only composited with "multiply" in Photoshop (A:M could do this too in a Composite Project) Here's an AO-like strategy. This uses a light traveling on a spline over many passes to simulate large, broad lighting, but no AO, no stationary lights. 100 passes takes about 5 minutes. 256 passes takes about 12 minutes

"Anthropomorphized" (make a character out of a normally inanimate object)

"Endless Summer" "Working Stiff" "Secret Agent" "Back to School"

100 if you're sure you need 100, but I've never been that picky.

Maybe it's getting time for a new Image Contest but... it will need a topic first! Got ideas? Something not too narrow, not too broad, something we haven't done a lot before? Something that A:M users would enjoy putting their own personal spin on? One idea I have in the back of my head... "Planes, Trains, Automobiles" What are your ideas?

Some sort of toon setting change I would guess.

If you made their clothes 0,0,0 black instead of invisible you could simplify the compositing. Is there still a problem combining the toon and regular in one render? I would experiment with a different treatment of the eye blinks. Right now it seems they go like (open percentage) 100-50-0-50-100 Change the middle so they are not the same going down as going up, maybe like this 100-75-0-25-100 or maybe the reverse of that 100-25-0-75-100 Adding an extra frame of zero might help them seem more weary and less flickery 100-75-0-0-25-100 Head turns will usually look better if they move in an arc rather than a straight path. Usually a small dip in the middle. They also will move faster in the middle and slow-in to the end position. It's very rare for anyone to turn their head in even increments from start to stop.

As far as I can ascertain, a "server" CPU... -more cache -more RAM capacity (TB instead of GB!) -uses ECC RAM -faster bus -more cores -multiple socket mother board possible A "desktop" CPU CPU... -faster clock speed -extended instruction sets like SSE4 -onboard GPU (Intel only?))

I think lighting is the hardest part of getting pleasing 3D results. I'll note that even in live movies where they have the advantage of instant AO all the time, and walls that will bounce the illumination from the lights that exist in the world of the movie, they still usually have to cheat a bit with extra fill lights that are unseen and off-camera. example In A:M we have an advantage that our light bulbs can be anywhere and we don't have to try to hide them from the camera.

Hi Simon, For AO you need to have the Choreography>Properties>Global Ambiance Type not set to "None". -"Global Color" is the simplest choice. -This basically enables an all-around environmental light. The more that a surface is blocked from that all-around light the darker it will be. -You can adjust the environmental strength with "Ambiance intensity". When other lights are in the scene it is often necessary to set the Ambiance intensity to less than 100% -"Ambiance Occlusion" controls how dark the occlusion shadowing effect is. You also need Render to File Settings>Options>Ambiance Occlusion>ON -Occlusion Sampling is a quality vs. time choice. Higher means less speckling but longer render time. I often set it to 10% for test renders just to see the AO effect more quickly. -Transparent AO (Slow!) allows the all-around rays to pass through patches that have some Transparency set. I figure an institutional hallway like yours is probably lit with wide fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Putting holes in the ceiling approximates that. I also put holes in the opposing wall to simulate the light from the ceiling that would normally bounce off that wall onto the characters. I just added a few CPs in the middle of splines to disable patches in key areas. Here is your edited PRJ so you can see the altered model and settings. New Happy Families 001B_RCH 01 AO.prj And the preset CorridorWith AO.pre There are other ways to get this effect without actual AO that might render faster but this is easy to set up and more predictable.

In my own case, since I do more modeling and animating than rendering and since most of what A:M does is single threaded, I'd favor a faster CPU with fewer cores over a slower one with more cores. The CPUs that can throttle up one core when the others are unused sound like an interesting solution but I haven't had one yet.

When I'm looking at published benchmarks of CPUs, I think that the "single threaded" version of "Cinebench" is likely the closest to mimicking what A:M does.

I built my PC about 8 years ago so most of it is pretty ancient stuff that isn't made anymore. Core 2 Quad 6600 2.4 MHz 8GB RAM Nvidia GeForce GT610 graphics card with 1GB RAM - it was ~$75 when i got it, much less now -This is definitely lower than mid-level for gaming but it's fine for A:M -Previously I had an even punier AMD card that was fine until its fan died. -I like that it has two video outputs so i can run two monitors. I put the Project Workspace on its own monitor. -My monitors are just 1280x1024 and 1920x1080. If you were going to run two larger monitors maybe 1GB RAM would not be enough. NVidia has started making graphics chips for laptops ("M" in the chip name for mobile) and many laptops are available that use them. the down side is that they probably still take more power than Intel graphics so your battery time will be less. I prefer a 4 core to a 2 core CPU but it's hard for a laptop to scream with all four cores for very long because of the heat. They are built to slow down or idle cores if the heat is getting too high. Desktops can have giant fans so it isn't such a problem. Personally i need several USB ports. Printer, Mouse, Keyboard, cameras that I plug in to download files. My Cintiq monitor needs a USB port too. Does this answer any of your questions?

This takes 3:48 with your settings. I see that you have AO on in the render settings but there is no Global Ambience selected in the Chor and no Ambience Occlusion % set. You won't get any AO effect without those. However, there will be almost no AO in a scene like this that is not exposed to outside light. There are several settings that seem very odd to me, like the spot lights set to 180° wide and set to only 30% darkness. Do you really want this very flat, no-shadows result? Just to experiment, I removed unseen parts of the ceiling and walls so the Global Ambience could shine in to create something a bit more like broad "waiting room" light. I turned off the three spot lights. (I set the surface color of the glass to black so the reflection wouldn't be brighter than what is reflected.) I think this gets better illumination on the down-turned faces and a more realistic presence to the room lighting overall. This took 35 minutes to render.

By "number pad" I mean a numeric keypad like this on the end of the keyboard. I like your idea of a quad core so you can make use of Netrender. 8GB RAM is probably a safe amount. Laptops tend to use only low-power Intel graphics which are troublesome for A:M, but laptops that have dedicated Nvidia or AMD graphics tend to be quite expensive. That is why I just have a desktop. If you do get a laptop that doesn't have the numeric keypad you could still get a full size USB keyboard for $10 or so and plug that in when you are at home. make sure you have enough USB ports so plug in both a mouse and the keyboard. You'll probably also want to have a monitor port so you can plug in a larger monitor.

Here's a 1080HD 9-pass render with the corridor ON that takes 2 minutes 28 seconds, but i don't know your render settings.

I downloaded your PRJ. Could you save and post a preset file of the render setting you are using?

If you haven't bought the computer yet, consider something with a real number pad on it. The number pad is huge time saver for navigating the views.

What size are you rendering at? I think you could render at half your typical size and not lose any details.