robcat2075

Welcome back to A:M! The primary advantage of the 64 bit version is access to larger RAM, RAM over 3GB or so but it's rare for A:M projects to need even that much in the modeling or animating stages. Rendering to very high resolutions with very complicated scenes may push at that limit. The overall speed of the program will be only slightly faster in the 64-bit version. Does your 64 bit version have a Real-time Driver choice of OpenGLOpenGL3? Try switching that and restarting. And, old stand by advice... are your graphics card drivers up to date? Is there a reason to still be using v17?

Just curious... Is the graphics card in an iMac in a standard slot like in a PC? Could one swap it out with another card? Would the OS sense the change and update the drivers via the web like Windows does?

That turned out better than I expected!

Congratulations, Gerald! And big thanks to Ken Citron (pixelplucker) who did the heavy metal casting that made these medals possible!

The character in the loop looks a bit like Prince Charles.

And I like that avatar! Did you make that?

A temporary work around for rotoscopes might be to place the image on a rectangular patch that you then size and place to suit, then lock while you do your other work.

Here's comparison of times back to v15. Great work by Steffen on optimizing A:M and getting it to 64 bits!

That's very cool, Serg!

Running the ThreeTeapotsBenchmark on my 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 Windows 7 PC I get v17 5:11 per frame, 11.57 frames per hour v18 4:59 per frame, 12.04 frames per hour 4% faster than v17 v19 4:35 per frame, 13.09 frames per hour 13% faster than v17

When you turn off the AO you also need to turn down the Global Ambiance level in the Chor, otherwise you have lots of global light on things with no shading to counteract it.

Pass 1 would look like this: Pass 2: The composite with ADD:

For most modeling situations, the simplest solution will also render the smoothest: join the splines at the apex of the hump in a tiny ring rather than in one CP...

Are these all flat or is the center point elevated?

It always helps to post a sample PRJ so we know we're doing what you're doing.

Make two copies of your Project. Of course, all your models must be "embedded" for this. Copy 1: For the models that have some Toon, set the groups that create Toon to black with no specularity. Leave everything else as is and render as usual. Copy 2: For the models that have no toon at all, delete all the groups and set the whole model to black with no specularity. For the models that have some toon, delete all the groups that are not creating Toon and set them to black with no spec. Render the scene and you should get all black except the Toon parts. Since this one is only toon surfaces you can save time by not rendering with AO. These changes are made in the objects folder. The two renders will composite exactly together with an "add" mode. "Add" literally adds the RGB values from each render together. In this case the colored portions of each render (values greater than zero) will show through the black (zero) portions. Different programs call "add" different names. Photoshop calls it "Screen" but After Effects calls it "Add". A:M calls it "Add" in a "Composite project". We can talk of A:M composite projects if you don't have software that can do the "add" Test this out with just one frame from each render first, to make sure you are getting the parts right.

Is there a reason you're not doing the previously mentioned method of having Toon and regular render in one pass?

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)