robcat2075

I imagine it's possible but I've never used Zbrush. Someone has been able to move maps back and forth between A:M and zBrush I recall.

I tried v15. For some reason the render to file just gets a blank screen whether DOF is ON or OFF. But the DOF is working in an onscreen render, Something non-DOF related must be weird about the PRJ. You can use v16 or v17. Those work. V15:

Displacement maps are typically painted like bump maps are. I have generally painted them in conventional formats and lived with the +-127 problem My version of Photoshop only supports some basic processing of HDR formats like OpenExr and I can't actually paint directly in it. I have tried converting my 8-bit grayscale maps to 16 bit and then applying a slight blur to get the extra steps but that's just experimental. Most of what i have done with displacement has been with materials rather than bitmaps. Materials don't have that 8-bit limitation in the greyscales they can make Tanks, but no Tanks

I call it "Fast DOF" (the DOF you get with multi-pass OFF) because I recall Martin talking about A:M once with something like "...and a fast depth of field effect that only takes a second to compute..." It is a "post effect" much like FakeAO; it uses a depth buffer that A:M creates internally for rendering purposes to calculate its effect. FakeAO isn't real AO and Fast DOF isn't real DOF, but they resemble their namesakes well enough in most circumstances. Fast AO does pretty much the same process as the DOF plugins for After Effects that use a depth buffer. It's not as advanced and full-featured as the other guy's who've spent 10 or 15 more years coding and tweaking whereas A:M's has been sitting there unnoticed without much clamor for it to be improved. But it is there. The DOF you get with Multi-pass is done by jittering the position of the camera to simulate the way a real lens is not an infinitely small point and is capturing the scene from many slightly different angles.

I think the Fast DOF has been there at least since v11, probably before that. For big blurs with multi-pass DOF you have to do a lot of passes to blend it all together but it should be more accurate and not have the weird artifacts when objects move that the depth buffer DOF (what FastDOF really is) has.

There is an upper limit to the blurriness and i may have reached it in my test PRJ. One way to get a bigger blur is to render a much larger field of view and larger res and then crop the image back down to the original field of view. The left was rendered at 640x480 with the camera "focal length" set at 45mm The right was rendered at 1920x1440 with the camera "focal length" set at 15mm and then cropped down.

Those are a favorable situation for it. Some cases will not work as well, but it's there to try if you want to load up v16 or v17. I'm sure the absence in v18 is just a bug and I've made a report for v19 on it. Here is the PRJ and render Preset if you want to try it... LegoGlossy06b DOF rack.prj FastDOFDemo.pre

Here are two frames from my Legos DOF test but this is with A:M's built in Fast DOF instead of doing it in post. This is done in v16... near focus far focus

I just noticed that Fast DOF doesn't seem to be functioning in v18.

This previous thread has a discussion of both of A:M's DOF effects and down around post #29 information on getting A:M's OpenEXR buffer into post programs like After Effects. It also has a brief demo of the effect created in post on an A:M render..

Use the OpenEXR depth buffer, that has millions of steps.

OpenEXR renders can create a Depth buffer and that buffer is usable by DOF plugins in post programs like After Effects. Somewhere on this forum we've had discussions of how to enable it. I think Matt "John Bigboote" has worked with it. A:M does have a similar effect built in. That is the effect you get when DOF is ON in a non-multi-pass render. While A:M's fast DOF is not as refined as some third party DOF plugins for After-Effects, both have limitations that become apparent when objects are in motion.

Wonderful! I like that there are lots of details for the eye to discover.

Normal maps are like Bump maps in that they only change the shading of the surface without actually changing the shape. I tend to use bump maps rather than Normal maps because they are easier to create in a paint program. Basic tips for Displacement maps: -The grayscale range of TGAs, PNGs and JPGs only has +/-127 steps so very slight slopes or slopes on large lumps can start to look stair-steppy. If you have a way to paint in a high dynamic range format like OpenEXR, that will allow you many more steps between zero and peak. -Extremely steep protrusions rarely work well with Displacement. -Displacements have a way of flickering in animation as the angle of the camera to the surface changes. I have found that can be mostly eliminated by rendering at triple size and scaling the finished render back down in post. For example a 640 x 480 image would be rendered at 1920 x 1440. In a normal Final render that will cause a noticeable render time hit. If you are using Multipass you can save some time by using fewer passes... a 1920 x 1440 image done with one pass and scaled down to 640 x 480 will have the same level of anti-aliasing as a 640 x 480 image done with 9 passes.

Can you show us one of the unpredicted results?

After sleeping on it, here is another approach... a stripe material on a flat card, warped with a Pose into a cylinder... https://www.dropbox.com/s/ltef9j7laxj453x/PoleWrapMP4_30.mov?dl=0 Thanks!

I'll note that Combiners typically have two attributes, one for each color. One way to get more than two colors in a materiel (like Red White and Blue) is to change one of the two attributes into yet another Combiner. This is "nested" combiners.

Unfortunately, A:M does not include a "Spiral" combiner. There was a 3rd party set of materials that did include one. I forget the name. A decal would be most likely solution here. If I were determined to do it with a native materiel in A:M my first gambit would be to use the Extended Grid Turb combiner to put vertical stripes on a cylinder and then, with a Pose, twist the cylinder.

"Why don't the duplicate relationships also get a number appended to them?" It wouldn't be impossible to implement. Probably just a bit more involved than with the Groups or Bones because the Relationships can contain bone names in targets of constraints and those would need to be properly converted so they point to the right bones. Currently A:M will update target names in a relationship if you manually change a bone name, so part of the work is there.

If you model the spokes with an inner, middle and outer CP instead of just two that should prevent adjacent spokes from creating four point patches.

Whileyou are experimenting with v18 be careful to not resave any files over old file names. From v13 on, the file format changed so anything saved in v18 will not be openable in v12 or earlier.

I suppose the consistent thing to do would be to append a number to the duplicate Poses, in the same way that a number is added to duplicated Bones and Groups.

Work-around Explained Problem: A Microsoft update for Windows versions 8.1 and earlier (KB3086255, released in September 2015) disables the secdrv.sys file that enabled copy protection like that used by CDROM-keyed versions of A:M (v14 and earlier). With the file disabled, the CDROM verification gets stuck and A:M is never run. Microsoft felt the file had become a security flaw. The copy protection software that uses that file was not written by Hash, Inc. Hash only licensed the software and won't have access to the code to update it or fix the security flaw. Solution: The best solution is to update to the current version of A:M that doesn't use the CDROM copy protection. Current versions of A:M are much faster, more stable and incorporate new features. However, in rare cases, it may be necessary to revisit old projects in the version they were authored in. If you need to run one of those past versions of A:M in Windows 8.1 or earlier, it is possible to re-enable the secdrv.sys file and permit a CD ROM version of A:M to run in Windows 8.1 and earlier. This Microsoft Bulletin explains DOS-Style commands that can typed in to enable and disable the secdrv.sys file as needed. I was not able to get them to work on my computer, possibly because of "path" confusion. The bulletin also explains a registry modification that performs the same enabling/disabling. That procedure does work on my PC. Microsoft warns that enabling this file is unwise and Hash, Inc. is not recommending you do this. I am not recommending it either. To minimize your risk, enable it only before starting A:M and disable it when done with A:M and disconnect your PC from your internet/network for the duration of that session. On my PC, a restart is required before the registry enabling takes effect and another restart for disabling to take effect. What about Windows 10? There is no published solution from Microsoft for Windows 10. If anyone finds one, let us know. Another version of the How-to-Geek article hints at using a virtual machine of an older Win under Windows 10. I have not tried this. Run as Administrator? Another problem mentioned above was that the CD ROM versions of A:M would fail to start and give an error message that they must be run by an administrator even if the user was logged into their PC as an administrator. Individual programs can be set to automatically run as if by an administrator. on the program's icon, choose Properties, select the Compatibility tab and under "Privilege Level" check "Run this program as an administrator".

Success....

Further clue... a search on secdrv shows it does exist in the A:M versions we are investigating...