robcat2075

Hey, I like your avatar! i got out my 3D glasses to look at it. Here is a bump map I have used for rope purposes. It tiles perfectly in Photoshop but not quite right in A:M for reasons I'm not sure of. if you have trouble using it come back and we'll figure it out. RopeMap.tga

There should be no difference between these two, the duplication is just for convenience. "File" is where Save is normally found in Windows programs but since there is an explicit "Project" menu a Save was put there also in case someone went looking for it there. And, of course, these two will overwrite the last saved file with the same name:

One of the teachers at AnimationMentor had a clever antidote for the temptation to pose like that.... give the character a prop, like a cup of coffee to hold, so they CAN'T wave that hand around like the other one. I also look forward to the day when Corporate CEOs don't have to wear high-heels and black leather jackets.

Steve Jobs was pretty good at presenting. Most corporate heads are not. Wanna see a painfully long stretch of mirrored posing and mechanical delivery? Skip ahead to 2:00 and watch the CEO of General Motors talk to a crowd... Mary Barra CES Keynote Speech

For some reason that reminds me of the kind of thing Méliès would do.

For comparison.... Z-Buffered Klieg with Penumbra OFF but with 20% softness.

Rays > 1 does mean rays greater than 1 Multiple Rays will work in either Regular or Multipass. With "distribute in passes" ON the total number of rays cast is the same either way. With "distribute in passes" OFF I believe the multiple rays get duplicated in each multipass, which probably has no benefit since they are probably not jittered any differently. Penumbra ON adds a 9 (?) position jitter to a Z-buffered Kleig light (which has no "rays") to try to suggest the penumbral shadows of a wide ray-traced light. With very wide lights the separate jitters become distinctly visible but the"softness" of the light can be upped to blend them together. Wide light with Penumbra ON and 0% softness: Wide light with Penumbra ON and 20% softness:

Matt, I believe you need to set the Kleig light to "Ray traced" , "Rays" to 1, and set its "width" to some large value depending on how severe you want the shadow diminish effect to be .

Wow! that is lovely! Any idea why the far-side windows in the top pic are so bright? I'm guessing it's a "fog" problem?

The difference between 8 minutes and 10 minutes is indeed the difference between 30fps and 24 fps for 14,400 frames. (btw, thats a lot to be rendering in one scene from A:M) In A:M proper, the fps setting is found in the properties of the Project in the PWS. The compression settings will not overrule the PRJ setting. That is something you typically set before you begin keyframing as all keyframes are identified internally as a certain amount of time from the start rather than a certain number of frames. Changing FPS to 24 now will not make the animation run longer. If you are wanting to rerender, it is possible to stretch your animation out to run for 10 minutes. Change the FPS setting in the PWS to 24 -Change your times display from Frames to SMPTE in the Units Panel. -Find or make a keyframe at exactly 8 minutes in the time line -Select all the Keyframes in the timeline -Drag the right edge of the bounding box until the key frame that was at 8 minutes is now precisely on 10 minutes. This stretches all keyframes proportionately. -Save under a new filename and render. If you don't want to re-render and have Quicktime Pro you can -export the animation from QT Pro as an image sequence at 30fps (in QT the fps setting DOES govern the result), -then import it back into QT Pro as an image sequence with 24 FPS chosen as the import speed, -then export again as a QT file with 24 FPS chosen in the compression settings. Of course there will be some loss of quality from all the recompression i believe it is also possible to do this maneuver in A:M: In 32-bit A:M (Windows only, on Mac this doesn't matter), Set FPS in the PRJ to 30. Import the animation to the Images folder. and do "Save Animation As..." Click on the ... button to set a file type of JPG or TGA Click OK, to export Close and reopen 32-bit A:M Set FPS in the PWS to 24 Import the image sequence, "Save Animation as" Click on the ... button to choose Quicktime as the export type. Click on the Compression button to choose the codec and compression settings. Export to Quicktime file.

If you can post the test case, we might look at it.

Each decal addresses a particular surface parameter, like color or specularity, so you can use both materials and decals on the same surface. Example: You could have "roughness" set in a material and leave "color" unset so that a Color decal can do that work. Also, with an alpha channel in a decal you can have the decal cover only part of a surface and allow surface attributes to be revealed in other areas.

And I'll note that for the first time, the "Notifications" drop down menu at the top of the forum actually works. Before it would just do the spinning icon thing and never display anything.

Hey, Tore... Here's a better idea... On Saturday I do "Live Answer Time". People call me on Skype and I look at their problem and try to solve it. Get yourself Skype and you can show me exactly what it is that your other software is doing and what you want A:M to do and I think we can identify the problem very quickly and decide if it's a bug that needs to be reported or if it's just something that needs to be done differently.

I was able to "like" the post without an error message, but I've been able to do that before without errors.

Because it's important to fix the thing that is the actual problem and not spend time on something else that is being referred to by the wrong name. There has to be a yes or no answer to this question at least: Also, in the following software, when you set "Out=60" doesn't that just mean that when you hit Play the program will play the animation onscreen from frame 0 to 60? Or does it mean something different?

Tore, I've read the thread and I'm still not clear on what you are doing that needs the Chor length to be a certain length. Play range affects only the span of the timeline that gets played in real time when you hit the Play button. It has no effect on Render Range. Chor length also has no effect on Render Range. Newton and SimCloth use Chor length to know when to stop a simulation but other than that Chor Length doesn't mean much. Render Range is something you explicitly set in the render panel. Tore... is Render Range what you are really trying to save with your PRJs?

Here I moved the light to show that it's not dependent on the environment lighting

that's the one that's probably a deal-killer for use on cloth where you can't explicitly control the shape. Cloth will get curved and folded. So far, the SSS method is the only way I know of differentiate between front and back of a single thickness surface in any shape...

I dimly recall that my technique was a compositing process. It used the fact that the "wrong" side of patches with SSS on them would render as black to create a matte to composite two renders together.

When you say "Scene length" what do you mean that is different form the Chor "length"? I'll note that in the file, Play Range and Chor length ("Frames") are written as separate values, so they are potentially independent of each other, but there is no "Scene length " parameter.

The reflection thing is weird. Try an image with an image in it, something other than a flat color.

I tried your test PRJ and it does fail to retain the 50 frame setting after a save and reload. What you really want is for the Blue bar (the Chor Length) to stay set at 50 frames after a save and reload, without having to make other workarounds in the chor, right?

That's pretty good.

They're just not in the holiday spirit.