robcat2075

Zach Taich's guest? What is Zach doing these days? Last I recall of him we were doing Zachary Brewster-Geisz's 48-hour film "Duck Sauce"

I just drag the wav into the chor and that works. I tried it with one of your wavs and it worked as expected.

It has been possible for Hash to create a license for mac users who want to run Windows on the same machine. I presume "virtualize" is the same running-Windows-on-a-Mac that others do. Contact Hash on that.

What is the drawback for character work?

TSM2 (not TSM1) is available free on this forum. However, to run it on Windows you will need to install A:M v16, which you can do with your current license. You only need to be in v16 while using the plugins, you can model outside of v16 and you can use the rigged models outside of v16. TSM2 for Mac will not run on any MacOS since "Panther"

CUDA is an NVidia proprietary way doing pretty much the same stuff as OpenCL As far as I know it is not different enough to expect the results would be much different. from Wikipedia: OpenCl supports both NVidia and AMD GPUs so that was the choice to try on A:M because A:M needs to support both. I don't know a lot about this area of computing and my explanations will be very basic and probably inaccurate but that doesn't mean that Steffen overlooked some simple thing that everyone else in the world knows. Steffen really did put a lot of time into implementing it and trying it, but just as the Hash programmers found out with Gelato, the things that A:M does don't seem to benefit much from this sort of GPU computing. It is not going to be a simple matter of using CUDA instead of OpenCL. There is really nothing more that I can explain about it. Steffen would have to weigh in to give more insight.

Steffen gave OpenCL (the open source version of GPU computing) rendering a big try when he was developing v18 but it did not have the reliability or the increased speed that was hoped for. Hash had a similar experience when they tried to implement Gelato (Nvidia's original GPU rendering scheme) some 10 years ago. For now, the idea is on hold until some substantial improvements in the development tools arrive.

Long-ago forum member Zachary Brewster-Geisz's acting career continues to edge upward. Behold, a very favorable mention in the Washington Post review of "A Midsummer Night's Dream". Zach, seen reclining below...

I can't duplicate that on a simple case so if you have a specific case that does it that should become a bug report. I've looked through all the v18 reports and only see one that mentions copying, #6404, but it is listed as resolved.

Alain did lots of great stuff.

Save your installer for v18L Download the installer for v18o and give it a try.

The first one looks like a lava cola.

"Add Image" will tile a copy of the bitmap onto every patch. This is the most likely (only) gambit if you are modeling the rope in noose shape at the outset. Cylindrical decaling can work if you start with a pure cylinder in the model window, decal the image onto it, THEN bend the cylinder into your noose shape.

Set the specular highlight to be quite large and quite dim and that will make a duller specular highlight.

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.