robcat2075

Here's part of my confusion... Currently in A:M, as I scrub through an animation or let it play in real time, for every frame interval of 1/24th of a second, is A:M transmitting the entire geometry and lighting and color info of the scene over and over again to the graphics card, which then renders it (in shaded mode)? If that is the case that seems like a small overhead for the transfer of the scene data from the CPU to the GPU. If that is not the case... what IS getting transmitted every 1/24th of a second?

And when you say "everything"... what is that really? Does, for example, the timeline and graph editor all have to run from code on the GPU? I can't imagine it. Some of our users have been exporting OBJ sequences or "pointclouds" and then taking those files to 3rd party GPU renderers and getting fast renders and/or specialized rendering results from that. That would have to be the ultimate "bottle neck" between the CPU and GPU and yet it is still advantageous for them to do so. ??

Could it be inefficiently implemented and still be faster? Powerful graphics cards will only get cheaper and more powerful with time.

As far as it being a different renderer... we have different renderers now that we choose from Wireframe Shaded Final (and it seems like our current "radiosity" is also a different renderer) So having one more option wouldn't be crazy to find within A:M. I'm of two minds on it all... On the one hand, most of our users barely scratch the potential of what we have already and they would probably be quite alarmed at the longer render times of even this speedier radiosity technique. (It IS faster, right?) On the other hand, there is a strong desire for this technique among our advanced users; it would get A:M more into the modern CG age and most of all it would permit us to use lighting techniques that are more like the real-world techniques we learn about in photography classes. But if it is still glacially slow I'm doubtful people would be happy with it. Can this be sped up with hardware computing? Can any portion of the process be sped up?

How interesting. I didn't know there would even be a book on it. I wonder if it works!

I bought Maya (student price) some years ago and made a point to work through the book of tutorials that comes with it. I wanted to give it a fair shot. When I was done I couldn't help but feel that 9 out of 10 things you do in Maya take 2 or 3 or 4 times as many steps as the same task in A:M would take and the 1 out of 9 things that is easier in Maya isn't a deal-breaker... there's still a way to do it in A:M. That is probably very true especially at the entry-level jobs. True of animation, also. I think I see more actual listings for TD jobs than animators at the A-list studio level, maybe because there is an extreme over-supply of animators, while good TDs are harder to come by.

I believe if you edit your first post and use the "Full Editor" you can add tags.

thanks, again, Yves. It sounds like the hard task for the user with a physically-based renderer is to define the materials, while the modeling and lighting techniques don't change much. But many people are using such renderers so i presume most of them make do with using material definitions that have been prepared by someone else, much like people who can't model are limited to models someone else has made. It's like clipart. Once a physically-based material has been made it can be re-used on any model and doesn't have to be remade for every scene, right? This doesn't sound like too many parameters to manage. I count six there, which is less than the number of parameters in our current "Surface" definitions. If the program used the standard units that these properties are typically described with one could look up the values in appropriate references (or copy them from another program's material definitions ) without needing a testing laboratory to ascertain the values from scratch for every material. And someone with general knowledge of the parameters could take an existing material and vary parameters to arrive at a desired appearance by experimentation.

Thank Lorenzo Lamas for bringing that to my attention.

I think the gap between the thighs at the crotch may be too wide.

To pursue the modeling angle a bit... Materials aside...there shouldn't be any reason that your proposed separate renderer couldn't work with A:M spline models directly instead of them having to be converted into polygon model files first, right?

Thanks, Yves. "Physically based" is not something I'm familiar with. What are parameters someone would need to be setting that don't exist in our conventional materials? Would you have to model anything differently? The shapes in your sample pics all look like things that could be made in A:M so that wouldn't be true, would it?

$995! Ouch. Well, I'm still on Windows 7 so I'm out of the loop anyway. Is that a piece of hardware? If it has "firmware" it must be hardware, right?

I forgot to mention that after you apply the decal, you need to set its Type in the PWS from "Color" to "Transparency" The effect of a Transparency map will only be visible in Final renders, not shaded mode.

MS Paint doesn't support alpha channels, the others I don't know about. To do it without alpha channels a transparency map can work: -Make your "window", set a surface color for it that you want for your letters, then set its Transparency to 100% -Make a decal like this with black background and white letters Apply that to where you want your text to appear. The white part of the decal will override the Transparency setting of the window and allow the surface color appear.

John, what paint program do you have to create decals in?

That would be wireframe mode. You don't have to switch individual lights. Make the one Pose for the set. One pose switch ... is all it takes. You're going to be switching something. Either the render method or the lights. Either way, there's going to be a button somewhere you have to switch.

Yes, I have seen rigger demo reels where they show the motions and controls they have built into to a model. As the basics of rigging bipeds become more automated I suspect the rigger skills in demand are the ability to deal with things that don't have generalized solutions like faces and unusual props and creatures. I believe riggers fall under the job description of TD (technical director) Forum member from times past, Barry Zundell, who went from a game company in Utah (Sapphire?) to Pixar and then to somewhere else would be an example. You might take a look at his blog for his insider info. It's unlikely a professional rigger has only rigging skills. I imagine they need to be competent modelers and functional animators to have built up a body of their own work to show. It's possible someone could fake a reel by pulling stuff off the internet but that would fall apart after the first audition assignment in an interview. Maya is a ghastly horror, but it's the ghastly horror most studios below the Pixar level are built upon so one would have to become proficient at it to pursue jobs that use it.

I thought I was ready to model a realistic insect but there were many details of this struggled with and wish i had done better on. This is actually a combination of a cicada that I had a specimen of to study, a Brazilian Tree Hopper which is known for the elaborate structures that grow on its head and a firefly. One of my aims was to texture it with materials rather than bitmaps.. On my Cicada I noticed that the wings have a cellular pattern that is bunched up where the wing joins the body, then expands to follow the curve of the front edge of the wing and ends perpendicular to the trailing edge of the wing. There is no material that will do that right out of the box but I figured i could apply a cellular material to a rectangular shape and then morph that rectangle with a pose into the wing shape and that woudl morph the material pattern with it. This clip show the Pose going from 0 to 100% I also used Render as Line on the front and back edges to make those more visible. WingMorph.mov I used a similar ploy to apply a cylindrical gradient to the not-cylindrical abdomen structure... AbdomenMorph.mov Here's a full HD with some additional development. The text is a screen capture from the online 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. I stamped that as a color map and a blurred version of it as a bump map to give the appearance that the typeset letters are slightly impressed into soft paper. I also added a bump material to roughen the surface up overall. That is just barely visible in this HD render. (click thru to see full size) Here is a cross-eye 3D version with some DOF... And lastly, here is a final-to-wireframe clip that you can scrub back-and-forth on to examine the modeling. InsectFinalToWire.mov

I believe this may be a limitation of the shaded rendering process that tries to present a compromise exposure of all the light in the scene. The lights are so much brighter than everything else that the compromise exposure leaves everything else down at the bottom of the scale. For an easy work around, make a pose that will toggle all those lights ON/OFF. In the Chor set it to "Constant" rather than "Time Based" so you can switch it on or off on any frame you want and not be creating keyframes that you have to erase later.

Wonderful idea!

Note that it is Shift-6 that toggles Show Backfaces, not F6

SO- by global ambiance, that simply means the choreography setting where you select a global color or HDRI image... if I select a color and add a value, the scene becomes less dependent on lights but does NOT become more realistic... It's not simply choosing it... you have to use it right and for the right reasons.

"Radiosity" seems to be for cases where you need the color bounce from adjacent surfaces. For most situations that's not a major factor.. Global ambiance and ambient occlusion should be able to do most of your realistic shading needs.

I'm glad you're asking questions instead of leaving disappointed! Come back if there's more trouble.