robcat2075

Precursor to Cinerama.... the "Hemicycle" of Paul Delaroche. A 180° degree painting on the walls of the Amphithéâtre de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts depicting great artists of the past, chatting amongst themselves.

It probably won't run at all on XP. I had to upgrade from Win 2K when Steffen moved to a compiler situation that didn't support Win2K. I also had to build a new PC to do that because my old PC couldn't do Windows 7. I imagine our XP users have older machines that can't be upgraded.

I'm sure the clouds in the background and the distant mountains are something they either painted or photographed but all the rest is good A:M work.

Yes, we need to know what it is you are wanting.

I'm not sure what your question is. What material are you wanting to make?

Here is an experiment by Ken on bronzing a scrap of pewter...

And if by chance, any of the caricature winners already have a Caricature by Largent of themself, they could use their prize to have caricature made of a family member or friend to give as a gift!

You are now free to sing "Happy Birthday" and use it in your movies without paying royalties. The rigorously enforced copyright, which all the facts indicated was invalid, has been declared invalid by a Federal Court. This one has actually been all they way to the Supreme Court before with a win for the copyright claimants, but now that is over... for now. ‘Happy Birthday to You’ copyright thrown outand ‘Happy Birthday’ Copyright Invalidated by Judgealso... Old Colbert Report on "Happy Birthday"

There was a time when you could learn a 3D program by just reading the manual, but 3D was pretty basic back then.

Robert, Did you download and install from the official release or from previous download? (or alternatively from Jason's posted owncloud file) I downloaded what is linked to at the top of the thread... that's official, right?

I'll note that I installed both the v18n 64 and 32-bit versions and they both seem to launch and run without reporting an error. I'm on 64-bit Windows 7.

I don't see m in here but I do see versions prior to that, perhaps one of those will hold you over until your n bug can be fixed... ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/old/

Which ones were those? One I recall is being able to clip a shape with a spline. Sort of like a subtractive boolean.

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?