robcat2075

In the prize list above I forgot to include... -Seven certificates of runner-upness, awarded to the fourth through tenth place finishers. ... now added. You have four days to finish and submit your entry!

On the back of the lottery cards it says "Please play responsibly." Buying 10 at once probably didn't look good.

Final rules and how to submit your image for the "Insect" Image Contest: 1. Your image should be primarily about and show an insect. 2. Your image must be modeled and rendered with Animation:Master. 3. Your image should be 1080 pixels high and can be any width you choose. I will resize images that don't fit that dimension. 4. Submit your image, your email address and your physical mailing address in a PM (private message) via the forum to me, Robert Holmén (AKA robcat2075), by going to my profile and choosing "Send me a message". You can attach the image to a PM in the same way you attach an image to a forum post. 5. Submit your image on or before August 9 2015 (or August 10, who's counting?) 6. The submitted images will be exhibited in a thread on the forum for one week before the voting begins. 7. The voting will be conducted on a page created by Forum Administrator Jason Simonds and will begin on or about August 16 and will be open for one week. Prizes: -One Hash Siggraph Jacket, awarded to the first place finisher -Three Medals, one awarded to each of the first, second and third place finishers -Three Caricatures by Mark Largent, one awarded to each of three entrants randomly chosen from the top ten finishers -Seven certificates of runner-upness, awarded to the fourth through tenth place finishers. -Ten $1 Texas Lottery Scratch-Off Game cards, one randomly assigned to each of the top ten finishers. The Big Scratch-OFF of the game tickets to reveal the winnings (if any) and the random drawing for the Largent caricatures and will be conducted by me on a YouTube video to be recorded and posted after voting has concluded and results are known. Lottery Game winnings (if any) will be sent via PayPal to the winners. If anyone should win a large prize I reserve the right to subtract 10% to pay the income tax I will incur since i am the legal purchaser and redeemer of the game card. Any further interpretations or decisions about the rules or prizes or the conduct of the contest will be made solely by me, Robert Holmén. All decisions are final, unless i change my mind, and then I get to make a new final decision. The Texas Lottery game cards are ready and itching to get scratched! You have five days to finish your entry! Don't miss out!

You can attach it to a PM on the forum.

Another calm, reasoned article about the privacy settings... Broken Windows Theory, Microsoft’s Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare. Here’s how to protect yourself.

If you can send me the model I'll look at it.

I'll note that "lighting" is the area of 3D where A:M is most like other 3D programs. Almost all concepts in other programs will translate well to A:M. If you have a doubt or question about a detail, ask us here. For a great explanation of 3D lighting that is non-program specific I'd recommend Jeremy Birn's "Digital Lighting and Rendering" I have a thread where I translated the general terms he used into A:M terms and explore some work-arounds when what he is talking about doesn't exactly match the way A:M does it.

Looks cool! Tell us more about the projection.

A compendium of tips and tricks... The ultimate Windows 10 cheat sheet: Everything you need to know

Today's Windows 10 panic.... Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do – here’s how to opt out

Today's Windows 10 panic... Windows 10 May Share Your Wi-Fi Password with Facebook

I don't use After effects enough to warrant getting into the subscription pricing, but I use it enough that I don't want to give it up. I'll have to stay put on Win 7 for now. Did you have to reinstall all your old programs or did they get brought along automatically?

Official Prize Announcement: Jason Simmons Simonds has graciously donated a Hash Inc. Siggraph jacket to be awarded to our first place finisher. I'll get a picture of it later but I recall it is quite ostentatious. You still have two weekends to get your entry pulled together and polished up. Remember, there are prizes for the top ten finishers so you don't want to sit on the sidelines and miss out!

OK, I didn't see the first post was in May. I'm still on the fence. I'm think I'm going to image my Windows 7 first and then try 10 so i can revert back easy if too much stuff doesn't work. I don't want to lose After Effects.

I meant, why did it work today and not yesterday?

So i wonder what changed.

I will probably just have people message the images to me and I will set up the exhibition page.

My suggestion would be to render with SSAO, then turn out all the lights and render the glow as a separate pass and composite the two with either "lighten" or "add". I dimly recall a similar problem with glow in my "painting with light" series and I found that compositing the glow an easy fix.

For any of you Android phone users. from NPR... Major Flaw In Android Phones Would Let Hackers In With Just A Text

They did a lousy job at that but you can't curve the "2001" image onto a Cinerama screen because the camera did not shoot a wide angle of view comparable to what a Cinerama screen presents to a viewer. The woman in pink and the red couch on the edges of the 2001 frame are probably only 20-30° from the center axis of the camera. Everything in that frame is more in front of the camera than to the sides. Nothing in that frame can be properly placed on the side area of a curved screen that would wrap around you On the other hand, the left and right edges of a Cinerama image are 70° off the center axis. To actually sit in a Cinerama movie is not seeing something that truly looks like the smilebox. What you see is a wall that curves around you. The middle of the screen does not appear shorter than the sides because the middle is just as close to you as the sides.

What I'm doing is un-distorting a wide shot. Would you agree that my A:M camera is at least taking a truly wide field of view similar to Cinerama? CinemaScope could never take in that wide an angle of view. They didn't have the lenses for it and... a truly wide angle image needs to be shown on a screen curved to the same angle to not look completely weird. CinemaScope had only a slightly curved screen. And would you agree that my Posed version at least eliminates the size distortion of the single lens image? It's not complete yet, but those are the first two steps to get to a Cinerama-like image. Here is the problem with three-camera Cinerama displayed in a flat format. Notice how the shoreline and the wavelines bend at every seam. That distortion is a problem for any straight line that is not exactly in the center like the horizon line. The wrap around Cinerama screen is an attempt to re-wrap the image around the viewer to recreate how it was wrapped around the camera. It didn't work completely, the distortion was still obvious on a Cinerama screen but somewhat less so because each third of the image was turned to face the centerpoint where you sat. Also, Cinerama movies were planned to avoid horizontal lines that would cross the seam. There is very little linear horizontal element to that Debbie Reynold sample so distortion is not obvious. Smilebox hides the bends a bit better because they are curving the interior of each third.

Here is a bit more toying with the notion of using a pose. the top is the original A:M camera render, mapped onto a rectangular grid. I think this distortion is called pincushion distortion. The bottom is the same grid smooshed in a pose to negate the pincushion effect to make objects appear about the same onscreen size no matter where they are in the field of view.

Here's a quick test of a very wide angle camera in A:M. I used a lathed circle to place the vases all equidistant from a center point where I put the camera. The distortion of the vases near the edge is obvious but also note that the radiating lines of the lathed circle appear parallel in the camera view (top). It should be possible to remap that camera render onto something that could be stretched and squeezed and curved for a smile-box view.

To do it in A:M... I would note that the three-camera approach was compromise based on off-the-shelf lenses they had at the time. OmniMax is more modern attempt at the same effect. Today an OmniMax camera (not Imax) can cover the same field of view in one image and the OmniMax projector on the OmniMax screen (basically a dome) can approximately undo the distortion that result from putting that on one flat piece of film. That distortion is what we see when we set an A:M camera to a very wide angle. Idea 1) It should be possible to take that flat A:M render and re-map it onto a suitable rectangle then, with a pose, stretch and squeeze it in the right places to undo the distortion and create the curvature. Idea 2) you can do three cameras just like cinerama and remap them onto a curved screen. Because A:M cameras can occupy the same point simultaneously there should be no mismatch between adjoining edges although there will be linear distortion at each seam. Idea 3) Instead of three cameras.... many cameras, each set to take a narrow vertical slice of the panorama. Those could be mapped back onto a panorama screen. By using many narrower cameras you would reduce the curvilinear mismatch between neighboring slices.

holly, if you have further questions, let us know. I'll note that Hypercam 2 is a free screen movie software.