robcat2075

What would this "lite A:M" be worth to you? In dollars.

Geez, it seems like just yesterday I was installing Windows 95

You do need to tell us more about your trip to Iraq, Rodney.

I once chatted with Ken Baer, former Hash programmer, the one in charge of the Mac version and now employed elsewhere as a MacOS programmer, about the feasibility of recoding A:M for a new OS environment. The PC version of A:M absolutely depends on numerous calls to code that is built-in to Windows and the Mac version depends on custom code Hash wrote over years that covers the code that is lacking from MacOS. All of that would have to be recreated again to work on Android. If you absolutely need A:M on a tablet, real Windows tablets are getting very powerful and very cheap.

Here it is... Painting With Light It Can't Be Done

I've been to maybe two 360º movies. One was a 15 minute promotion for Mercedes that was set up and exhibited at the State Fair about 20 years ago. The audience stood (no seats) in the middle of the room encircled by screens. It had a narrative story of sorts and starred the comedian Kevin Nealon. Oddly, this film does not appear on his IMDb profile. Aha... here's a press release on it... Mercedes-Benz Brings Its Star To New York City For The First Time Auto Show is Only Area Stop For Mercedes-Benz Circle Scope™ Theater

I see a lot of blue triangles that should not be there. Am I the only one who sees those? Here's what I know... -you shot your original stop-mo footage with a camera on a solid colored background. -It's impossible to light the colored background so that the camera records every singel pixel of it as the exact same RGB value -that is why a simple cookie-cutter transparency in A:M won't get the desired result. Cookie cutter can only knock out a single RGB value. -To create a transparency from that colored background some sort of compositing software will be needed.

If you send me the PRJ and the first four or so frames i can look at the key color problem, if it's still a problem.

I'm still not sure at what step you are creating an alpha channel or why IF... using a key color in a cookie cutter scenario worked. Did that work? That sounds like mission accomplished right there.

I fyou scroll through the timeline manually does that frame 260 work right or not?

What are you doing the compositing in? A:M?

That's a very convincing-looking result! Are we sure that the numbered frames you have stored do not do that? Does your original frame 260 have that wrong image in it, by any chance? Can you edit out that glitch? I'd have to know more to know more.

If you can post a represenative frame i might be able to experiment with extracting a matte out of it.

Have you tried acting this out to a camera and watching that for reference? That would probably tell you a lot about the timing and size of motions. The initial gesture with the wand toward the book i find confusing because It's not clear which of the strokes is the magic one. There is a great Keith Lango tut on "snap"... gesturing with an arm... that would serve you well on her left-hand gesture with the open palm. Right now you have just the hand rotating on the end of the arm but it can be made much more effective if the whole arm contributed to the motion.

If you have imported the polygon as an actual A:M model you can go into bones mode and move the model bone origin to make the pivot anywhere. If you know the coordinates of the pivot in the polygon program you could write those down and plug them into the model bone's properties in A:M Props have a similar model bone property but it appears not to be editable. Perhaps there is a work-around in constraining them to another bone that woudl serv as your pivot.

If anything comes of that be sure to show us the quilt!

Can you show us the vector version you got out of this?

As a side note... One can do a lot of relighting "in post" by first rendering to OpenEXL format with lights to separate buffers. That may be similar to what you are wanting to do here.

The diagonal artifact is weird. I don't recall that.

He should have a mic!

Super work, Mark!

Hooray!

If I were going to do that over, I would not use the hooks, I'd continue the splines all the way around. I was being lazy.

Now with more rectangular specular reflections... Heart08.prj

I guess A:M does have some "expert mode" circumstances, like "show advanced properties" which is not on by default.