robcat2075

Welcome back to A:M! It's difficult to document something with so many possibilities, but you have found the place to ask questions.

Yes! In the Chor turn on "Show more than Drivers" for that model That will expose the "Decals" folder and you can navigate down to the Percent property which can be keyed over time. Welcome to A:M!

It's helpful that you posted the whole screen. I proposed that a siren sound whenever that thing is off but instead we have the red border.

It looks like you have the A (Animate) button off The red border is the warning that you have the A button off.

I'll note that I have explicitly asked Steffen about the possibility of an iPad version of A:M in the past. I thought it would be a potentially useful way to extend A:M's visibility He told me there is just too much that doesn't exist in iOS for that to be a simple matter of recompiling the current A:M code or even after adding a modest amount of effort. Also I don't believe they allow an app on Apple iPad unless it is fully compliant with their interface guidelines. As noted above, that redesign would be an impossibly time-consuming task. Your idea is not a bad one, but it is an expensive one to implement.

Welcome to A:M, Laurence! The most common way is to set a "specular" color of white in your surface properties and to set the specular size and specular intensity to a value greater than zero. Experiment with different values for different looks. Note that in your sample pic, they have used an off-white object so the white specular highlight would be more visible. In addition, your light needs to have Specular ON in its properties for the above effect to be visible. In A:M's default Chor only one light has Specular set ON. If you want a very sharp specular spot you can optionally set "Specular Render Shader" to "Glossy." For that setting to work, you will also need "Plugin Shaders" set to ON in your rendering settings. The floor in that image has some reflection going on to appear glossy also. That is also a surface property you can set for your floor object. If you are making letters rather than spheres you will want them to have a curved bevel on their edges (an option in the Font Wizard) so there is always some part of them that will catch that specular glint.

It would be worth $10 (if I had an iPad, but I don't and won't) but there is no way it can be produced at that price point or even at $30. If you can line up 5000 customers at $10 that still wouldn't be enough to pay for the cost of developing A:M for a new OS. If you can line up a programmer who will do it for free, that would be a different story.

As far as I know there is no bargain Android tablet with a real pen, it's all finger control. The A:M interface has many small buttons and menus that would have to be sized up to be practical for fat fingers but that would lose you quite a bit screen space. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it would be quite a bit of work and revision to make it satisfactory.

Youtube will work on any tablet, as far as I know. If someone has animation to share they can put it out there for everyone to see even if they are not A:M users. The set of A:M buyers is just not big enough to fund a venture into a new OS.

I supposed six square-framed cameras in A:M might do it. I haven't read any of the material to know how they expect it to be stiched together into one seamless view.

There would not be enough buyers at $10 or even $30 to pay for the development cost on a new OS. Personally I would not buy a "lite" A:M. If I wanted to have A:M in a portable form factor I would buy a Windows tablet for it and run the real thing. Not the cheapest possible Windows tablet with the least power, I'd get one that has a real Intel CPU and adequate RAM. Remember that A:M is not usable with touch gesture control, you will need something that can use a mouse or at least a true pen. A used MS Surface 1 or 2 would fill that need. Those can be had cheap now. What ever advantage an Android tablet has in some hardware aspect would be outweighed for me by the fact that I could run full A:M rather than a stripped down A:M on a Windows tablet.

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.