robcat2075

Was there someone you knew in the damage or just helping out?

Is he climbing out of a crater that his landing made? I don't think that would look like rock it woudl be morlike mounds of dirt and not so veritcal. Dirt will be harder to do than rock, however. I agree with the camerawork comments above.

Update: forget the new blank model part, you can use a Null that you add to the chor with >New>Null. No need to add a model.

It seems a Layer can only have its model bone. If I understand what you want to do, make another model (it can be empty, all you need is its model bone), add that to the chor and position it to where you wanted the new Layer bone to be and then Translate To and Orient Like constrain the Layer to the bone. Typically I would not use a Layer if I needed to "rig" an image like that, I'd make a model with a flat patch and apply an image as a decal and give it bones, but if you've got a Layer, you can constrain it to other bones directly in the chor to do what you want.

Here is a thread that covered some of the details of creating proper alpha channels. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...++flaming++pear and another with explicit steps... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...++flaming++pear Note the mention of the Flaming Pear solidify plugins.

What age is v6 from? What comes before Stone Age?

One argument against the AMD architecture I'm finding is that Windows isn't optimized to distribute threads for it. If there are four threads to put on the CPU, Windows will assign them to an Intel CPU's real cores before it resorts to virtual cores for best performance However, on an AMD FX CPU which shares one FPU between every two cores, Windows may distribute those four threads to the first four logical cores (only two FPUs for four threads) instead of distributing them to every other logical core (four FPUs for four thread).

Possibly we have some difference in our "color manegement". My Photoshop is ostensibly set to not monkey with color when loading images ("Color management OFF") but various version of PS seem to address this control a bit differently. However, I think an alpha channel will serve you better than color keying in this venture.

Here's my result with 0,255,1. Note that there will still be problems with jpg compression around the edges. PNG or targa will get a cleaner result.

When I load your image in Photoshop i find that the RGB values for the green color are 0, 255, 1 Perhaps you have set 0,255,0 as the key color.

-you have the exact same color chosen and -"Cookie Cutter" chosen as "Type" ?

I'll note that transparency on a "layer" in Photoshop will not equate to transparency in an alpha channel in a TGA. However transparency in a Photoshop layer will equate to a transparency in a PNG that A:M can interpret correctly.

Congratulations David!

If the file has an alpha channel Cookie Cut will use the alpha channel to make the transparency. If it doesn't have an alpha channel there is an option in the properties somewhere to choose a specific RGB "background color" that will be interpreted as transparent. While alpha channel transparency allows some anti-aliasing of edges, background color is an all-or-nothing thing.

Since A:M itself makes only sparing use of multi threading, the extra four virtual threads won't get you much that the four real threads don't already. (I'm talking about a quad core CPU) However in NetRender, based on other user's benchmark results, 4 real cores+ 4 virtual cores will get you about 25% better throughput than just 4 real cores. Of course you'd have to buy a license for four extra Netrender nodes to have eight running simultaneously and you' need sufficiant RAM for those extra Nodes to operate. All things considered, the hyperthreading is probably only a modest advantage for A:M, and only when using NetRender.

I think the $600 box would be a decent A:M workstation (more than what i work on now) if you changed out their 2-core CPU for a four-core CPU and upped the RAM to 8 GB at least. Of course it wouldn't be $600 anymore I like their idea of making a cheap Hometheater PC. Something with more CPU oomph and RAM could make a plausible NetRender box when you weren't watching movies on it.

Article with suggestions for best PC build (not necessarily render box build) at $300, $600 and $1200... http://lifehacker.com/5840963/the-best-pcs...or-600-and-1200

I as referring to a general problem... a single patch thickness surface will only cast a z-buffered shadow on the ground plane if the ground plane is set to "Cast Shadows" ON. In v17 and later the ground plane has that set ON by default but it was OFF in previous versions.

That's a very odd reveal. That could be some sort of space warp/uncloaking effect.

I think that sounds like a realistic plan. Two minutes is a lot but it's do-able.

It stands on the shoulders of giants.

I'll note that from the Tools>Customize>Commands tab you can drag any button to any toolbar for convenient placement.

Happy birthday, and may you continue to create fabulous A:M works!

There's a thread or a tut around here by Jason1025 where he talks through doing this image based lighting stuff. A ground plane will need to be set to Cast Shadows ON in its options for a single patch to properly cast a shadow on it. That might be the problem. The razor sharp shadow probably don't look right. You can try the z-buffered lights again. Or, ray-traced lights have a "width" and when you use that with multi-pass they will jitter to create authentic fuzzy shadows that get fuzzier as they get farther from the object. To me it doesn't look like there's any AO happening. We should see some darkening around the base of things or under the helicopter. Perhaps some crucial setting is not right on that.

The 4096 was added for 3D printing purposes, probably overkill for most other occassions. The OBJ for that test object is 31,194KB vs. 6KB for the A:M spline original. You're going to need a bigger hard drive if you want to do much of that stuff. Probably small. It's an either/or situation. We can presume the center of a red clump is farther out than the edge but we don't know how much. For painting purposes it ought to be well within the limits of what the eye would ever notice.