robcat2075

Screenwriter William Goldman famously said "No one knows anything."

I'll also note that if it is tedious to CTRL-select all the relevant bones in a character at the start of every animation, you can make a draggable pose for that character that forces those keyframes. Do that once and drag it onto the character every time you start a new animation. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...mp;hl=draggable

Welcome to the A:M forum, Mr. Bump!

It's not more cumbersome with more bones because you're going to make a first keyframe anyway on what ever number of bones you have ... whether you can set a default before hand or not. It's something you are going to do anyway so it's not extra work that is created by this workflow for setting the default interpolation. You have to touch each of those bones eventually or you couldn't animate them. This workflow isn't forcing you to work with any bone that you wren't going to work with anyway. CTRL-select the bones at the start, Force keyframe, set the Interpolation. It's done. Even if I could set the default beforehand, I'm still going to do those first two steps... CTRL-select the bones at the start, Force keyframe, ...because I need to establish the channels for those bones so the Force Keyframe button will be able to work on them later. The normal operation of the Force Keyframe button is to only create keyframes in channels that already exist. The difference is only whether we set the interpolation before we make the first keyframe or after. It's true you need to do this procedure for every chor you start but it only takes a minute to do and we don't start new chors ever minute. With this system you are not required to have the default the same across the whole scene. i can make my character default to "Hold" but a spinning top in the scene can default to "spline" if that is the best way for me to do my scene. This system also lets me have different defaults working in different chors and they won't be overridden by a global setting I might change tomorrow or that someone I send a chor to might have set differently. Also, i can progressively change the default on specific curves as I refine the animation. I don't have to change the whole character from Hold to Spline all together. This A:M system is a powerful implementation that lets you have any defaults you want across any scope of the scene, even different defaults for different bones within the same scene. It IS more involved than a single global setting, but just slightly more involved at the start and has the potential to save work time later.

Can you show this happening? I'm not sure what you mean.

I'm pasting this again for emphasis... After you have done that one thing, it's automatic. You don't need to keep selecting keys and changing their interpolation. All the new keys you make will get the new interpolation automatically.

That's a real good effort on the head. Those legs look like they have way more spline rings that you would need for those shapes and more than you would want when you set out to rig them.

Can you tell us a bit about what you are doing to overclock it? Hardware? Software?

that's a good monster cloud!

You're overclocking that, right?

This is an interesting technique. The camera is "following" Daffy as he runs to the left but the background isn't just moved to the right, it's slanted to the right also. (from "Drip-Along Daffy")

My own thumbnail spec for overclocking is that it has to be fairly plug and play in implementation. The intel quad core Q6600 I have now can be overclocked from 2.4 to 3.0 GHz with just an app from the desktop and still uses standard fan. That's easy enough for almost any user to do. Do i need to bolt on a different cooler? OK I can manage that, but maybe not most users. Still, I'd consider it but needing to do a lot of experimentation with voltages and other parameters... then it's getting a little bit less likely for me because I don't really know how all that interacts

I'll also note that 3Dpaint still works great with A:M. It can load and paint on any saved model, you don't have to use the plugin to switch directly from A:M to 3DPaint.

I think what you want is an edge gradient effect, a bit like the "fake rimlight" material we sometimes use. Delete all your other texturing and try dropping this on the model Semi_Xray.mat

I've only used baked surface to export models to p3d which also requires square bitmaps. I found scaling the map in Photoshop to square worked fine.

Tore, watch this. This is easy to set up. i can't imagine that it is really a deal-breaker to set the interpolation default like this when you begin animating... SettingDefaultInterp.mov

Both of those CPUs have some overclocking potential. I don't know how much one might surpass the other with that.

Here's the way I see it... I can already map and texture any A:M shape I want. Or at least i thought i could. What does this unwrap program do that i can't get done now with A:M? Post me an example of something that won't work in A:M. I'm not being sarcastic or dismissive, I want to see what it is that I'm not seeing. Now, looking at this with serious intent... what would it cost to entice a programmer who is either familiar with that code and would do the work to familiarize himself with coding for A:M... OR... is familiar with coding for A:M and is willing to do the work to familiarize himself with that unwrap code? What would it cost to hire someone who could get this task done?

She carries it well.

Looking more closely at this chart and comparing the single core performance of the i7-3770K to the FX-8150 (chart doesn't include an FX-8350)... (Cinebench tests a CPU's ability to render an image in the 3D program C4D, probably about as similar to A:M rendering as a common benchmark will be) For our single-core Netrender purposes the i7-3770K ($300) looks to be quite a deal compared to the i7-3960X ($1000). We can regard these numbers as a comparison of frames rendered per unit of time. If the FX-8150 core can output .97 frames per minute then we could expect the i7-3770K core to output 1.66 per minute of the same scene. I could extrapolate the FX-8350 score to possibly be 1.07 based simply on the increase in clock speed. 8 AMD cores x 1.07 = a NetRender total of 8.56 (frames per unit of time) 4 intel cores x 1.66 = a Netrender total of 6.64 turning on hyperthreading in an intel CPU gets about a 25% increase in throughput for 8 logical cores over just four physical cores based on one forum member's benchmark results. 4 intel cores x 1.66 x 1.25 = a Netrender total of 8.3 So it's getting close to a draw between the Intel box and the AMD box However, if I were building a computer for me to work on (model, animate, test render) with A:M, I would go with the intel CPU since it would be about 50% faster for the single A:M process.

Good thinking... inside the box!

There's always going to be something new in the future, we hope, but what about now? What if we need to make a box NOW? Here's my initial try Intel: i7-3770K four/eight core CPU + CPU fan + ASRock Z77 Pro3 Motherboard combo $390 16GB DDR3 RAM $100 ATX Case w/ 500watt PS $60 Video included on MB $0 500GB HDD $30 Windows 8 OEM $100 total: $680 AMD: FX 8350 8 core CPU + CPU Fan + ASRock 970 Extreme4 Motherboard combo $319 16GB DDR3 RAM $100 ATX Case w/ 500watt PS $60 Basic video card $50 500GB HDD $30 Windows 8 OEM $100 total: $659 In both cases I'm presuming a DVD drive, mouse, keyboard and monitor will be borrowed from another computer long enough to install the OS and other software. i figure the rendering throughput would be similar between the two boxes because four intel cores can do about what six AMD cores can do. If hyper threading (8 logical cores) were used with the intel CPU that would probably bring it up to what 8 AMD cores do. The intel CPU has the advantage of being about 70 watts while the AMD is 125 watts Both these motherboards have room for an additional 16Gb RAM beyond what is spec'd above.

You can simplify your angle numbers by changing the rotation "driver" to Euler instead of the default Quaternion. Quat is the default in A:M because it avoids gimble lock in complicated rotations but for simple one-axis moves Euler numbers will be easier for you to understand. To change: Select the bone, Open the properties window, Object Properties>Transform>Rotate on Rotate and choose Convert Driver To>Euler Here is a bone being rotated on one axis from 0 to 45 to 90 to 120 degrees The three-number groups are, from left to right... interpolation of the curve through that CP. 1="default" (one of the below previously set as default. "Spline" is the default default.) 3=hold 5=linear 7=spline 9=zero slope Time. I believe this counts 30ths of a second. Any other FPS setting, such as 24 fps, will create fractional values. Angle in degrees 1=

Is there an open source version of this algorithm out there? One that doesn't require A:M to become open source itself, preferably.

About every year we speculate on the most powerful renderbox one could make for the money. One thing I find hard in scoping this out is that it's difficult to find up to date benchmarks of CPUs that test single core performance. That would be useful for judging Netrender usefulness since each Netrender node is a single-threaded process. At the consumer level it seems like the best AMD cores take about 50% longer to do something than the best Intel cores. Hard to find comparisons of server-lever CPUs like Xeon and Opterons that can work on multi-CPU motherboards. Anyone want to spec out a box for 2013? Lets say under $1000 for a box (or boxes) that can run Netrender nodes and be networked with your regular A:M computer. Overclocking is fair if that is easy for the user to do.