robcat2075

Watch in action!

For me to be interested it would have to be a turn-key addition... you don't have to retexture or relight a scene for this other renderer. How much faster are these for an exactly equivalent render? They aren't instantaneous. Has anyone compared?

I think we can presume the CPs are placed as accurately as digital measurement will permit and the splines between them are a fair approximation of circledom. I woudl say the approximation is good enough to pass any scrutiny that would be incurred in story telling animation, which is all A:M is intended for. It is certainly superior to any polygon approximation of a circle.

An A:M patch will display only one normal to give us a clue as to how it is facing. However every point on a surface has its own unique normal that is calculated at render time to control, for example, how the light hitting it shades it.

It is an approximation. You can test that by reducing the lathe sections to three to see the roughest circle that A:M will make. Still not bad however. Of course, a true perfect circle is achievable by neither man nor machine, we are all making approximations.

When I look at these charts both of my monitors are very, very close to being on target. Here's your avatar loaded into Photoshop. I'm sure that is not intended to be completely black, but looking at the levels, all the pixels are black or nearly black and it appears black on my monitors, which are correctly adjusted by the measure of the gamma test charts and display all other images that appear on them with a normal, expected appearance. There is some combination of things trying to set gamma on your computer that are creating a viewing environment that is wildly different than what the rest of the world sees.

If my monitor settings were the problem then everything else on the web would look unnaturally dark too. But they don't, everything else looks normal. There's gotta be something wrong. Do you have Photoshop installed?

I've circled the only parts that do not appear totally black here. Is it really your intention that this shot be almost entirely black and that none of the details of the room are visible at all?

I just did a gamma adjustment on your avatar and found out that it's not a black square, there is a face there! Can you reset your monitor and graphics card to their default settings?

All I see are the volumetric cones from the lights. I can't imagine that is what you really intend. If I take that into a paint program and do a huge gamma adjustment I start to see some details in the room. Something is seriously misadjusted. Either your monitor (causing you to under light scenes) or A:M. What is the gamma setting in your A:M render panel set to?

And there was much rejoicing! Nice ducks, Rodney!

That happens if you choose Shaded or Wireframe to render. It's fixed in the upcoming v17g. Make sure you have Final rendering chosen. BTW, I was able to do a shaded render by running the 32-bit version and changing from OpenGL to Direct3D in the Options tab.

Here's an idea. Find out what the Octane people would charge to create a plugin to integrate Octane with A:M. Then bargain them down... and then do a Kickstarter to fund it, with the provision that the plugin itself is free, it doesn't add to the cost of an Octane license purchase.

Martin told me that the situation with NVidia was unworkable. If they asked a question on NVIDIA's Gelato user forum they wouldn't get an answer and if they went the official support route they had to pay some huge chunk of cash upfront to pose the question and if the answer to the question was "we don't know" the money wouldn't be refunded. Those were GPU based like A:M's shaded render is GPU based. No shadows? What good is that? Geez, A:M is faster if you turn off the shadows.

We had a brief discussion about them a while back... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...3&hl=biased

It's faster when it's faster, but not if it's not. There have been two serious runs at GPU rendering for A:M that I know of. When the first GPU rendering scheme came out ("Gelato") Martin says they tried to implement it but it was never faster than what A:M did already and NVIDIA wouldn't answer their technical questions about how to make it work better. Steffen tried again for V17 using OpenCL but said it wasn't reliable and what worked wasn't much faster. Perhaps the OpenCL software will improve in the future to make it more feasible.

looks like radioactive laboratory tube bubbles!

I'm sure having to toggle Render as Lines is a bug.

I did not know about this! http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...t=0#entry382581

Update: I just found that these two properties still exist in v17. Who knew? Hmmm... this may be big! It solves a long standing annoyance I've had with lathed objects. Below5 is a semi-top view of a lathed cone shape. If you look at the top version you'll see there is slight pattern to the shading that radiates from the center. With "Average Normals" ON and Normal Weight set to 0% it exhibits the same pattern. With "Average Normals" ON and Normal Weight set to 50% the pattern is gone. With "Average Normals" ON and Normal Weight set to 100% the pattern is back with opposite shading.

That's a new one to me! "Show Advanced Properties" is an option on your Global tab With that checked, make a Group in your model, then in its properties toggle Render as Lines ON and OFF and two new mystery properties appear at the bottom of "Surface": Average Normals and Normal Weight. You may need to refresh the display to make any change to the settings show. It seems to be somewhat like the "porcelain" material they added later. The appearance is not dramatically different but can be noticeable in some cases.

I have to concur with Nancy and Markw... there is something seriously overdark about your render. On the spaceship interior... is this a comedy or a creepy thing? If it's a comedy i'd go for lots of blinking lights plus thins we don't' normally expect in an alien ship like fire extinguishers mounted on the wall.

I'll also note that you should be weighting to actual geometry bones. I don't know if the bones in your screen grab are geometry bones or control bones.

This would be my first gambit. After i did this and tested it I woudl make changes but this woudl be my first guess is i were trying to make a smooth bend. In the diagram the fraction refer to percentage weights between the "pelvis" (I'm guessing what that bone is called in the 2008 rig) and the leg bone. However, I would seriously consider putting the origin of the leg bones higher in the hips (green X). That woudl be more anatomically appropriate and and easier to weight convincingly. (A different set of weights than I have marked here for the existing placement).

That's a pretty convincing fur look. If there were some way to roughen up the silhouette edges it would be a complete illusion.