robcat2075

If your image can tile successfully, you can select the mesh>>Add Image and a copy will be applied to each patch. If the image is not oriented correctly on any patch you can select the patch(es)>>Rotate Images until they are oriented correctly.

Here's an introductory video with no sense of humor, but may be helpful none-the-less... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=358113

Also... are those decals applied with a plugin like "bitmap Plus"? Make sure "Plugin Shaders" is ON.

Crazy idea that makes no sense... ...render a frame in Shaded mode and make sure "show decals" is on, then render a frame in "Final" and see if the decals come back.

Perhaps someone could post a screen capture of the ideal settings?

Are those palm branches decals also?

Could you show that from the PWS rather than the Timeline?

Put it in the mascot contest! I count about 100 topics since then. That sounds like a lot to me!

Maybe the most often asked-for, most long-awaited feature that will be in V17 is the visible warning that appears when you have the A key off. D'oh!

Good looking mist! I hope you've assembled a beauty shot of some of those characters and entered it in the mascot contest!

After a bit of investigation, I think this is the more likely of the two strategies. It's not hard to get a series of bones to follow each other on a path, but controlling their "roll" is a bit of a problem.

It can be done. Model your film as a strip of patches with one patch per "Frame". Use transparency decals to create the sprocket holes. Add bones in a long row along the length of the strip with one bone for each crossing spline. No bone should be a child of any other bone. Path Constrain each bone to your path and offset their "ease" setting so they follow one another. that's a bare explanation of the concept. An alternative strategy would be to model the entire film path as a long strip of film and use an animated decal or material to progressively reveal more of the strip so it appears to be moving.

Just to try I made a grid with 100K patches and tried stitching a new CP into it. A:M appeared locked but my Resource Monitor showed A:M using variously from 25% to 95% of my 4-core CPU and it came back after about 10 minutes. It does try harder now.

Hey, Al, it would be great to have you back poking around here! Jody's answer above sounds about right. There's going to be a wall somewhere, and it's best to use the alternate strategies to avoid hitting it. Ostensibly, A:M can now use extra cores in a CPU to help plow through the work and that may be what has raised the wall somewhat. Yes. Your one-year subscription lets you run anything that comes out during that year. It's faster! Check out these speed improvements. NetRender is included now and works on multi-core CPUs. Read the back of this brochure for some other recent major additions Martin's been very quiet for quite a while. I think he's taking a break from software for now. Your a bigshot now!

It's like a movie! Looks wonderful!

Deadline isn't until the end of March. And the mascot doesn't have to be a "character" so here ought to be some good entries from what has been seen on the forum over the last year.

He certainly looks enthusiastic about his new teeth.

Welcome to the A:M forum! Looks sharp! (Although i know nothing of rifles)

Sometimes just letting the sun rise on a new day is enough to fix things.

It works here. Try loading this render preset when you go to render. FlamePreset.pre

I'm not sure about the password thing, it oughta work if it worked before. But you dont' need the chat to use A:M, if you have questions ask 'em here on the forum.

Year ago I was able to run A:M twice on dual CPU machine with Windows NT which was even more ancient, so it can be done. You can avoid freezing the computer by launching the "Windows Task Manager" (CTRL-ALT-DELETE) and setting the "priority" of one of the instances of A:M to "below normal" so that when the OS absolutely needs to do something it can grad enough time to do it. If you are just returning to A:M after a long time away I'll also suggest you watch this first installment in a not-yet-done A:M tutorial series aimed at new users. Although it was done in V16, the interface has changed very little since V11 and almost all of the principles presented will be good for what you have.

First... Welcome back to A:M! Second... I strongly suggest you get up to our current v16 which comes with NetRender to more easily use your dual core CPU and of course, has numerous new features and stability fixes. However... with V11.1 ( and anything before v16) you can run A:M twice and set one to render the odd frames in your sequence and set the other to render the even frames in your sequence to use both CPUs to their max. Of course this requires rendering to an image sequence such as targas rather than directly to Quicktime at first. Windows 7 is very good at allowing you to max out the CPUs with multiple apps running without making the Windows interface slow down. Previous versions of Windows had trouble with that.

try this experiment... Hold your arm in front of you and rotate your hand to face your palm up and down. You can imagine the motion as either your hand turning on the end of your forearm bone or as your forearm bone turning and your hand going along for the ride. The second is closer to the truth, your hand moves because it is at the end of your twisting forearm. Now roll up your sleeve and watch the skin on your forearm as you turn the hand back and forth some more. The skin at your wrist turns almost as much as your hand does but the skin at your elbow hardly turns at all. And the skin in the middle of your forearm turns about half as much as the skin at the wrist does. In the TSM2 scheme (after rigger has been run and added all it's constraints) the first bone of the forearm turns not at all if you rotate the hand but the second bone follows it completely. This makes it easy to simulate that progressively twisting skin action by CP weighting or fan-boning between those two basic bones. For example (warning: this is an extremely simplified example) if your model's forearm had 5 spline rings... the one nearest the elbow would be weighted completely to the first of the two bones, the second spline ring would be 75% to the first bone and 25% to the second bone the middle ring would be weighted 50-50 the fourth ring woudl be weighted 25% to the first bone and 75% to the second bone the last ring (at the wrist) would be weighted 100% to the second bone By spreading the turn along the entire forearm it avoids an obviously fake looking twist concentrated at either the wrist or the elbow. The upper arm has a similar twist spread out over its length as do both the upper and lower legs although not as obviously as the arm action. There must never be a bend between the first and second bones of a limb segment, they're purpose is to be exactly in line with each other. Scale, move and turn them as a unit by using the standard manipulators on the first bone only and never adjusting the second bone separately. Personally i find this weighting or fanbone adding to be easiest BEFORE I have run Rigger, when the basic geometry bones are still visible and no non-geometry bones have been added yet. I open up the model in an Action and use the rotate manipulator to turn bones one at at time as needed to see how my weighting is doing. You can call up the CP weight editor while you are in an action and changes you make will be instituted in the model.