robcat2075

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.

Looks good! I hear "cloud computing" is what all the hipsters are into now.

Thanks! Nice to see you peaking back in here, Dale!

I don't have good internet now. I'll be back to help on Monday. (But those bones are needed)

Separate sphere is usually easiest. Kee Kat is example of oval eyes from spheres.

Might this have anything to do with a buffer being "normalized"... being stretched so that its high and low are as close to 0 and 1.0 as possible? Not that that is necessarily right for a Normal buffer...?

Interesting. I don't suppose that stuff can be baked in to separate models...?

Curious. I think we need Yves for this. Someone say his name three times out loud.

A bit more experimenting with cloth. Cape000.mov I thought the cape would be easy since I had the pants working, but it wasn't.

I remember Martin once saying dynamics had to be simulated from the front view, but I couldn't find that it made things any better when i tried it. If any one can find more on that I'd be eager to read more about it.

In the Choreography properties, under plugins, there is a Simcloth option to turn "Use Chor Length" OFF and set a start and end time.

That looks real good Gerry. In my test case the birdseye view was still a perspective view so I'm not sure that perspective vs. non is the issue but perhaps it also is. In further testing I'm beginning to think that different birdseye views may have more or less success but that's hard to confirm since birdseye views can't be saved and reused. I found this because I had an old project aht worked in v16 and was going to add some more cloth, but now in v17. But that didnt' work, and even just the original cloth wouldn't work so figured it must be a new v17 bug and went back to v16. But it didn't work in v16 now, even though it had worked before! Eventually I just happened to run a simulation after I had turned out of the Camera view and that whizzed right through. A-ha! However, I still haven't got my new added cloth to work yet.

That's lovely and beautiful! Well Done! My only suggestion would be to have some way that the text was not readable at the very outset but I'm not sure how that would be done.

I've found a case where running a simCloth simulation while looking in the Camera view is a problem. A simulation that would run in a reasonable time if I started it from a Birdseye view would get bogged down with many tens of thousands of "collisions" (see lower left corner of the screen shot) to try to solve if I started it in the camera view. My experience is that anything more than a few hundred collisions is a sign of a simulation going bad and 30,000 is pretty much crazy stuff that has gone off the rails and will never finish properly. For simple situations like "Wave the Flag" I don't think Camera View will be an issue, and if you have created some genuinely unsolvable circumstance in your model or animation, BirdsEye view wont' save you, but just be aware that Camera view may not be ideal while running simulations.

PurpleGirl, I gave the "I've got a secret" tutorial a try and since i haven't done it before with this version of A:M I got the same message as you, but then it spun for a bit and continued on, apparently having created the new index.i file that Steffen referes to above. Two ideas to try: - get out a simple text editor and create an empty file and save it as "index.i" to the location that A:M was looking in (should be the same dir that A:M is installed in). Then try the tutorial from the beginning again or... -unzip this index.zip file and put the index.i file that my A:M just created to dir your A:M is in, then see if that works... index.zip (I had to put it in a zip because ".i" isn't an uploadable file type.) Try those and let us know what happens.

Thank you! I enjoy interacting with everyone on the A:M forum and hope we can continue for a long time to come. (I should note that I'm not actually 29 like it says at the bottom of the forum, it just looks better than 52, and I think I'll be 29 again next year)

I have been caught by that dual functionality occasionally. The other one that I a reminded of is the fact that the 7 8 9 0 keys can either set a view mode or set a channel interpolation mode depending on what window you are in.

The eyelids do help defuse that stunned look.

If you select a Group or other element in the PWS then use the cursor keys you will change your selection to whatever is listed above or below in the PWS. Re-click on the selected thing in the model window after you select it from the PWS, then the cursor keys will nudge in the model window.

As far as I know, the 64-bit version should install to... C:\Program Files\Hash Inc\V16.0 and the 32-bit version should install to... C:\Program Files (x86)\Hash Inc\V16.0 It's possible that the installer could get confused and that's why I recommended examining the address that the installer says it is planning to install to before you let it go ahead and install, but i also dont' know if it really matters that they be in proper folders since it is technically possible to install a program to any folder anywhere. I like to have them in their different Program Files folders so that the different 32 and 64 bit versions of the plugins are not getting put in to the same folders, but i dont' know if that really matters either. But in the case of TSM2 it does need to be put in the plugins folder the 32-bit version of A:M is looking at for plugins, and that's easy to find if my 32-bit A:M is in the 32-bit "Program Files (x86) folder"

Yes. Master.exe is the 32-bit one. In my Start menu they appear like this so it's easy to pick the one I want...

Here's a longer render, from 32-bit A:M... Swarm000.mov

I noticed it will also crash if I scrub the timeline, so I've AMReported both those problems.