robcat2075

Hey Gerry, If you ever get to use A:M on the legal stuff I'd love to see it. I suppose it's all super secret though...

I used to think I was a sci-fi buff because i liked "2001" when I was 8 but later I met actual sci-fi buffs and realized i wasn't even close to being a sci-fi buff.

OK, I'll re-introduce myself... I got started with 3D but not with a Hash program. I recall reading about Hash's "Animation:Apprentice" around that time but didn't bite. In 1995 I got a job in a corporate media department that was all Mac and saw an ad for this program called "Animation:Master" that was optimized for character animation. That sounded cool so I convinced them to buy it. That was V3. It had oddities in the workflow. For example, to rig your model you had to save out each piece of the mesh separately and re-import it to give it a bone. I didn't get too far with that. V5 was dramatically better, not too far from the workflow we know today. You can see examples of A:M work done for that job with v4-v8 in the 90's I drifted away from A:M as the job needed more Flash and almost no 3D. Years later, about 2003, I saw a book about CG character animation called "Stop Staring" and after a few pages thought "Hey, I bet A:M could do this" I loaded my old V8 and quickly found I remembered nothing of how it worked. Wanting to be current I upgraded to v10.5 and started relearning it. I've never actually read that "Stop Staring" book but somehow it was what got me back to A:M and I've been having fun and drama with A:M ever since. I used A:M for my assignments at animation school; later I did about 2 and a half minutes of animation for TWO and a little bit for SO and have been part of a few other A:M-based projects. Today, I try to be Mr. Answer on the forum and hope people find that helpful.

How about "Checkout"?

Mine is uploaded in a zip, now, btw.

It looks like a cross wind would be bad for that car, but i shall look forward to see it materialize.

If you don't have QuickTime Pro already, try loading the AVI into the regular QuickTime Player just to see if it can play it. If it can't then it's in some weird codec and Quicktime Pro won't be able to read it either. But QuickTime Pro is generally the usual suspect for converting video to image sequences.

I would think it's entirely possible to reuse a window if needed. There are also many possibilities in the open spaces in front and on top of the buildings.

yup, I voted

OK, I've got my test chor keyframed. Now what? Who do i give it to and what do i give them? Use what you can see. Don't use what you can't see. It's like in the movie, it's not about what Jimmy Stewart never sees because it's out of his view, it's about what he can see from his vantage point.

First... do you need to keep sound with it or do you just need the video?

I think a "Matte Object" woudl fulfill the function that Elm is looking for. A:M doesn't have matte Objects yet but perhaps if we specified it well in an AMReport Steffen could add it. Let me guess what you are doing... you have a 3D model that you want to put in real footage and it has reflective surfaces that need to reflect that real environment, which of course it can't because it isn't really there so you simulate that by putting a dome around it with a map of the real environment on it, but with the dome there in the background the object isn't cut out with an alpha channel anymore. Is that what you are trying to do?

All good goals!

Can someone send me the location to download the set? The camera is the observer. He's stuck in his room and he can't move.

I don't think there's an alpha channel for sound. Or is there? Sound card claims may have even more marketing wizardry at work than graphics card claims. I see Audacity offers 16-bit integer, 24-bit integer and 32-bit Float as options.

I dont' know about the SSD question. At the very least I suspect you'll need to transfer an image of your old hard drive to the SSD rather than just reinstall Windows and all your apps. But i don't know. an email to Jason at hash would be in order. "32-bit color" can mean several things... -24 bits are stored in 32-bit holes because it's faster to move 32 bits than just 24 bits. This is typically what graphics cards mean by 32 bit color. -24-bits of color + 8 bits of alpha channel. This may be relevant for semi transparent displays like Aero. I rarely hear of apps like Photoshop talk of "32-bit color" even though they have used 24+8 for their files for decades. Photoshop typically refers to itself as 8 bits per color or 16 bits per color (which would be 48 bit color. 64 bits if you added an alpha channel but I've never seen anyone say "64-bit color") -Some way to hold more than 8 bits per color, like your graphics card's 30 bit color. But then where's the alpha channel? Unfortunately there isn't a standard way to talk about these things. A:M can render to 24+8 in its targa and PNG formats and with OpenEXR (a floating point format) can render to a nearly unlimited dynamic range Only some very special displays can show more than 8 bits per color and most flat-panel displays are faking it to display even that.

The only thing you're giving up in this mode is the semi transparent windows of "Aero". There's only 24 bits of color in the desktop even with Windows 7 with Aero on. No, A:M doesn't cause 16 bit. Your computer still displays 24 bit color. All your other graphics programs handle and display their image color with their full range as does A:M even while A:M is running. It's only the styling of the Aero interface that is turned off. In Tools>Options>Global you can check "Disable Aero on startup" but not everything in A:M will redraw correctly if you do. Better to leave it unchecked. I'm in basic mode all the time and still have full 24-bit color available in all apps, even in the desktop. This is the color picker showing full 0-255 available for each color:

there is no log that i know of for that rendering time info

Ping-pong may have changed substantially recently... From the always-reliable Wikipedia: When I was a boy we used 38mm balls that went by too fast to hit... and we liked it!

The drop back to basic colors solves some screen redraw problems in Windows 7 (and Vista I think). Screen redraws during cloth simulations is one I can think of. Learn to love the basic colors!

I'm still waiting for someone to send me the "rules" for the test segments. what happened to the test?

chart? + Edit: I found the link in your page. A baseball more bouncy than a ping-pong ball? I think he's off on that one. But I don't have either one to test.

Hey, David, I think those all look good. It was fun to watch each ball individually. The squetch versions were tastefully restrained. Personally, I'm doubtful that a ping-pong ball is the least bouncy of all. Maybe your needs some air.

Very fine looking!

Disclaimer: my offer to animate should not be taken as an incitement to quit your day job. Not just yet.