robcat2075

Now I'm hungry for waffles.

Good to see someone out there teaching it.

Maybe you are already doing this, but some repetitive items like individual cells could be models themselves, and you could assemble many of them in the chor to make the whole set, then you could turn their "Active" property ON when they are needed on camera and OFF when they are not visible to possibly save on render time. You can also turn their realtime visibility ON and OFF in the chor to speed up your general working. Whether this is useful depends on how much you need to be working in the whole set. Sorry you lost your previous work! That new external drive is for backups, I hope?

? a material effector

You made me dizzy! that's pretty fab, matt!

Reminds me of the aerobicise that used to run on tv in the 80's

Thanks, Jason! I think we can prune those down a bit for brevity and style but those are a good starting point. The "Tool tips" window I'll cover in my first quick start Lesson 0 so you won't need to pursue that one. I'm not going to use either the Library or Community window in any of the regular tuts so we will want coverage of those for people who are curious. Here's the question a tut on "Library" needs to answer... Why do I want to use this when i can already load files directly from my hard drive? And... If do decide to use it, how do i add things to it? I view the Library as a vestigial feature from days when new users probably didn't know how to navigate to a file on their hard drive and it had to be made visible in the interface for them. Is there a still killer use for Library today? What is it? The items in the Options window I'm going to try to cover as they become relevant in flow of the regular tutorials so let's wait on that until we know what doesn't get caught that way. However... i was thinking you were going to cover this material that I outlined earlier regarding customizing the interface.

If your ground plane has more than just the bare minimum of splines, the magnet tool could be used to evenly raise a portion.

Specularity adds almost no render time, it's a fast trick rather than a realistic calculation.

Very cool! For specularity...Of course have specularity onthe surface ON and set to a size greater than 0, but also aim a light at it that has Specularity ON. You can have a Specular-only light that that doesn't light anything but the highlight.

I didn't know Win7 could have a boot animation. How does that work?

Arthur is a creator of several import/export plugins in A:M. Happy Birthday Arthur!

I like that gif!

I would inquire with jason@hash.com for an official answer on that. The physical "CD version" could indeed be installed on multiple computers and run on any computer that had the CD in it but, last I heard, that arrangement isn't available right now. I would inquire with jason@hash.com for an official answer on that.

Hooray! I'm glad to hear we have at least partial success. Direct3D isn't available in the 64-bit versions... yet. (Quicktime isn't available in 64-bit either). Typically OpenGL works faster for everyone but if your video adapter doesn't like it, I'm glad there's still Direct3D for you. I like your transforming vehicles. Yes, a 6mb model may be a little pokey in rel time, but shouldn't be a cause of crashing in itself. The fact that Direct3D works for you and OpenGl doesn't is a strong indication that there is some sort of driver problem at work here. When you've caught your breath you might check out the other options for drivers and see if they do better.

Here's a progressive render that seems to be showing hair rendered. I turned the regular density down to 50% for that. If it is going to be a distant shot, some other strategy besides "hair" may get you better looking/faster grassland.

In your material>Hair System>Realtime turn the density to something small like 1 or 2% so the real time display isn't wasting your time redrawing a lot of hairs. Final render will still take a long time. You may want to turn the regular density down too.

My simple test case works OK. Post a test case that crashes and we'll have know more.

A capsular birthday to you!

Do you know what "series" of Intel Mobile Express you have? Here's an odd little statement on an Intel page: Why would they leave that out? Just in case you got your drivers elsewhere you might want to check their download center

We don't need to water down the concept by making the set dark. This transistion plan will work

This may be the problem. I wonder what it supports in terms of OpenGL and DirectX which i believe are needed for basic interface drawing and operating.

Cool! It's like a time portal.

Well, this is quite a mystery and I recognize it's very disappointing for you. I have quite a few programs, including Photoshop and A:M, that dont' report sizes in that control panel so I don't think that's a problem. Just to try.... try a different installer. Here's Hash's ftp page ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/ that has the current 32 and 64 bit installers. Since you are on a 64-bit machine you can use both. They will install to different folders and not overwrite each other. Try the 32 bit version, copy your license to its install folder. If you can get to it, go to the Tools>Options>Global tab and switch "Realtime driver" to the other option. That ftp page also has an "old" folder with the previous v16 installers in it. Try those if the above two don't work Also to try... in the "v15" folder there is a v15 installer. Try AMWeb.exe. Your license may not run it, but you'll find out quick. If all of those still crash, my money is still on some sort of video card setting. What kind of card do you have? Have you done this setting? This sends Windows back to the stone age but solved a different display freeze on my computer: Try all of the above and let us know what happens.

looks like part of the trick of making glass that can be shattered is to model it with something other than a regular grid that would just make square particles?