robcat2075

Well... The camera is an object IN the Chor. You can constrain it (both Translate and Rotate constraints) to make it behave as if it were a child of the null. Or, as you surmise, you can make a new model and add a camera to it which will be like a bone that you can make a child of another bone or Null.

It was the most inexpensive car you could buy here. About $1700 in the 60's. I think i recall a promotion once that put it at $999. Even a very, very cheap Detroit car was $1900+, most were in the $2500-4000 range. And the whole hippie/Love Bug thing made it attractive.

You could use the dupe wizard to spin a small shape around ins spiral and then copy one resulting spline to use as your path. Or... you could make the camera a child of a Null that would be at the center of your spiral. Then rotate and move the Null, the camera will spin aroudn it.

The range of the chor is independent of the play range of the timeline. The chor range tells A:M how long to do things like baking cloth or particles. But play range is whatever time span you decide to play. It's just a few clicks to set it.

Good looking character! Is he making an appearance in Bus Stop?

There's only 256 shades of gray in 24 bit color. Anything in between 134,134,134 and 135,135,135 for example, has to be simulated with something like 135,134,134 which will not be pure gray but red tinted. That's the first problem. In a long stretched out gradient like you have it may be visible. Then when you compress to DVD or any digital TV format precision gets even worse. The DVD codec will compress areas of similar color to the same color making banding more obvious. I see professional DVDs with obvious banding and some where it's not apparent. It may be that CG images are worse because they don't have film grain noise to break things up.

Some lens flare settings will create actual visible circles or bands because real lens do that sort of thing as artifacts of the lenses. That banding looks quite slight, it may just be the limitation of 8 bit color. OpenEXR format has more precision but it can't change the fact that your display is almost certainly 8 bits per color also. I have an LCD display and a CRT and i find the LCD is much worse when it comes to banding. This is true with your sample image when i compare it on both. I think most LCDs are doing tricks to approximate 24bit color but dont' really do it like CRTs can. Lens flare and other post effects aren't included in alpha buffers. If you absolutely have to composit a flare from A:M into something else, do a pass with everything else black and use a compositing mode to add it to your final image in whatever app you are using to composite with.

mirror mode has an icon at the top

Make sure mirror mode is off. But I've had that happen rarely where some CPs seem to get stuck highlighted. Try saving the model and re-opening it.

... And render ... Not sure I'll make it. It's unlikely I'll have this thing all edited together on the morning of October 21 so you probably have some wiggle room. 16 probably will be faster and if you got two cores and enough ram you can probably run the netrender. Try a few frames and compare with a v15 render to see if anything is going wrong.

a greyscale map here's an extreme demo http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...6&hl=dragon it works with grayscale materials too. If you look in my "this is only a ..." blog (below) you can see several displacement experiments. There really aren't "upgrade" prices anymore. The premise being that the subscription prices are very inexpensive and even a full CD version is still cheaper than an "upgrade" for other software. That's the pricing scheme now and it is what it is for now.

new in the last few years DarkSim plugin enables use of materials made with the DarkTree editor SimCloth replaced the old v10 cloth Newton Dynamics enables many physical simulations. Ambient Occlusion rendering Sub Surface Scattering for better human skin effects Displacement maps now displace independently of the resolution of the mesh. Many Plugin-shaders included for various specific lighting effects OpenEXR fileformat enables greater precision beyond the usual 8 bits per channel per color OpenEXR renders allow rendering various lighting aspects of a scene to different buffers for later adjustment in post AMComposite allows some basic AfterEffects-style combining of layers and manip of OpenEXRBuffers The Chor now enables some basic NLE style editing of clips already rendered Hair isn't very new but only recently have people learned how much it can do. V16 will have a 64-bit version NetRender is back after having been away for a while and a limited version may be included with the basic V16 I'm sure I've overlooked many things Biggest improvement is stability.

Every cloth situation requires careful testing of parameters. I'd turn the stretch stiffness WAY up and maybe turn the friction down.

Somewhere around here Martin explained why he didn't like "Feature lists" but I can't find it. there is a change log for each version at AM Reports. The dropdown list by "Project" chooses the visible version. http://www.hash.com/reports/changelog_page.php However it doesn't always flag new features as "Feature" and they might be listed as issues under any other heading.

At least 8 more days to do magic Bus Stop animation!

hmmm... You'd have to search on the internet for useful pics or photograph them yourself if you have the object you want to model. try searching on things like "plans", "diagrams", "blueprints" or even "Front and side view" press Page up or Page down to change the real-time subdivision.

You might call the customer service of your card and see if they are aware of a transaction getting rejected for any reason, or ask why a merchant would getting such a message. Just to make double sure it's not the card or the card company's fault. There may be some obscure reason besides available funds for something not going thru. Or try a different card? I don't think Hash takes PayPal yet.

I bought my new sub about a month ago... When you say "won't let" you, what sort of error message is it?

Typically when you put a bone on a wheel or a gear you'd place it along the wheel's axis. The flipping sounds odd, I'm not sure how you are moving it. Always use the Rotate manipulator rings ® when turning bones. If the bone is on the gear's axis the blue ring will turn it properly.

Welcome to the forum! In general, the more complex your image the longer it will take to render. You'd have to show us more about your scene for more specific advice. I did a lot of A:M work on a machine about like yours but, of course, faster will always be faster. Here's a thread where someone presented something that was taking too long (for him) and I tried to simplify it for faster times: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...;hl=render+time

An all z-buffered solution would involve a no-shadow sunlight to light the whole set and then a combination of a positive and negative kleig light shining on each object to add shadow without adding more light. I forget the exact workflow. But if you're just trying to get a sketch out quick, I'd pass on the shadows for now.

It's good you translated that. I read it as "Earth Beer Corpse"

You may use sound if you wish.

A-ha... The z-buffered Kleig light is shining on such a wide area that its shadow map hasn't the res to do a proper shadow for that scene. One pixel of the shadow map is the size of probably 100 pixels on the render image. The 25% softness is hiding what little shadow is there. Set the "Softness" to 0 and then reduce the cone angle to 10° and you'll start to see something resembling a shadow. For a scene like this where the light needs to stretch to the horizon, I recommend using a "sun" light instead of a Kleig light. Render times might be higher, but the scene will be easier to set up. There are purely z-buffered light solutions for a scene like this but complicated to describe and set up.

I had one of the buses in the 80's. It was much more basic than Roger's however. They weren't good in a cross wind. i got pulled over once for "weaving" because of that.