robcat2075

I think a bump map is the way to go. If you have paint program at all that can blur an image, draw that shape in white on a 50% gray background, blur it slightly, then save it out and use it as a bump map. Save to TGA or PNG if you can, but JPG will work.

Welcome back! Just the other day I was wondering if you had disappeared! Have you watched the new-user video for Rigging? If your goal is to make a simple IK-only rig on a character, that tutorial leads you through all the concepts including... why we need rigs making bones bone hierarchy attaching mesh why/how to use CP weighting and/or fan bones why/how to add constraints why we need Inverse Kinematic (IK) examples of IK constraint, Orient Like constraint, Aim At constraint creating a basic IK Leg The concepts explained for the IK Leg can also be used to create IK arms. Those are the core concepts at work in every rig. Fully-developed characters will need more bones than the simple Thom example. However, animators will want to have as few controls as possible to pose the character. Barry Zundel's rig, the AM2001 rig, and (my preference) TSM2 all create advanced structures so that the animator only needs to use a few controls to manipulate many bones. It's a trade-off: Simple rigs make animation complicated... Complicated rigs make animation simpler. If you have more questions...do ask!

By "throttling" I really meant the CPU speed. My 3.5GHz CPU can sit around at 2.2 or even 1.6 unless I turn on a "power plan" that sets the minimum processor state to 100% However... When I'm just running A:M and rendering on my 4-core machine the usage of the cores can go as high as 49% and is always above 25%. I wonder what is happening during render that uses more than one core.

If you set Render to "Use Camera Settings" that should retain all the proper settings. And I presume you have your computer set to a power management setting that doesn't let the CPU throttle below 100%. Windows 10 does this well but i could never get Windows 7 up to 100% unless i was running multiple instances of A:M simultaneously.

You could load up v15 and see how that compares. I think about half of the speed up will be from coding improvements since v15

That is 20x faster than my first result 11 years ago!

Very good! How does the teapot bench mark go?

Here is a magnified comparison in After Effects. The top images were rendered in A:M with "Unpremultiplied Alpha Channel" OFF The bottom ones were rendered in A:M with "Unpremultiplied Alpha Channel" ON The left side has the wrong interpretation of each in After Effects chosen. The right side has the correct one. Either can composite correctly with the right interpretation. "Unpremultiplied Alpha Channel" ON is slightly more accurate for compositing purposes. The advantage of rendering with "Unpremultiplied Alpha Channel" OFF (the A:M default) is that outside of a compositing program the anti-aliasing of the object's edges still looks right.

Change the setting for "Save with unpremultiplied alpha channel" to whatever isn't what you have it set at. If you are using After Effects to composite, it has a setting to use either version of the Alpha channel...

I put a PRJ up there for you to test. Test it. Can you show this happening?

It just occurred to me... I think there was a PNG bug in v19o Render to TGA and see if that fixes the problem. v19p is out soon.

JPG never has an alpha channel. It can't. I always render to TGA because it represents the alpha channel the same as it does the RGB channels and imposes no color management. However, when i render an object in either TGA or PNG, the alpha channels both work as expected. Load this PRJ and see if it displays like I have... AlphaTest.zip The top Chor is the model that got rendered to TGA and PNG. The middle Chor is the TGA on a Layer. the Bottom Chor is the PNG on a Layer.

You could try linking the emission rate to the amplitude?

Let's flag @Jason Simonds

OpenCl is a programming library for trying to send computation tasks to the GPU. But all the OpenCL things your program needs should be taken care of by the program's installer. Have you tried uninstalling and re-installing? Have you tried uninstalling and installing a previous version of the program? Have you reported the bug to them and looked for a newer version of the program?

So you have the 16 digit key but it doesn't work for some reason, right?

The Scale Group to X=0 menu option is just one step.

Remember that handy list of new features I sent you?

I tried it in v15 and v17 and got similar results.

Yes there is. Edit the Netrender.cmd file in your A:M program folder... REM starts the rendermessnger in two instances for a dual core machine REM renderserver should be started first start renderserver_64.exe timeout /t 15 start rendermessenger_64.exe timeout /t 15 start rendermessenger_64.exe duplicate this portion for as many nodes as you need to start... timeout /t 15 start rendermessenger_64.exe That file will get reverted it you later do a Help>Reset All Settings so you may wish to save a copy elsewhere. OpenMP enables multi processing, which probably has no advantage for NetRender.

Rodger, can you add the "rear_hinge_hub.tga" image that is called for? Even though you did an "embed all" on the PRJ, images will still not be embedded. Do any previous versions do any better?

The Master_64.MAC file seems to store keyboard shortcut customizations. Does it store anything else? And where are custom screen Layouts stored? @yoda64

I can almost smell the Play-Doh!

As we get higher and higher-res screens to work on , the buttons we have to hit get smaller and smaller.

I'll add a flag for Jason here... @Jason Simonds