robcat2075

Forces have a box that shows their size like lights do. The force that pushes the particles up could be made short enough that it runs out after the particles have risen just a foot or so. Or... the force could be following the car so the particles get left behind and aren't pushed up by it anymore.

A translate limits constraint could stop that

Thanks, everyone! Animated by hand. The rocket body is wobbling around its approximate center of gravity. The string is a two-point spline with one end attached at the surface of the rocket body. This gives the impression that the string is being jiggled by the rocket's mass. At first, you'd think the rocket should move around the point where the string attaches, but a rocket has much more mass than a string so it tries to turn about its own center

Very fine looking! He needs some saw marks on his skull where he had his stone-age brain surgery done.

If black is 0 and white is 1, then the black and white stripes are simulating 0.5 if RGB of 128, 128, 128 is made to display the same as that 0.5, I'm wondering how that is not "linear" . that sounds like x=y. This is where my in-person observation is absolutely at odds with everything everyone else is saying a monitor's default behavior is 2.5... with tweaking it's 2.2... and in those circumstances everyone else is getting a display where the two grays match pretty close. On a default monitor. No monitor I have appears that way at its defaults. But if I adjust my monitor to make those two grays similar it's obvious that everything else is pale and washed out and over-bright. I do like the fact that with this setting the lower end of the gray scale is not all crunched to black and that I can see the difference between 0 and 8 and 16. But that setting doesn't render most of the rest of the world's graphics well. They seem to be made with the expectation that 128, 128, 128 displays quite a bit darker than 50% gray. For them, the middle grays are found somewhere between 128 and 256 If I create graphics with my monitor at its matching-grays setting everyone else complains that the result is too dark. It looked fine on my monitor but way too dark on theirs. All the shadow detail is black. It's a mystery to me.

Here's my version of puffy exhaust http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=38007

Puffy exhaust with particles. FlashSmall0600kbps.mov mp4 version: FlashSmall.mp4 This is much the same as my cumulus clouds PRJ but the emitter rate is animated on and off in the chor.

Yes. That is the principle. If a person's monitor is set that way, so that the two grays match, is that monitor set to 2.2 gamma or is it linear or is it something else? The intention of that adjustment is ___________?

Use EXR for your displacement map and you don't have to deal with PNG weirdness. OpenEXR.org has a EXR plugin for photoshop

Thank you for your detailed reply! When we render a TGA or JPEG in A:M, do they get a color profile embedded in them? One of the menu choices is NTSC/sRGB which sets the value to 2.2. I guess for A:M purposes those are regarded as synonymous. Really no. It is called "linear workflow" because there are steps where the images are corrected for the display devices which are not linear. What you see there is the result of one of those steps, the output step. If my next production stop is to use this image in some composite in AfterEffects, I'd want to use the version that had a value of 16, I'd think, right? If I used the "80" version then I'm using a version that has compressed the bright grays near the white end of the scale. Maybe the software in AfterEffects is expecting the "80" version and un-smushes everything? That sounds messy. AH-ha! Now I see what is going on. If you get a reading of 2.2 when you set the video card to 1.0, then that is a good news. It means that your monitor default calibration is already calibrated to sRGB standards and don't really need further compensations. I've kind of suspected that too, but I wonder where this is controlled? I've taken out the Adobe Gamma utility, the video card is set to 1.0, there are no other control panels for my display...? And I wonder how we know that chart is being displayed correctly, because... ... the gamma chart on on my video card control panel still suggests I'm way out of whack at "1.0". It's similar to the one you put in the A:M Options panel. The solid gray bars are WAY darker than the striped bars if my video card setting is at 1.0. If I move it up to ~1.9 the bars finally match. And this is true of all other such gamma charts I encounter. If my viewing device is displaying correctly I would think those bars would be very similar. My understanding of those charts is that the stripes simulate a 50% gray and you want the solid 50% gray to match that. So far, I haven't encountered any set-up process that leaves me with a normal looking result on-screen.

Don't I want to see a uniform gray scale? Here's a render I get if I set the gamma to 2.2 The step up from black is zero to 80. How could this possibly be used as part of a linear workflow when it's not recording linear values? Shouldn't an image used in a linear workflow have a 16 there? On my monitor with the video card control set to 1.0 the step from black looks way too big. If I set the card control to 2.2 it's even worse. It's impossibly bright. But that image looks normal on everyone else's monitor? With my video card set to 1.0 I get 2.2 for the left bar, about 1.9 for the middle and I can't tell on the right. With my Video card set to 2.2 I get about 1.0 on the left and middle bar and can't tell on the right.

After some more fiddling, I'm finding that the brightness and contrast settings of the monitor have a lot to do with what gamma setting works At low brightness and contrast settings it was possible to have a gamma setting of 1.0 and see all 17 shades and have them appear even, but the gray bar and stripes gamma test chart isn't right at that configuration. If I adjusted the monitor gamma to be "correct" then the shades looked wrong. To much jump from black to near black. With brightness and contrast turned way up I can get to a place where all the bars are visible if I crank the monitor gamma up to 1.8. The gamma test chart also looks "right" at that point. The jump from black to near black still seem a bit big but not as bad as before. But if this is correct, I'd say there isn't much on the web that was made to be seen with a gamma corrected monitor. The forum is very pale shades of blue. Photos on websites have obvious noise in the dark areas that doesn't seem intended. There don't seem to be muck black at all in photos Even the A:M interface doesn't seem made for this. The difference between the white "play range" area and the gray at the top of the PWS is very slight now. I feel like I need sunglasses to look at my screen now. I'm sure it would be blinding if I ever got it to the point where 2.2 gamma was working.

That's not bad. I'd say slow them down and it will seem "bigger".

Tell me at which step I've gone wrong... - I decide to make a scene that appears to have 17 linearly stepped shades in it from black to white. - I make a scene with 16 lights, each set to 1/16 of full intensity, (the above scene, the one you suggested but with 16 lights instead of 4) - I render the scene to a file with A:M's Gamma set to 1 - The image looks right in A:M's render window. All the shades are visible and they appear linearly stepped; not crowded or stretched at either end. - I load the image into Photoshop (Color Management is off) and it looks the same as it did in A:M and sampling the image shows the numerical values are indeed linearly stepped from black to white. At this point I get out my jump suit and say "Mission Accomplished!". I created a scene with linear tools and expectations and it came out with both linear numbers in the file and linear appearance on the screen. ?? But based on what you said above I shouldn't get this result unless I set A:M's render gamma to 2.2. Or something other than 1. (If I use the "current Gamma" tool in A:M, that says my monitor has a gamma of 1.6. If I put 1.6 into the "desired gamma" box and do a preview render the result is obviously not right and over bright in the gray tones.)

Was this quicktime made on a Mac? When I try to play it it says "This file can not be found"

That was wonderful!

You didn't search on "clouds"? Here was my effort http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=322946

hmmm... When I render that test scene in A:M ( with the A:M gamma at the default 1) and sample those grays in Photoshop and they come out with the "right" numbers... is that not what is really stored in the image file? I turned off the Adobe Gamma Utility and then used my video card control panel to calibrate my CRT monitor. This brings me to a setting of ~ 2.2 If I then render the test scene in A:M with gamma set to 2.2 the result is WAY too bright with all the light grays crowded together. And the values for the grays in the image are not "right" anymore. What is the relationship between "desired gamma" and "current gamma" under "Preview renders" in the Options window?

That's the way it works for simple splines we make with the path tool. I don't know how splines A:M creates( like after you lathe or extrude another spline) identify that except that it probably copies the arrangement of the original spline.

The "Ease" property in the path constraint tells the object where to be on the path. If you leave it unset it automatically goes from 0 to 100%. You may want to key it to go from 100% to 0.

Very impressive stuff! Will you do the little seams between the skull plates?

That's a pretty good first pass. Food turns out to be hard to do. Fuddrucker's bankrupt? With a name like that?

Try holding the SHIFT key when you do the picking.

Four lights looked right , so to torture test the idea I did it with 16 sun lights set to 6.25% intensity. i also set the ground to 0 diffuse falloff so the light angle wouldn't be a factor. When I sample the numbers in photoshop, every gray has the right value. On my Cintiq, which is an LCD, I can see all 17 shades and they look about right. (My second monitor is a CRT, on that the black and near black look the same.) Here's where I get confused... This monitor ( the Cintiq) is not calibrated, not according to any gamma calibration chart i've ever tried on it. If I try to calibrate it with the Adobe Gamma utility, the setting that makes the chart look right makes the three darkest shades all look black. If I try to calibrate with the gamma utility in my video card control panel, it makes the image brighter and although I can still see all the shades, the jump from black to near black seems pretty big. My best viewing result is when I leave those at the "wrong" settings. The same story, with slight variations, if I try to calibrate the CRT monitor. So something must be wrong in my process somewhere. My monitors, A:M, Photoshop, the Adobe gamma control and/or my video card control. That's too many variables.

That looks nice!