robcat2075

It does seem long. I haven't done much with decaled hair, but Nancy has and I don't recall her mentioning 7 hour frames. How big is the decal for the leaf shape?

Why do you need multi pass for this hair?

I'm not sure I detect a difference. Is there a previous post where you went into that?

It was 16 hours before? Yes, that's better. You may have to actually show us what this looks like.

I recall that one! Not bad!

No, this is actually still the original animation but with the updated material substituted. I was thinking of doing that with two treads, but then I thought I should add some wheels inside first , and then I thought I should add a body and then... well, thinking about it was as far as I got.

If it's for a logo, is it just one still frame? You could paint something that looks like a reflective surface on top of it. If it has to be animated that will be harder.

for flames , I've had success with streaks. LOTS of VERY transparent streaks http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=308692 I'm not sure I have the PRJ file anymore but some explanatory details are in the last post. If your flame needs to be silver and reflective, that's very much not like a flame. Do you have a picture of what that looks like?

nice noggin.

Sun shadows are ray traced, that's all they can be. Only Kleig lights can be z-buffered, and if you put a Kleig light far enough away it's like a sun light. With light lists it's possible to have different lights for different models.

One trick I read in Jeremy Birn's book is to not use ray traced lights on hair. Are you using ray-traced lights?

Describe the situation that needs this a bit more.

Slight further refinement. After a bit of research I've found that tank treads usually have some sort of tooth on the inside so they can be engaged by the drive wheel. And you can see this animated (with no flickering) at my A:M tests gallery

Yes, the animation is a bit surrealistic, but... you're making a movie! I think about making a movie; you're actually doing it. I agree with Largento, the ghost stuff worked real well. I'll look forward to seeing the whole film when it's done. Hope I haven't seen any spoilers!

I don't recall the settings but here's the thread http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=304884 The settings will be quite particular for each situation. You'll have to play with it a bit.

yes it is possible...it is called dual hosting. I used to do it on a web server i had set up (many many moons ago). It can be a real pain to get it up and running, but it is possible. However, I don't see how you could get each network adapter to be assigned to an individual cpu within a multi cpu machine. Sounds like a hassle. I was just brainstorming and thinking that since you can get a USB network adapter for $4 now maybe that would get you that extra IP address or some other avenue of access. But it sounds impractical. That's interesting. I didn't' even know what a blade server was. But it seems like all the economical, high performance CPUs are multi core now ( or are they?) so you still have that apparent problem of not being able to use them all. Wouldn't you also have to have a Windows license for each "blade"?

Is it possible for a computer to have more than one IP address? If it had more than one network adapter?

I believe Net Render also lets you queue jobs, something A:M doesn't do even on one CPU. NetRender was created back when a 30MHz mac was "fast". There was an obvious need for it. I had NetRender at work circa 1997 and occasionally rendered stuff on our office of Macs. But now my one core Athlon 3200 has more CPU power than all those macs put together. So in a certain sense the need for it has dissipated. The price may not be attractive, but it's not like they're pushing it or even mentioning it very much. I still think with a little scripting wizardry someone could get multi-core net rendering going, but I'll leave that to the scripting wizards.

I'm not familiar with elephant dreams but he looks like a serious work. Gonna be tough to rig but you're up to it.

If you click in the background, the hidden black model bone will become visible. That is what all points are assigned to before you assign them to other bones. When the black bone is flashing you can assign points to it, making them not assigned to other bones.

He needs some sunscreen! The nose seems not quite Indian-like. Is it based on a reference?

Why? Because some one has a Mac, doesn't run windows on it and wants to use A:M. As far as translation... Martin has said in the past that A:M is developed in a codebase crafted so that it can be compiled for PC and compiled for Mac. It's not written for PC then translated to Mac or translated by the mac. The Mac version is "mac code". There was a window feature in V11 that went away in V11.1 because there was no way to do it in the Mac OS. That's an example of the codebase being conformed for both of them. I'm sure the code is "written" on a PC but that's a just working in a text editor. A lot of things are different in the two compiler results and obviously the Mac version isn't as fast. Why? That would probably take some serious technical diagnosis from Apple (or Microsoft, which wrote the libraries that make mac compilation possible). Microsoft no longer supports its Mac libraries, and Apple obviously wont support them either. If you're developing apps for Mac and PC these days you're on your own. So says Martin. Apple is currently screwing one of their oldest developers, Adobe, over Flash. They could probably get together and fix whatever is supposedly wrong with it, but the real problem is it's not Apple's. So i imagine the prospect of a small company like Hash getting help from Apple is dim.

I can tell you that with all the displacement material tests I've done the 127-128 neighborhood gave me no displacement. In those black background tests, the depression for the black spot is gone. that tells me that ,for displacement purposes, the balck alpha area is being interpreted as 0,0,0 gray resulting in full depression.

Is there any value you can put in the gray and not have the edge of the alpha make a visible ridge?

Gray 127 made a slight displacement when I cranked the level up high. 128 seems to be true middle. Here's a test with gray=128 and displacement set to 10000% There's no displacement created where the gray decal meets the undecaled portion of the model.