robcat2075

Here's a brief clip showing some of the oddness complex displacement patterns have when animated. treads11_LoHiComparison_H264.mov Watch the top version around the edges of the tread and you'll see strange flickering and rippling. I think it has something to do with displacement texture being seen at a very shallow angle. The ripples seem to be about one pixel in size rather than all different sizes, which makes me think that somewhere between the material that generates the grayscale pattern and the actual displacement process, a value is getting passed thru a lower precision than it ought to be. Just a guess, I really don't know much about how it all works. The bottom is the same frames, but rendered at double res then shrunk down. Less flickering and rippling, but not completely gone either. Its ripples were about one pixel on the original large frames also. Haven't tried quadruple size.

Possibly, although a propeller is so much simpler than tank treads to rig and animate that doing it conventionally is probably better. Yes, that would be very much like tank treads. I'm not sure we have a combiner that would make a nice cylinder shape for the bullet casing. Bullets move thru their positions so fast that strobing might be a problem. This tank tread thing is best for repeating shapes that move quite slowly.

Does that handle corner-turning?

There's another hard thing to teach. Rotating the materials (there's four that have to move exactly together) just the right amount so the tread appears in synch with the ground is tricky. It's not quite right in my demo. Yes. You'd animate separate instances of materials on each tread. About 10 years ago I went to a talk by one of TRON guys, Chris Wedge. He said there was no interface in their software at all. Everything was done by coding on punch cards to control the renderer. Ouch.

Thanks, everyone, for your positive comments! That's exactly right. It's all "Extended GridTurb" combiner. My problem is figuring out how to teach it beyond just giving an exact series of steps. As it is, the process is rather un-intuitive. The tree you make in the PWS gives little hint of what the result will be. If we could drag and copy nodes in materials around that would be a big help, but we can't. Also, these displacement things can behave very oddly in animation. How to explain that it's not going to be perfect?

Probably not, displacement is tedious to render. In this case 16 passes take 2.6 minutes per frame.

Here's a slightly more detailed treatment of the tread. (I have no idea what is on the inside of tank treads.) Another day lost to A:M! I started this just before lunch and got the basic tread concept working in an hour, but then i couldn't leave it alone. Now my stomach is grumbling. I think you're limited to one displacement material on a surface. But you can model the bulge in the tire and spin the tread on the model, much as I'm doing here.

What would be the least obvious way to make tank treads? Tank treads made with, what else... procedural materials! The top is the final render, the bottom is the wireframe. treads9CompH264900.mov

What you are asking doesn't quite make sense. I suspect there are several terms confused. However, If you're on A:M v15 the OBJ importer will be included already If you just need to render the obj into a flat image you can RightMouseClick on the Objects folder in the PWS>Import>Prop The imported OBJ can be put in a chor and lit any way you want and you can render the scene to a TGA. Imported OBJ often look washed out or too bright. You will need to set the "ambiance" for all the groups in the object to zero.

Those are looking good. I agree. In the absence of scarve or capes or hair, a fundamental thing to do would be to pose them like they are moving forward fast. Have them grabbing the hand rail and leaning forward or... being pulled back. Anything but straight up and down.

You can adjust the angle and magnitude of the spline thru any CP with bias adjustments. Turn on the "Show Bias" button to see the adjuster. You can turn it and pull it to suit any shape. Shift and CTRL modify how it works.

When you turn the ALPHA buffer ON, the background will appear black ( aka nothing) until you use the image in an app that reads the alpha channel and lets whatever you put behind your render show thru the black. If you use the image in A:M as a rotoscope A:M will read the alpha channel and make the black part transparent. But when you first render your image it will look black since there is nothing behind it in the render window.

If A:Ms current regular render DOF effect could be allowed to produce a greater blur it would probably be quite good, it's already being driven by the depth map A:M uses internally.

You can constrain any model to a bone in any other model in the Chor. You can also drop a model in an action to use with a character in that action "Conforming" clothing... no. It would have to be a mesh specially modeled with bones in the right place to constrain to bones in the character model. I imagine Poser clothing isn't just any old model, it's a model made to work with whatever their conforming process needs.

IF you just need one still, I'd say model the new shape. You modeled the others, why not? That will be faster than trying things you're not sure of.

It's still not clear what the exact result you want is. If you merge those three components, only the section I've highlighted is derived from just yellow parts. Would that be the only yellow result, or would something be yellow if ANY of the sections was yellow? Or do they all get averaged? That's potentially 1x2x3x4x5=120 colors I think. If they don't get averaged, how are they prioritized, what color beats what color? And again... do you need to animate these merging together?

Actually that would be subtracted

And may all your patches face outward.

Making bones stay in place One of several tuts on keyframing on my screencam page. see link at bottom.

An exr depth map contains distance values from 0 to infinity (not values from 0 to 255). Where 0 is the camera lens and infinity is... infinity. If you want to focus on a distance 100 cm away, 100 is added to subtracted from all values. The DOF blur algorithm then interprets all pixels with values Pixels with values >0 are farther away and are blurred also but their blurs will be overlapped by pixels of objects that are nearer and less blurred. I presume the DOF filters work by starting with the pixel that is farthest away, blurring that and storing that result on a layer, then moving to the next closest pixel and blurring that. By working from back to front the correct overlaps can be imaged. That's probably oversimplified. The simple blurs in most image apps wont' be able to handle this. If you move your white zone to a mid round distance, they have no way of distinguishing the the gray zones in front and behind it for different treatment. There are some situations in which a simple blur will give approximately correct results but it wont' work in all.

A proper compositing app interprets the values in the map as distance values and that drives the DOF blur filter to blur/not blur the range you specify. Proper DOF simulation via a depth map will not work well with the typical blur filters in most apps (like Gaussian blur). A proper DOF blur filter understands that the blur of an out-of-focus background object should NOT overlap an in-focus middleground object and that the blur of an out-of-focus foreground object DOES overlap anything behind it and yet retains this sharpness of in-focus middle ground objects seen thru that blur.

What non-depth direction are you needing and for what?

But what happens when yellow intersects with another color? Or with two colors? What happens when red and blue intersect? Presuming that the colors represent a range of values, I would map that range to a gray scale, average the four gray maps together then re map the result back to the color range.

So the 2nd is what you don't want, but I'm still not sure what you do want. I suppose you want the yellow parts to appear as one contiguous section , but what do you want when red intersects blue for example?

I'm still curious about the black caterpillars. Did you solve that? Was that something that only showed up with DOF on?