robcat2075

Hi Phattso, welcome back! Why, when I was a boy, there was just one t in that name. Q4: If you should have any "can A:M _______?" questions, the Forum is the place to ask. Sometimes the answer will be "nope" and we have to live with it, but it's OK to ask. We also do Live Answer Time on Saturdays, Noon CST (1800 GMT)

We'll just put a band-aid on it...

Are you on "Mac OS X 10.13.6 or earlier"?

This was composited in After Effects which is better suited for this than Photoshop.

Answer to another question... what is a shadow buffer for? A shadow buffer will contain the image of just the shadows in the scene. This can be composited between a render of a CG object and a background photo to make it appear that the CG object is casting a shadow in a real environment. When not rendering to OpenEXR, buffers get saved in their own separate files in what ever format was chosen.

Re: our discussion today of buffers in OpenEXR... Here is a tut that shows how to make the detail of an OpenEXR depth buffer visible to the naked eye... A subsequent test of OpenEXR render in v19 and v17 indicates something is wrong in v19. For now, do your OpenEXR Rendering in v17 if you need buffers.

Boo! I mean Hooray! Another entertaining SMF episode! I enjoyed that very much!

Now we think of excess diesel emissions. I'll check my Nick Drake box set to see if there's a song that will fix that.

I'm afraid he's known for exactly one hugely famous song "Pink Moon"... and that was back in the 90s. https://adage.com/creativity/work/milky-way/6922 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-11-ca-49418-story.html

That could be a Nick Drake song title.

I wonder who the railroad bean-counter was who thought that one up 😃

Sometimes Markers don't show in the Chor I've found that it has something to do with a particular object being selected or not selected. Markers showing while "Shortcut to Lot" is selected... Markers not showing while "Shortcut to Lot" is not selected... I've reported the bug. For now, I was able to make the markers appear without "Shortcut to Lot" being selected by deleting its keyframes and remaking them. Fortunately it didn't have many.

I have split these posts into their own topic so they may persist after I clean up the Live Answer Time thread!. Our successful Live Answer Time investigation of the Z-Sumi plugin can be found in the October 31, 2020 edition, archived at live-answer-time-less-live-archived-versions/ Thanks for bringing the topic up, Tom!

That's it! I forgot it had to be an actual "path" not just a spline. Thanks!

Does anyone recall a plugin that would distribute instances of a model along a spline? I tried Simple_Scatter but couldn't get it to work.

A classic pumpkin!

They do. Make sure you have View>Toolbars>Show Tooltips checked

I've never seen a "Translate.W" Can you show a PRJ that has one? As a person who used to be a teacher and still dabbles in instructional media, what i would say in David Rogers' defense is that it is hard to get the trade-off between clarity and conciseness right for every student. I look at that picture and see three icons, but maybe not everyone will. A:M is a full-featured 3D animation program fully capable of professional workflows and results. That means there is a lot to know and explaining it all in one book may be hopeless. So we have the forum, where you can ask follow up questions and know-it-alls like me will try to answer.

That's a good looking promo. How cool that A:M helped you get your message out!

Those are very effective!

If you drill down far enough to expose single channels in the PWS, a small symbol of a "curve" becomes visible that is really three drop-down lists. The middle one sets the default interpolation for the channel and has itsy-bitsy icons representing the behavior of the four choices... Note that when you set a new default for a curve, the new default is only applied to new keyframes you make. Existing keyframes retain the interpolation that was the default when they were made. The first and last drop-downs contain choices for pre- and post- extrapolation, again with icons representing the behaviors. By default, A:M uses "quaternion" representation/interpolation of bone rotations. Among other advantages it never creates the "gimbal lock" which plagues other systems. However, it does invoke the mysterious "W" channel which is not intuitive to edit. For most small edits that character animators might do in the curve editor, the W channel can be ignored. As an exercise, keyframe a bone at 1:00 to rotate one complete 360° rotation from from where it was at 0:00 and play it back. Nothing will happen! Quat always picks the shortest path between two bone rotations, regardless of the internal numerical representation. However if you keyframe the bone in successive one-third rotations it will indeed animate in a full turn. If you want to be really weirded out, look at the curves after you have done this. I've never read a comprehensible explanation of Quaternion representation, but by eliminating gimbal lock it greatly simplifies the 3D animator's task. "W" is rarely an impediment since Characters almost never need to rotate a bone as much as even a half a rotation at a time, but for mechanical animations that do, Euler or Vector interpolation can be opted for instead. I'd have to see more clearly what you are doing to understand your question better. Posting a screen cap would be clarifying.

Very lovely. The little fracture lines are interesting. How did you do those?

Maybe after the plague of locusts has passed! Until then, you can usually get an answer on the forum here. And we do Live Answer Time every Saturday.

I just noticed one thing about your question... where to find the keyframes. It is possible to do the cut and paste without the aid of the right pane of the PWS which has a time line in it. It is possible to do the selecting by clicking on the bones in the view window and possible to navigate forward and back through keyframes by using the Next and Previous keyframe buttons. That may be how David Rogers book presents it. But I think it is way easier to visualize what you are selecting by using the PWS.