HomeSlice
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The 8-12 age range seems right to me. I showed the movie to a couple of 10 year old boys (with parents) and they both stayed interested and watched the whole thing. Not sure though if they really liked the movie or if their parents just threatened them with death if they didn't sit still and keep quiet
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And, the skills needed to master AM are not readily transferrable to the polygon kingdom. It's a different currency.
For me, that wasn't entirely true. It took me several years to learn animation in A:M (from knowing *nothing* about animation). Then one day I got a temporary gig animating in another package. I had a little over a month to learn the new program well enough to animate in it and I was able to take what I learned in A:M about timing, wind up, follow through etc. and also about when and where to use reusable actions and how to animate with a graph editor. I learned the new program in that time and completed the gig. ... of course the whole time I was thinking, this would have been so much quicker and easier in A:M
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Hey robert, I noticed cribbidaj is using v.15. Is that function available in that version?
Post Extrapolation was available since v9 or v10 I think.
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That's awesome Chris. Thanks for all your work.
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Can a body still make a buck? With AM, I mean?
That depends.
If you want to produce photorealistic VFX, there are better tools out there.
If you have a dream to work for a large production company who has its own proprietary 3D pipeline, and you have the talent and discipline to forge yourself into a virtuoso in your field of interest (lighting, modeling, animation etc), A:M is a good choice.
If your intended clients are companies who want finished product (a fully rendered piece), A:M is a good choice.
If your intended clients are small to medium sized production companies who need you to fit into their existing 3D pipeline (most of whom seem to use one of the two industry standards), you may want to consider investing yourself in one of the industry standards.
As you know, the entertainment industry, including 3D CG, is highly competitive. Regardless of which software you use, you will need to become very very very good, and a little lucky, to succeed.
Does it (A:M) have what it takes to last another 20 years, or so?The program and its underlying technology certainly has what it takes. Whether the company that currently sells it is still around is anyone's guess.
SoftImage and Maya have been on shaky ground for years and they are still around.
For example:
In 1995 SGI bought Alias Research and Wavefront Technologies in a deal totaling approximately $500 million.
In 2004 they sold Alias|Wavefront to a private equity investment firm for only $57 million (OUCH!)
Just one year later, in 2005, the investment firm unloaded the company to Autodesk. One person who tracks such things told me Autodesk just took over Alias' $182 million debt, but I have been unable to verify that.
This site: http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Autodesk_%2...ms_Holdings_Inc tells an interesting story.
Even though the press releases at the time said Autodesk bought Alias for $182 million in cash, Autodesk's breakdown of what they were actually paying for hints that some creative accounting was being practiced to beef up the perceived value of the acquisition.
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Worth of Actual Assets Acquired:
Developed Technologies: $34.8 million
Customer Relationships: $29.8 million
Trade Name: $8.1 million
Net Tangible Assets $0.1 million ( one hundred thousand dollars).
Total Actual Assets: $72.8 million
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So Autodesk paid substantially more than what Alias/Maya was actually worth, presumably just to sew up the 3D market. If Autodesk's goals had been different at the time, who knows what would have become of Maya?
If I were you, I would not base my purchasing decision on which product will be around the longest. Unless you have some insider information, it is just impossible to tell. There are so many factors involved.
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and one of my future professors will be providing me with free copies of... ahem.... competing animation products.
After learning those other products and realizing that something is hard, *not* because you don't know how to do it, but because the interface is a clunky prehistoric mess, you're going to beg your professors to allow you to use A:M.
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Looks good Gene!
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I think Mike will like that!
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Just make a new free email account with gmail or Yahoo and give them that email. Potential Spam problem averted...
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But that is easily fixed by modeling parts in a different window and copy/past into the main window, or by using action objects.
I use to model them in separate windows then put them together in the choreography. Indeed .. wheels account for more than 60% of the patches in the model.
If anyone is interested, here is a program that will convert a Choreography to an Action file
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=344331
It is much easier to assemble things with a lot of parts in a Choreography, but Actions are reusable and more versatile. So this was my answer to that dilemma.
It worked well back in January, but I haven't used it much since then. It is mostly javascript with a few special api calls to open/save files on the computer. If you want to look at the javascript code, it is in the "Resources" folder after you install the program.
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We don't need game-ification of the forum.
I think it would be awesome if someone figured out how to do that.
Your hit points could be equal to how many Posts you have.
Your armor could be 50,000 minus your Member Number.
If you don't like someone's post, you can try to shoot it down (the computer will play for the defender).
If you "die" while trying to shoot someone's post down, you can't take any more actions for the rest of the day.
If you like someone's post, you can send them a "power up" which makes it harder for other's to shoot it down.
Woo Hoo!
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I spent quite a few hours with it about a year ago. At the time it was quite a job just to get it running. Then there was an issue where it would not let you set the location of your project files. The location defaulted to the root of the drive and there was no way to change it. And the file import/export options were very limited. And it required proprietary Matrox codecs, which didn't always play nice with the rest of the system. It may have improved since then though.
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As far as *Watching Animation*, for me, it's all about the story. If I get pulled into the story, it doesn't matter if it is Southpark or Avatar.
That said, I love watching Pixar's stuff, not only because the stories are usually really good, but also because the level of expertise that goes into every element is just mind blowing. Dialog, Lighting, TD, Rendering, Direction, Animation, Art Direction .... its all just mind blowing.
As far as *Doing Animation*, I much prefer simple shapes, minimalist sets, clean lines and stylized textures. It is much easier and faster for a single person or small team. And you can spend less time on the visual style and more time animating!
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....My characters have Holmes' Lite Face rig and I just wrote asking him how compatible it is with the automated functions, and his rig has a full set of phonemes. So I was prepared to do the whole thing manually in any case, and in addition there are very few closeup shots of the face for this sequence....
LiteFace does work with AM's dopesheet feature. You have to edit each phoneme pose (in User Properties > Face Controls > Face Rigging > Phonemes) and shape the mouth into the appropriate shape for the phoneme. You can manipulate bones, control points or a combination or both.
But the dope sheet creates choppy movements and I usually have to spend a significant amount of time in the Channel editor to smooth out the animation. So, like Robert, I have gotten better, and faster, results by doing it manually. (I have had a lot of practice lip syncing though, so at first it may take you quite a bit longer to get the hang of it)
Some issues I have noticed with the dope sheet:
*The keyframes it generates are often only 1 frame apart, or less (a fraction of a frame apart). Occasionally you may want some keyframes only one frame apart, but not often, and I have never found a desire to have them less than 1 keyframe apart.
(fix: delete keyframes until there are none left that are closer than 1 frame apart. Then go back through and remove/move keyframes that are closer than two frames apart unless there is some very fast talking in a particular segment.)
*The keyframes are all zero sloped by default. I always want spline interpolation, even for very fast talking.
(fix: Select all the keyframes (in the Channel editor) and convert them to Spline Interpolation)
*After I convert all the keys to Spline Interpolation, the splines (in the Channel editor) quite often travel over the 100% mark or under the 0% mark during their transition from keyframe to keyframe. This effectively clips the animation, contributing to the choppiness.
(fix: Move control points (in the Channel editor) down until the apex of the offending curves are just a tad under the 100% mark. And move control points up until the nadir of offending curves are on the 0% mark (not below it).
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As for what the ancients would have thought of this kind of display, my guess is that it was probably pretty much what we "moderns" think:"Holy crap, look at that!"
He he!
Based on my somewhat limited experience with people from "primitive" cultures - When they see something they don't understand, they ascribe it as a manifestation of some aspect of Divinity, and are often moved into a transcendental state of extreme appreciation (or fear) of the source of creation.
From reading various comments on news sites, blogs and YouTube, when many of us "Moderns" see something we don't understand, we simply pass it off as "Gay", Coincidence, or Satanic
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I have to go out of town in 10 minutes. I'll be back Monday. Earnest please email me at holmesbryant at gmail dot com to remind me to send you the music.
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I'm not sure exactly what you are asking, but here are some tutorials that might help:
Modeling with Distortion Boxes
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29735
Animating with Distortion Boxes
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Dang Ernest, that's great. It is is a really good synopsis of the film. I agree with making it shorter and faster-paced, but don't get rid of that version. It might prove useful at some point.
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Yay! Way to go Chris
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In addition to TAoA:M, there are a few tuts on different particle systems here:
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hi Robcat i tried that and it did work a little but will only alow me to save 3 frames of it. i am running windows 7 on the 64 bit download
Also make sure you have a defined a Frame range or more than 3 frames.
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I can't get this to work! I've tried quicktime movie files animation with million colors +, jpegs, TGA sequences 24 bits and 32 bits.
What' the best format to use in AM in order to get the transparency of an image to render?
You and liveimpact may be having different issues. In your case, make sure you actually have an alpha channel in your image knocking out the areas you want to be transparent. I've had the best luck with tga images, but 32bit png images work for me too.
It sounds like liveimpact has proper alpha channels in his images, but there may be a bug which renders black triangles when certain patches intersect. But we can make a better diagnosis with 1) an image showing the problem and 2) a *very simple* project file (with all models, images etc included in the zipped file) which consistently displays the problem.
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SO has been finished for several months, and Mouseman is looking at various film festivals to submit it to. When that has been exhausted, we will make it available for everyone to view.
The Artist
in Off Topic
Posted
yes!. You could call it "Brain Warp".