jpappas

Hey, Thought this thread was a good place for this. Found a website with incredible pictures of the sun, (and I think it's updated every few minutes from a satellite): http://soho.esac.esa.int/data/realtime/eit_304/# -Jim

Al, To add Specular reflections (these are the bright glints things have from light sources): 1. in your Light's Options, you need to turn on Specularity. If you have an outdoor scene like this and you're using more than one light, you should only have Specularity turned on for the light representing the sun. The idea is that you don't want specularity coming from your own fill lights, etc., you want to have specularity only for lights in your scene that represent real lights. 2. in your Models Surface Attributes, set a Specular Color (white is fine), set the Specular Size to some value, stick with a small size probably between 10-25% since metal is reflective you want a small specular size. Then set the Specular Intensity to some value depending on how pronounced you want it. You can give different Specular settings to different groups, so the cockpit material could be more Specular than the body of the plane, etc... When you do this you will see a very uniform Specular reflection in your render which, while it looks good, doesn't actually occur much in real life! Objects that have a very smooth surface are usually plastic, so this is often a reason why CG renders in general can look plasticky. To get past that, you could create a grayscale bump map decal for your object which helps break up the perfectly smooth specular appearance, or, you could actually create grayscale specular size and specular intensity decals. -Jim

Hey Leo, You certainly don't need to worry about modelling something like this! Heck, I made mine just for fun too, that's what A:M is for! If you plan to model the audio cable coming out of the microphone I'd love to see more posts here on how you attack it. I ended up making a series of cylinders each with a bone so I could move and twist the cable as needed, but it didn't work the way I had hoped, so I have to revisit that at some point. -Jim

Leo, We're both working on the same old fashioned microphone! Actually, I got to a point where I thought it looked OK so I haven't touched it in a few weeks. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=196875 I like the look of your bump map on the top, my suggestion would be to keep it, and if possible to shrink the lines so the wire mesh is even tighter. For the bottom, isn't the bottom of these microphones solid? I thought they only recorded from the top, but just for artistic purposes, I do think making the bottom look different maks it look more interesting. BTW, if you ever flick by CNN during the Larry King show I noticed the show uses a CG image of this exact microphone for when it goes to a commercial break. -Jim

Technodandy, very nice work on the model, it looks great! Rodney, I had no idea this was possible! A:M surprises me all the time. I just tried it and sure enough, there it is and it works like a charm. So let me spell this out again to make sure I've got it right: The basic idea is to clear the Choreography of everything else, remove the cameras, lights, ground, etc.. and you're left with a blank Choreography that acts like another modeling window. You then can drag instances of a fully textured model and use them to make up a new model. Then when you're happy, you export the Choreography as a model. Then you can start any new project and import that model as needed. It brings up some very interesting possibilities. My floating city for the last image contest for example, was mostly assembled in the Choreography. I guess its possible to save that whole thing as a model itself. Unreal. -Jim

Duke, You not only fixed the problems, but it looks like you also finished the rest of it -- a very cool looking model, nice! -Jim

Hi, That hover board is casting an unusual looking shadow. Are you using Transparency or a CookieCutter texture map? -Jim

Hi, Check out the Path Ease (walk then wave) video tutorial here, I think it's what you're looking for: http://www.hash.com/VM/ -Jim

That's one of the DarkSim Procedural Materials, you can download them for free from here: http://www.darksim.com/html/simbiontam.html The plugin that allows A:M to use the DarkSim materials is called Simbiont and is also free, but if you have A:M version 13.0 or above you don't need to get it, it's part of the A:M install and ready to go. Just create a new Material, change the Attribute to Darksim, then you'll see where you can click to load a material in, and just navigate to where you downloaded the materials. -Jim

Hi, I'm not sure what's going on, but you could be right thinking it could be something with the video card, I just made a new model, imported an image as a rotoscope and it looks OK for me, I'm using V13.0j on WinXp, on a laptop with a not-so-great ATI card, set to Direct-X. In fact, my tip about Control-D doesn't seem to affect whether rotoscopes are drawn, it must just affect decals. Does this only happen with the rotoscope or any decal in the model window? If it's just the rotoscope then you could do a workaround that should at least keep your workflow going (while you figure this problem out on the side). Make a square patch, group it and call the group MyRotoscope or something like that. Apply your rotoscope image as a decal to the patch, size it accordingly, then just set it so you can't select it, you can then even control the Transparency of it just using the regular Transparency Surface Attribute of the MyRotoscope group. -Jim

Julian, Very nice! Yes, please share what you've learned about using Planet Glow. It's one of about a dozen things about A:M that I have on my "check-out-this-cool-feature" list. -Jim BTW, the swathes of nebula gas really add a nice touch to the images. Is that particle smoke or some other effect? Thx, -Jim

Hi, Just a guess, but hitting Control-D will turn decals on or off in the realtime preview. You might have them turned off? -Jim

Well, I did create a bug report for this, I'm pretty sure it's a bug as the Help system says there should be a Quality setting on these Volumetric Effects, just like Lights have. -Jim

Hi, I saw this banding on a recent animation I did. But here's the thing, yes, there is a Quality setting if you create a Light and turn Volumetric on. But if you just create a new Volumetric Effect (instead of a Light), like Volumetric Dust, Mist or Steam, the banding is pretty bad and there is no Quality setting. I wasn't sure before, but now I'm thinking this is a bug. Can anyone verify this? If so, I'd be willing to file a bug report. The picture shows the properties for both a Volumetric Effect and a Light with Volumetric turned on. -Jim

Micah, Thanks. The Stereo forum is calling so look for it soon with your red/blue glasses on. -Jim

Hey! Thanks for that, I appreciate every vote! About the building decals, I created them and kind of stumbled on a few great techniques by accident. They're just simple grids of gray lines, but I overlayed a white-black Gradient in Soft Light mode over them, white at the top, going to black at the bottom. Then to make what looks like little windows I just used a Texture filter on the grid, I think it was Photoshop's Patchwork. I made the decal 4 times wider than the width of the building, then I just applied the decals to the buildings as Cylinder maps -- works perfectly, even though the building is square. Speaking of the overall concept, I've been thinking of all the influences that might have caused this to pop into my brain, and realized how much of a staple floating cities are in science fiction. I was able to think of these off the top of my head, I'd be interested to hear what others I missed! 1. mother ship/city from Close Encounters of the Third Kind 2. the Comet Empire from Star Blazers (Yamato) 3. Bespin/Cloud City from Empire Strikes Back 4. the one from that Star Trek TOS episode where the gas on the ground made the ground inhabitants dumb 5. Macross city in the SDF-1 from Robotech -Jim

Hi, This was my first time entering an Image Contest, and it was really a blast! I was busy the week before finishing off "The Door is Stuck" in TAOAM (check it out in New Users and give me some critiques on that too if you get a second). Then I jumped right into this, it took about 4 days, give or take. I'll post some wireframes and other images here if anyone is interested. To start, if anyone wants a good laugh, here's my chicken-scratch sketch where this began: -Jim ...and some wireframes: -Jim ...and some shots from other angles:

Hi Ross, I can only confirm what you are seeing. I used Volumetric Dust in my recent animation for The Door's Stuck and like you say, it's an effect that seems to work only when the color chosen is a bright color. I'm thinking, that may just be how it works? Just thinking out loud now, Volumetric effects usually refer to things involved with lights, like dust swirling and made visible by a light, so maybe that's it. One other thing that I noticed was that the effect caused very visible banding in the area it was rendered. The Help file talks about this and says to increase the Quality setting to get rid of the banding (keeping in mind it makes for a longer render). I haven't seen a Quality setting under the Volume Dust properties in either V13 or V11. Unless its referring to increasing the number of passes for MultiPass, I'm not sure. I ended up using it anyway since the scene was a fast moving object and the banding was less noticable due to that. I'm thinking at this point that a better option for dark fog or dark dust/smoke is probably to use Particle sprites. -Jim

Check this post in the main forum for more information. The voting won't start until Sept. 7th, Steve will let everyone know when it's time and how to vote. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=194442 -Jim

Hi, I think you just need to find your own workflow and make checking other Views a habit. If I move the arm in the Left view, I always check Top and Front. Sometimes I just press T and twist my view around. And let's say I'm rotating the arm, I'd rather hit R for the Rotate tool and grab just one axis; the rotate is more predictable for me this way. BTW, I don't do this myself yet, but another thing you can do is open multiple windows and set each one to a different View, so as you move something in one, you can instantly see what it looks like in the others. Another thing I like to do is save multiple copies of my project as I work on it. Sometimes if you move something and because of IK or some other thing, it ends up twisting another part of the model, it's just easier and quicker to go back to your last good state and go foward again. Hope some of this helps! -Jim

Hey Hashers, I added Volumetric Dust for Exercise 6 but it's rendering with very noticable banding. The Help file says to increase the Quality setting for the Volumetric effect to get rid of the banding, but unless my eyes fail me, I can't seem to see it. Can anyone verify this? I'm not sure if this is a bug or I'm just looking in the wrong place. Here's a picture of what I see for my Volumetric Dust properties. I'm running V13 f. thanks! -Jim

Here's some interesting information from www.nineplanets.org that might help explain why stars are much larger than gas planets: Jupiter is just about as large in diameter as a gas planet can be. If more material were to be added, it would be compressed by gravity such that the overall radius would increase only slightly. A star can be larger only because of its internal (nuclear) heat source. (But Jupiter would have to be at least 80 times more massive to become a star.) -Jim

Hi, my name is Jim, and I've been Poser free for over a year now. I purchased AM last year and haven't looked back. At that time a year ago I was actually on the verge of buying Carrara when I found someone's posting on Renderosity's AM forum of all things, where someone was raving about AM, and this started me on the AM path. It's ironic considering there's barely just a handful of posts in Renderosity's AM forum -- but even so, just that one person's post did much to convince me (and I wonder how many other new users too). In these forums, I've posted here and there, but I thought I should re-introduce myself because I'm about to go through TAOAM -- because I want that certificate! Well, and also because the journey is the reward, and all that stuff... I did finally model and render an object for my avatar so there's hope for me yet. I'm a software engineer going on 10 years, starting at Lotus Software which later was bought by IBM. I approach things like an engineer so I want to let loose that right brain hemisphere from time to time. OK, on to TAOAM, and then Bootcamp! -Jim

Matt, Dan, Awesome renders! It amazes me that Jupiter's red spot is the size of the earth. -Jim

I'm not sure how to help, but you could try these keyboard shortcuts and see if it gets you to the menus: Alt+f = File menu Alt+p = Project menu Alt+v = View menu Alt+t = Tools menu ALt+h = Help menu If you can get to the Tools menu in particular then you could choose Customize... and try hitting the Reset button for the Toolbars. The only other thing I notice is that the main menu bar is movable, is it possible it was moved somehow and is now on the left, bottom, or right, or hidden behind another sub-window? -Jim