Hubukai

Definatly Fun. I will have the VIDEO from the MAAM Meeting up for the MAAM Members. (Not available to the public forum just yet... the video mat need a little "Editing". Maybe ill put up the best parts from the meeting... I think John R. recorded the entire thing... thats liek 3-4 hours. and i am sure no one will want to watch the entire thing. PS, i downloaded 13 alpha and i am now playing with the Ambiance Occlusion render to see what i can come up with. Thanks Zach. I know this is going to be cool!

Hi Guys, The MAAM Meeting was awesome! Thank you Don for hosting another meeting. Your place in Philly was great. Conference table, projector and everything. It was great for Vern and Zach to show there latest works! PS, I hope everyone has subscribed to Zach's pod cast already! You should, it’s awesome! I thought it was interesting that there were some similarities between the space ships that rich and i designed! Looks like there might be a little future collaboration on a possible "Sci-Fi" Project in the future... Hmmmm... Rich, Maybe we can begin collaboration. Thanks everyone for a great meeting. We might try to plan another before wizard world.

THANKYOU!!! Now i get it... yes, i am using photoshop... i just have to grab my JPG files and add the aplha channel to it and save as a TGA with alpha... Duh... Many thinks...

If anyone can help tonight, I would appreciate it!... I am not to familiar with decaling and alpha channels or decal transparency. Basically i am trying to decal portions of a ship i am working on. the decals i have are colored with black around the edges. I would like to apply the decal to the model and then change the image so the black portion becomes transparent leaving the color portion of the decal. I am attaching the cample images i have along with a screen cap of the decal i am trying to apply. I need help to get this worked on tonight fo the AM meeting in philly tomorrow. [attachmentid=14532] here is one of the decals i am trying to apply. [attachmentid=14533] If someone could assist with a description on how to do this i would greatly appreciate it.

Yep!, ONe more day = a 12 houre animation master sprint to finish all your projects. Ill be working on my project all night tonight... Looks like its time to get that network rendering working ASAP!!!

Well from what I am told, My wife makes the best cookies in the world. I will see if i can bribe her in to making some. ** (Confirmed, she will make cookies!, Home Made Yummy Cookies!!!!) ** In other AM news, this meeting has been good for me... It kicked me back in to gear and AM-ING! Thanks Don. I gave myself a homework assignment to have something to show for the meeting and i will. John H. Scott... I'm willing to "try"... I'm not a great cook or anything, Vern. I've been known to use food as a weapon, though. Hopefully I have all the ingredients. I warn you... I use lots of butter- in everything I cook!

Hi Rich, In an effort to get my project going... i asked my buddy John to play with the Earth Federation of Planets logo in adobe illustrator to see what he could come up with. It is all vector based and can be brought in to Master. thats why i like illustrator so much. Hope you dont mind. He took your logo and went a little creative with it. What do you think? if you like it, i can send the illustrator and AM versions. [attachmentid=13848] John H

Hi Bob, We will be meeting in philadelphia. Don Davis will post direction information closer to the date.

:-) Thanks Don!

Hi Rich, To change the subject..... In an effort to get something together for the AM meeting.. i was taking a look at Gen Man and thought he needed a space ship for the Earth Federation of Planets. do you happen to have a logo for ... Earth Federation of Planets? I want to imprint the logo on the Ship I am working on. If you dont have a logo for it, can I use my creative brain to come up with something? if you do... canyou email it to me? and just a question... is it suppose to be... Earth Federation of Planets or Federation of Planets?

I have decided to work on a new plug-in for AM per Rich's Quote #4. Only if you tell me I looked like I gained weight. It will use Vern’s Bio kit to extract extra fat cells from more stocky AM users such as myself and beam them to Rich! Then, Riches insane metabolism will take over, destroying all AM users extra fat cells within a 15' radius. Ill have to come in with a USB or Fire wire Cable to plug in to the computer and also to Rich. once this is done, I figure we will all come out of the meeting 10 to 25 lbs lighter, just being near Rich for a couple of hours. Maybe Vern’s next AM Bio project can include a Bluetooth Bio Implant for all of us. I dub the... "The AM to Entity MAAM weight loss plan". Of coarse we will have to compensate rich for utilizing his super metabolism.

It makes me feel good to know Vern stays inside in front of a computer more than me! I thought I was the only one that had dead beat clients. Maybe Rich can build "Web Man!!!" The Web guy super hero that fights for Web developers everywhere! He can code 7,000 lines of AJAX and SOAP in a single second to program away evil clients in a single bound! Thwart evil web site hackers! Top Ten things for Rich to do at the MAAMUG meeting 1. You can keep me company during smoke breaks! 2. When I show off my stuff... I want you to "oooh" and "ahhh" a lot. 3. Create a polygon import/export plugin that is "perfect" and demo it at the meeting. 4. Tell me I look like I have lost weight even if you don't think so. 5. Come up with the perfect UV/decaling technique that will revolutionize AM use. Keep it a secret so only WE will have this knowledge. 6. Tell me what a waste of talent it would be if I got a part time job at McDonald's. 7. Visit my dead beat clients and tell them you know Kung Fu and will kill them with only your thumbs if they don't pay me. 8. Assure me that all this strange weather is not a sign of the end times. 9. Bring in and show us the painting from your attic of you as an old man. 10. Bring the Yeti AM disk and the Orangutan Disk and do a finger puppet show. Vernon "!" Zehr

Rich, You can bestow your vast knowledge of Animation Master upon us!

Don, Awesome, February 18th it is. if you need me for anything prior to that, please let me know. I am always online if you need me. I will plann on bringing the computer systems and I will try to get there a little earlier to setup. I should also have the latest version of animation master as well!

Most Spectacular! And Thank you Don for again bringing us together! My schedule is pretty much open so any time will work for me. And this time I will be ready with something new to show! OOps, I almost forgot to mention. I will bring my CRAY computer ( AMD 4000 w/ 2 gig ram) and convince my wife to let me bring her new 12" Powerbook! (Now i have 2 MACs in the house.) I will also bring my iSight cam for documentation purposes. So with all that, the computers should be covered! Hubukai

Brilliant! I am up for Saturday the 14th. Not that is a big deal but StarWars Episode III comes out on the 19th and I am going to a StarWars party the 21st. I know we dont want to put it off to long... My votes for dates, May 7th, or May 14th, May 28th. I know I am a pain in the butt. :-) I cant wait though. There is so much to go over! the new version, Cloth... Woo Hoo.

Oh man that was funny! Yes Motion Blur would be nice. What a great character!

Hi Guys, Thanks to Don for waking me up out of my Holiday sleep. It seems very necessary for Users to have a user group page and sub pages that they can modify. I would imagine that putting a link or links on the second CD that point to the user groups main page would be the way to go. Speaking with Don before about this, and with the ok from Hash, I registered AMUG.us , unfortunately the .com was taken. I am a web developer of 10 years and defiantly saw the need for such a site, not only for MAAM, our user group, but also for the rest of the users. It would also probably be logical to have www.AnimationMasterUserGroups.com or something like that, (although it is a little long) that also links to the same spot. Currently I am hosting this site on my server and don’t think Bandwidth will be a problem. Now. For the site it self. It obviously needs to be a multi-level site. The main site for information. Sub Sites for each user group. The sub sites should have one or two administrators to take care of there own user group sub site. This site would be complicated to build. There ARE pre built solutions for such a situation such as Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Services. A Microsoft solution would be out of the question because it would be tough to get any $ for putting a site together. I am working on secondary “Free” Solutions for the manager system of this site. For all of my web sites tha I build I use www.xigla.com components for the back ends and managers. These components are top notch and would be very useful. Please look at them when you get a chance. Since this would be a “Big” Job, I am wondering if there could be any assistance from AM users. Well, With the AMUG.us Domain setup, I will begin to assemble a template page. I do not want to ask for help from the community Just Yet because there would just be a flood in questions and thoughts. So, I am sorry I have Been Missing in the Void. I am back and ready to be creative in 2005. John Hubickey

This guy Rocks. Simple but already full of potential. I cant wait to see him animated.

I LIVE!!!, Wait wasent that the title to a movie? Anyway, I want us all to pick the EASYIST location for other people to be able to come. West Chester, (my house) is on the available block, but you CANT beat the After meeting Philly Cheese steak and picture of beer or two or three in philly. So I vote where ever is best to get the most new users to the meeting. I know thats not a decision but maybe philly would be good this time, then house of hubukai in early 2005. Yea, we are all busy in december but hell, an AM meeting is just the thing we need to keep our sanity. (beer works too.) maybe a poll? I am 50% / 50% Philly / West chester... Sup to you guys... Maybe Phollythis time, then WC next time.. i need time to build my HDTV-PC!!! Oh, and i started working on AM again, good for ME, ill have sometihng new to show. Thoughts? John H

Back from a short trip to Canada. What a nice country. Friendly people, good food. Anyhow, render quality is important. I caught the last 10 minuets of "Father of the Pride", new animated series on Tuesday nights and saw it in HiDef for the first time and was like "W O W"... I mean WOW squared! So now, although we should consider lowering the res of the textures, in Riche's case, I would suggest FINAL renders be don in HDTV Quality. I mean Final renders. I am doing my renders at approx. 30% HDTV Size to get the jist of what it will look like, but when I am don, I am going Full HD in size. What a difference. Unfortunately you need a video card capable of HDTV output, ATI has some of these and a little converter plug.... SO, by the time the next meeting comes around, i may have a computer hooked to the new 60" Sony for some HDTVAM. (Hmm, sounds like an idea for a web site...... www.HDTVAM.com I like it... but I guess I should at least start www.amug.us first huh. TTFN, gotta go to bed. hubukai

Vern, The Incompetent Secret Agent Animatic is awesome. Its good we have some one like you in the group to inspire us to work on our own projects and actually complete them. That is why the user group is So good!

MAAMUG Meeting #2 - By John Hubickey Can also be viewed at: http://www.hubukai.com/animationmaster.asp The second Mid Atlantic Animation Master User Group meeting went extremely well and was hosted by Don Davis. We started the meeting between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.. Chris and I arrived at Don's house at approximately two o'clock. There was an abundance of food Don had prepared for the meeting and I think the best part was Don's special chili! After having two or three bowls of chili we went in the living room where Rich was projecting some of his work up on the wall. Rich started off the meeting by showing us some of the detail of the male human character he has been working on. The level of detail in Rich's model was amazing. I would have to say that Rich's modeling and texturing skills are approaching the level of the characters in the final fantasy movie. Some of the textures Rich is using on his character are extremely large which gives him the incredible detail that he is shooting for on his models. I will try to get an image of the character Rich is working on to post on the web site. Pause, go get a beer... After Rich's demonstration we proceeded on to hair and the dynamics of hair. One of the questions that I had was how do you get hair to react to forces and gravity. Rich and Vern both answered that question by using a simple primitive and showing us all how to adjust the hair settings. It got a little confusing because hair has so many possibilities but we worked it out and rendered a short 4 second ball of flopping hair that Vern was extremely jealous of! ;-) During the whole discussion we also watched some of the Jeff Lew animating characters DVD. This DVD looks extremely helpful and I personally am planning on picking up a copy in the near future. Pause, go get a beer and in another bowl of chili....(Yum) I showed some of the stuff that I was working on since the first meeting. I was extremely happy because the first meeting encouraged me to begin working on one of my projects. Now I had some animation master fans that I can show my initial renderings and animations to. We also got a Skyrig demonstration from Rich. I love the effect of the Skyrig because it gives you a very realistic looking render. Thanks to Rich, I am now using the Skyrig lights. Here is the link to the Skyrig setup and instructions on how to use it. http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/animas/skylight/ http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/animas/skyli...structions.html Unfortunately I missed Vern's demonstration as Chris and I had to leave a little bit early. Maybe it for lucky Vern will post is project so we can all take a look at. The second Mid-Atlantic Animation Master User Group meeting was another success thanks to Don Davis and his spectacular chili and cooking skills! We are planning on having our third meeting in approximately three months.(November-ish) The details of the time and location have not been worked out yet but we will post them as soon as we have it figured out. OK, now everybody get to work on that hairball and we will hope to see you and hopefully some new people at the third Mid-Atlantic Animation Master User Group meeting. Sincerely, John Hubickey.

im bringing the burgers and dogs!!! Woo Hoo, Cant wait. hubukai

Hi All, Although i am the slowest one to post information, finally i am putting something in here to say hi! I have been working on a page (within my own site) for the Mid-Atlantic Animation Master Usergroup. You can find the link here. http://www.hubukai.com/AnimationMaster.asp I may break this out to its own web site eventually. I posted my version of the MAAMUG first meeting which was a lot of fun. John H