Tom

Thank you for the reply...good advice! Tom

Thanks Rob! There might be over a week between switching my old OS to the new OD on my four computers and I am sorta working on something right now in AM. So I'm trying to figure this out with the minimum of inconvenience. Thanks for your suggestion... Tom

Thanks..I tried the link you had for "license key" and it sent me to a carpet store(?) Is there another link that could explain how to try reusing the license key? Thanks! Tom

Hello- I have been using Windows XP for years and because Microsoft is abandoning support for Windows XP I am about to upgrade to Windows 7. My AM web subscription is due in 4 days and I won't get the new Windows 7 in place for another 10 days to two weeks. If I renew AM and am sent a subscription code to be used to activate the new yearly license, will I need a new code when I upgrade the OS a few days later? I have been using AM everyday so I don't want to have a lag in service. Will the new bought subscription number work with both the old and the new Operating Systems? Or will Jason or Heath need to send me a follow up code? Any info is welcome.. Thanks! Tom

Hello all- I just saw a news article that says a UPS store here in San Diego (Kearny Mesa) is now having a 3D printer on the premises. People will be able to walk in with a file and print out their work as a 3D prototype. The 3D printers seem high end, meaning they are a cut above what the lowest pro-sumer models presently are. Don't know what the cost will be but the fact that you can walk in with a flash drive and walk out with your creation is pretty cool. If you don't live near San Diego, you might check the UPS store website and see if they are planning a 3D printer for a store near you. Best, Tom

Thanks John ...(aka Tinkering Gnome!) Tom

Cool! Many thanks to both of you for the help! These give me something to play around with... Best, Tom

Hello all- Just a quick question. I was checking out the UCLA Lab of Neural Imaging and came across a cool picture of a brain. I was trying to duplicate it in AM. I even thought that there was a Dark Tree shader that approximated x rays but couldn't find it. Anyway, in AM I took 2 spheres, crumpled the bigger one slightly and made it transparent. Added a color map and high specularity and came up with something that doesn't look even remotely what I intended. Any ideas how to achieve the effect on the left? Many thanks! Tom

Cool Trick ...Thanks! I also realized that even though I couldn't import the Shag emitter splines into other objects, I could always import other objects into the spline object window. Kind of work backwards... Save the same hair as identical multiple objects, and then import the characters into those windows. Thanks again for all the feedback! Tom

Thanks for the suggestions robcat! Those were all good workaround tries but unfortunately I couldn't get any of them to work...[darn] I wonder why they software ignores the "Shag Emitter" when doing things like this... I know you can export a model in motion from the Choregraphy window as another separate mode. For instance...if you have a walk cycle you can export any of those individual walking frames a separate model. Is there any way to export two models as a new combined model? Thanks for any insights... Tom

Thanks for the feedback! With 3D printing coming down in price it is great to have a software program like AM to play with! thanks again, Tom

Hello- I was playing around with hair and decided that because of the complexity of the final model, I would create the hair separately as another "object" and then copy, paste it onto the final model when the hair was groomed perfect. That seemed to work OK when the Hair was a "material" that was applied to model "patches" however, when I tried the same thing using hair on a SINGLE spline with a "Shag emitter" material applied it only copied the spline and NOT the hair "Shag emitter" with it. Has anyone else been able to copy, paste a SINGLE spline with a shag emitter applied, from one model window to another successfully? The benefits would seem to be that sometimes hair can be a bit tricky to get just right. When using the grooming tool etc it can take a bit of time to get just the right effect for a certain "look". If an artist had a group of characters with the same hair style it would be great to create a single model of just that hair style and then copy paste it into all the appropriate models without having to re-sculpt the hair for each one. Has anyone been able to do this with SINGLE splines with "Shag emitter" applied? Thanks for any tricks or work-arounds on this one... Tom

Thanks for the feedback! John also added another good question... Is there a way to define depth in the walls of a model. For example, if there was a standing character, would the printer always print it as a complete solid? Or can you define that the walls of the figure have a certain thickness, and leave a hollow space in the inside? Does anyone know? Thanks again, Tom

Hello- I apologize if this has been answered before but I did a search for "3d printing" and ".STL" in the AM forums search and it came up blank...so here goes: When exporting an .STL file with AM17, does the mesh need to be continuous to be recognized by the printer?...or can there be multiple models intersecting each other, without there being one unified mesh? (see picture)... In this simplistic picture there is a sphere (figure A) with some of the points pulled out..and then there is a sphere (figure with a cylinder intersecting. Are both of these models "legal" to the 3D printer? Will both models "print out" accurately? Thanks for any insights... Tom

And just to clarify the "COIK" that was mentioned in the previous post... I had been playing around with "Cloth Sims" feature in AM and was really enjoying the beautiful ballets as the cloth is rendered frame by frame...while the simulation is running. So I mistakenly thought that "Newton Sims" would do the same "frame by frame" rendering... where the user could enjoy it. It wasn't until Rob posted that movie that I realized my error. Nothing like seeing a first-person hands-on account to make it "COIK". Thanks again to everyone who took the time to help! Tom

Rob- Thank you so much for the movie!!! My father had a saying called "COIK" (kinda like "coin" with a "k"). It stood for "Clear Only If Known". Which was his way of dealing with new technology. And this is a perfect example of that. Here is my mistake. During the "SimulateNewton" action I was expecting to see the cylinders drop in the Choreography window...however the simulation was so fast that nothing moved (!!!) and I didn't bother to check the little markers in the timeline window to verify whether anything had been rendered... ....and I neglected to scrub the little marker to test the animation. So by just trusting my eyes I was missing the whole thing. And I wouldn't have problem solved it without your and the other kind members on the list! Another hurdle solved with the Hash helpers. Many thanks! Tom

I unzipped the simple Newton project and tried it on both my machines (I have two Hash Web subscriptions) and the Newton simulate did not work on either one... Wow..I am puzzled. I did not change or modify the model or project at all. Only loaded it and right clicked in the Choreography window to try and simulate Newton. The machine calculated like it normally would for any simulation but the models did not fall from the sky like they should have (as shown by the movie). I realized that there are two possibilities available when you are trying to get the Newton to simulate. You can right click on a model (highlight that particular model) and then when you right click you get "NewtonPhysicsHelper" and when you simple right click in the Choreography without highlighting anything, ... you get "SimulateNewton". I actually tried both options and when I highlighted just the model... I got the same error message which showed up (see first post at top of thread). I know you have to check a settings in the "options" window when you want particles/hair to render. Is there some other place in the software that needs to be told to render Newton physics? Thanks for any insights anyone might have... Tom BTW - I am running Windows XP professional version and AM v17.a 32 bit.

Thank you so much! I was just going to ask someone to post a simple project because some of the old Newton projects seem to work and others don't. Thanks for your kindness. Tom

Hello- I was attempting the tutorial on Newton Physics... the one where you have 3 cylinders that are supposed to tumble on themselves. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=A...st&id=19636 Each cylinder is set to be a dynamic object and the ground is static. Pretty basic stuff, but I get this error message when I right click on one of the cylinders in Choreography: I am using V17a and after receiving the error message I copied the "explode.hxt" from the V16 Hxt folder into the v17 Hxy folder ,thinking that might help...(because there was no "explode.hxt" in the v17 folder). Didn't help... Has anyone had similar issues...or any suggestions? Many thanks! Tom

OK...Thanks!

I haven't looked through all the models on the AM Misc Disk...but do you know of any pre-rigged face models that are already boned with Lite Face? It would be very helpful to study a model that is already rigged... Thanks for any info Tom

I did come across Shaun Freeman's video on the AM-pro series training video from Siggraph(?). I'll have to give that a second look! Thanks Tom

Hello- I was revisiting the Lite Face Rigging and I wondered if anyone has ever posted a tutorial video showing the best approach? The pdf file (which has a tutorial printed out) is very nice but I personally seem to have the information to sink in quicker when I see someone actually SHOW things in real time.... many thanks for any links of video face rigging tutorials. Tom

Thanks for all the suggestions! Hmmmmm.... I rechecked everything and the step was set to "1" and the FPS was set to 30. I rendered out individual frames with no problem so maybe that is the best approach...As long as it will work correctly with individual frames, I don't think I will sweat where the glitch was, whether my own human error or some weird software issue peculiar to my machine. Thanks again! Tom

Hello- I just purchased a web licenses for V. 17.a. I started a project and rendered a scene that was 130 frames long as an avi. When I loaded the avi into After Effects to do some tweaking... the length of the avi turned out to be only 64 frames long (?) I tried rendering a QuickTime movie but it also only rendered about half of what I had told the Render engine to do. I am a long time user of AM but can't figure out if I'm missing something simple. Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks! Tom