detbear

This is why it's so important for more interest to be placed on exporting animation out of A:M. Just my opinion. But it is the future. If you've never worked with a real time rendering engine before, it's hard to describe the power it gives in seeing your project and making important changes. It's a wonderful experience being able to easily tweak lighting, shadows, textures(bumps) in real time. My experience with it can be compared to putting in a great movie and being able to mess with all of the lighting and effects as you flip through it frame by frame. And what's even cooler is the ability to just say....."Hey...I think a shrub/ car/ etc. should be right there."...and add one in without having to re-render. I think it's a great opportunity to get in the door with these engines via A:M. But it needs to be a convenient and desirable process rather than "already do-able." Long live A:M William

Single user license for Z-Brush is currently $795. And I would say worth every penny if you have the extra budget. Artists have indicated to me that 3D Coat has even better UV methods than Zbrush. But I don't know how well it can translate back onto a spline/ patch model in A:M. That is where the troubles can come. UVing is extremely inconvenient in A:M as compared to newer methods being utilized in other software. Getting a ZBrush Model back into A:M includes the textures created in ZBrush as well. According to William Sutton, Zbrush textures/ UV's can be brought back into A:M and placed on a model. But I haven't ever done it.

Disney.....as well as the other top animation houses are no longer limited to the types of rigging we deal with here. Their rigs consist of multiple systems is one. From what I understand, lengthy input comes from the animators and the rigs are tweaked for the moods/ expressions of each sequence. The squashing/ stretching/ morphing is not nearly as limited from what I see.

Hey MAYAman. I remember that file if I'm thinking of the same one. It should be floating around somewhere.

I wonder if matt was actually talking about Mesh animation which relies on the exporting cp points movements after they are animated within hash via rig in Hash. When I think of point clouds, i think of things like facial mocap as with the FACESHIFT application that was recently bought by Apple. It relies on depth points in real time to pick up facial motion.

Thanks Gerald!!! That's good news.

I wasn't sure where to place this topic. It's probably already been discussed somewhere. Does A:M function on the Windows 10 platform? I'm upgrading out of necessity and will no longer be on past versions of windows. I doubt I'll downgrade to Windows 7 or 8 on a new system. I will however use A:M on my older systems if it won't run on Windows 10.

Forgive my mis-spelling of Hanna Barbera in the thread title? I always seem to get it wrong.

That's the beauty of 3d.....it doesn't go off model. You have to work from a model sheet and ignore the problems they had on the series where time ran out and money. The original series has fantastic moments and also struggled with extreme deadlines where animators had to be pulled from the Flinstones to get shots done. Unfortunately, that resulted in artists who were not quite up to the task to deliver the quality of the Quest series. Here's a fantastic example of Race Bannon from the model sheets..... Done by John Picha: xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3aPCxUiV0s

Hey Shelton, Awesome.. Will be back in touch soon.

This is a random question for you guys/ gals. Anyone interested in modelling/ rigging the Jonny Quest(1964 original series) Characters?? :)

Well said Rodney. All great points. I completely agree and understand the limitations of developing "new" features. Money and time are obstacles.

This is why A:M really should revisit it's export of mesh animations(and exports in general) and test them in various engines to improve the transfers. It seems as though no real-time solutions are going to be available in A:M anytime soon. BUT I do think the exporter quality and variety could be improved for faster and more use able mesh animation exports. Just my opinion, but this would patch the gap until real time rendering solutions could be achieved in A:M. Imagine if A:M had a special export to AE specifically streamlined for use in Element. Or a dedicated system to export FBX without having to fight through the current workarounds.

A while back I had to create a box and add subdivisions to it. It took some time. So I created some subdivided boxes with a bevel on the edge. This is certainly not the best way to create a beveled box I'm sure....But may save some "spline time" It's a lot easier to erase splines than adding them in. Also, the "Split patch" wizard comes in handy. Bevel box sub divisions.mdl

I started this at the end of my recent thread in "Showcase" but decided to move it into this WIP section instead. I'm working on several new videos for my channel and this is one that is about to begin. I've been wrestling with whether to produce this one first or to begin on one of two other short spoofs. Anyway....this is a Star Wars Themed spoof starring my character Larry. Several drawbacks come to the front in making this though. Here's a sample image of my work so far:

Hey... Thanks for your replies. I don't have mirror mode on when it happens.....so I don't think that's it. Although I have been known to forget that mirror mode was on and really messed a model or two up as a result I have also noticed this crash if I copy from one model and then paste into another. I'm not quite ready to add another install yet. I will just remember to save before I copy paste. It won't be long before I upgrade anyhow.

Hey Guys, I'm in this version 18. And on PC. There has been a consistent crash that has happened when I copy a group of splines/ cps and paste them in the same model. It doesn't happen every time, but I would say it does happen about once or twice a day. Has this been fixed in later V18 version. Thanks

I would really like to get this one done though. I think it could be fun.

I haven't made a decision whether I'm going to move forward yet with this one. There are several others in the works and/or being thought out. Not sure if this will warrant the time ahead of the others. I have about 4 things under development. There are drawbacks to doing a Star Wars themed spoof. Eventually I plan to complete this. But I'm deciding whether to do it before the others. (moved image for later post)

Cool... Nice job Matt. I like the way the Cupid's smoke trail becomes the heart and Pizza.

Rodney.... You have some great suggestions in there. I thought about adding a dark vignette early on, but got to the end and just missed the opportunity. It would benefit from that. Larry's skin color as you mentioned is odd. That green/ yellow encode result made it even more noticeable It was totally my fault somehow. Like the crab on "Finding Nemo" said when he just couldn't help but keep doing what they warned him not to......"I am shame"... I like that you mentioned the acting choices. There's a brief time just before the Tiger is revealed that was difficult to keep Larry occupied. I came up with a few ideas for things for Larry to do. But in the end it didn't work out. So I decided to have another turn with his head. Seemed a bit awkward but I decide to keep it the way it was. It's really hard to keep a character "alive" while doing nothing.

Oh yeah..... Also I should mention that I did experiment with darkening and lightening layers to keep the focus models from blending too much into the background. I definately used blur for this as well. Those subtle differences do help what the viewer sees clearly. Sometimes you just have to flip a coin and call it done. In the real world much of the dark areas and blurred places would never exist.

Hey.... YES Rodney, Most of the seemingly crazy things had to be thought out. The multi colored tracks were added because the first render(with them all the same color) gave the appearance that the tracks were moving in reverse. So I went in and individually colored each track. but spaced the dark ones where they are far enough apart to show which direction they are traveling. The blurring of things was a really difficult Composite. I layered 3 separate background, prop, and backplate layers in AE.... Then I actually masked and key animated them so that each had a separate level of "Lens" blurr. This was very difficult and didn't turn out quite like I wanted. But it did create a fake DOF that I could control like I wanted. COLOR CORRECTION......For some reason, the encoding came out wayyyyyyy too green. I still need to investigate that. The red buttons are more of an oversight than anything. THE BACK PLATE....The back plates(trees, sky) were created/ rendered in Lumion and then stamped as images onto Flat models in the back. SO the lighting had to be matched between these two worlds. THE tank track rig was a real challenge. It took much more time than I thought it would. In the end, I fit one complete rotation on a slider. I became a little more itchy to finish. there were some real hurdles that I ran into. I think the sheer amount of work and hats I have to wear takes it's toll on the process. Motivation is the only budget I have. In my case, I'm the story guy, the storyboarder, the modeller, the layout artist, the character animator, the rigger, the texture artist. The environment artist, the lighter, the compositer, the renderer, effects artist, the video editor, etc....etc...etc. In this case I had to make the sound effects and music track from scratch. The arrangement and edit of the sound took more than I had anticipated. Even though it's short, it was more than I thought it was going to be.

Hey Matt, Thanks a lot!!!! Yes... I use AO in all my projects. Unless the style requires that there be no AO. But my stuff always needs it for the more "realistic shadows." BUT as you know, A:M's ambient occlusion renders wayyyyyy slow. In A:M I use the SBAO option. Actually, I use to use the "Jenpy" plugin, but since A:M added the SBAO option.....I use it instead. ALSO.......I always render things separately in layers. The props, background, characters, etc......are rendered separately. AND I normally do a flat shaded render pass that captures only the ground shadows and AO. In Post, I overlay this in AE using the "MULTIPLY" mode. With this you can control your shows some in AE. color/ darkness/ transparency/ etc.

In getting this short done, I had to throw together a Tiger Tank. Here is my basic Tiger Tank refitted to A:M. It's EXTREMELY Simple and not detailed at all. I had to get something in there that did the job for the video. Maybe someone here can improve this Tiger for the community to use. (More detail/ better tracks/ better rig/ etc) Anyway....here is the model I constructed in all it's simplicity. TIGER TANK AM Version.mdl Cheers, William