detbear

The Alembic file format was developed by Sony and ILM as a pipeline tool to carry their models and data from one stage to the next. It was open source at one time. Not sure if that is so now. It is very powerful exporter and has been adopted by many rendering apps in order to allow numerous 3D apps to export into them. Whereas EXR is a texture format that separated channels..........Alembic is an advanced model transfer with separated elements. Octane allows for its own PBT(Physically based textures)......So in applying those....it is optimal to use a format such as alembic. I think Alembic also has the ability to tranfer motion like mdd....... XTAZ....am I wrong about that??

:) Yes....I'm definately familiar with The Exodus Narrative. I Love that story. I doubt the industry is going to "come to it's senses and stop sinning" though Hee Hee They're having too much fun parting the red sea with there tools. Making Blockbuster Feature films like Star Wars and AAA Next Gen games like Black Ops. That doesn't mean I don't like A:M though. I'm still getting my yearly subscription

It's really very nice for artists like Colcord to mention A:M. Unfortunately its now much easier for other softwares to surpass A:M than it is for A:M to catch up with other softwares. Although we all wish that was not true. I like A:M's workflow.

Hey Everyone... Thanks so much. We are very well and things seem to be settling down. OVNI1....Hee Hee....Yes, an Ark seemed to be a good place to be when the water began to get noticably high.. My location was never flooded, but the town and county right down the street was under some serious water. Flood water rushing over and under roads can erode them really quickly. That busted out big sections of highways and roads. You guys are all great!!! Thanks so much. Kevin

Hey... We are OK. Right in the middle of it. But incredibly we are on a high elevation in the town where power/ water remained operational. Over 20 inches of rain can do some serious flooding. The roads eroded in many areas cutting towns off. We are OK. And the waters have now receded a bunch. Kevin

That's a really nice modelling job Cronos... Thanks for posting.

Hey Rodney, Just noticed that you posted here again. Thanks so much man. I wish I had the time and resources to make more of these faster. I'm working on 2 other projects. One is pending on some collaboration with Holmen. He is very busy though. The other is a never before seen project by the public or forums. Exciting Game project that may never get finished......or really started either Heee Hee But I'm really glad you enjoyed this Flash Gordon film I did. Thanks again Kevin

Ooops .....had two additional questions... 1. Is there a "Best" version of A:M to install the rig in?? 2. Is it able to run Motion captures(BVH's)??? Thanks so much.

Hey Mack, If I want to add fan bones and other things such as weights and possibly smart skin......When is the right stage to do this. I'm guessing it would be done during the initial bone placement and assignment stage, but I just thought I'd ask first Thanks, Kevin

ON THE OTHER HAND, The new 'Jungle Book' movie appears quite innovative and stunning visually. I love the "Jungle environment work in the trailor. Fascinating!! Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcgJRQWxKnw

I'm very skeptical based on the previous 2-3 productions from there. I miss Pixar's innovative years. I would love for 'The Good Dinosaur' to wipe away my doubts by being awesome though.

Matt, Yes, I have V 5 of Lumion. It has moved to all Physically based materials. Which is nice. Basically a game engine really. But very fast.

Without a heavy working knowledge of the "widget", it requires much time and trials. I think I experienced the noise Yves describes in an animated setting. Without having his expertise in the subject, it is a long road to haul. BTW.....Yves...Thanks for your efforts over the years in providing the ability to implement these types of things in A:M. I'm certainly not knocking it. As artists we always tend to complain about things we don't fully understand. If you have a massive amount of time and the eagerness to just get it to work, I'm quite sure you can get the desired result. But In my case, I have neither luxury.

Matt, I tried to play around with it about a year ago, but the results for me were horrific. I guess if I had written the code for it, it would make sense, but it was ghastly. The render times for me were never-ending only to see a great mess at the end. It seems to me like a stone age tool compared to things like Element, IRAY, Lumion, Unity, Marmoset, etc.....

In both Cases..... with either tool, it results in a real jumble of a mess. Better off doing it by hand which is a really miserable task. Well maybe if I were working with some low patch model like Tom or a square box it may work.

Congrats!!!! Fuchur!!!!! The Lady bug looks great. Nice textures on it too. Awesome work everyone. I am very pleased to have gotten Third Place. Thanks for all the votes. Robert....Great reveal. Lots of work in that. Fae Alba and myself request that our HUGE lottery winnings be delivered all in pennies...... Clean crisp pennies..

Any updates on the reveal......

Do you mean the "Correct Normals" function. If so, that crashes A:M everytime for me. Especially since it is a more complex model I guess.

Matt, I'm not familiar with the nuts and bolts of the programing, but it could be you are correct. I think the hardest thing is fishing through all the little yellow lines. It's so hard to see in many cases. BUT if you had an option like "Show normals as color patches", one could easily pick out the ones that had the odd color. The speckles or groups of speckles.... If the software can have patches one way or the other(And it obviously does)....I figured there may be some way to color the patches according to the direction they're facing. Who knows?

RobCat..... I know it looks different than a normal, but as crazy as it appears....that's actually what it is. David..... I looked at my version of 18 and in fact I am on 18L. So this could indeed be the issue. Thanks for you guys input. I need to upgrade, but that's tough in the middle of a project. I may port it back into V17 to flip things. Is there a better solution to fixing normals. I find that while Steffen's plug-in does help some places, it creates other undesireble "flips" than were correct originally. Thanks, Kevin

I don't know about you guys, but I'm really struggling to repair normals when they appear like this on the screen. V 18 is what I'm in. ALSO....A great feature request would be to have an option to color the patches "red" or "blue" depending on what direction. Then have an option to "flip all red" or "Flip all blue" THAT WOULD BE GOLDEN

T.... Also, if you have some camera motion, you can track the footage to get it to match your animation. I think there was a free tracking app somewhere at Hash that was being discussed. Maybe it was in the "Third Party" part of the forums. Other Match moving apps like Syntheyes work well, but they cost a few bucks. If you want to overlay shadows and things like that you can ignite the "front projection" feature.

That puzzled me too. But at the time I couldn't see, click on, or unhide anything on the other side. It was like something invisible was there and locked. Good news is....I got rid of the spline by running another and that solved things. Honestly, you never know what's going to happen under the hood of an imported obj... They can be very deceptive. Often having two or three splines on top of each other with no visible indication. Thanks for thinking through this a bit with me. It was a real strange thing. It almost felt like I was clicking two cp's at once with one of them being invisible and unselectable.

Hey RC, Yes....i looked into those things and didn't find those to be the case. However, I am woring with an obj import and had used the snap feature. Still......if there are two cps there, selecting them individually and erasing or adding a new spline should've resulted in "smooth" bias.... but it had that weird result. I erased the spline and ran a new one all the way across. The new one worked better. Another new shapeshift in the splinework is that when you add a cp, you no longer can easily pick which side it's going to appear on. the splines seem to be more locked to a direction.

It seems like the spline architecture has radically shifted. I've been noticing strange weirdnesses over the last few updates and it seems that they don't behave as they once did. I tried to simply combine two splines on my most recent model and the bias handles remain separated for some reason on each side resulting in a "peak." This is not ideal if you want a flowing line. Attached shows the splines/ bias....before and after joining. This is very weird.