phatso

Trivia: lotsa people think NBC's 3 notes - G,E,C - refer to General Electric Corp, which started and owned NBC for a while. The problem is, GE sold NBC right around the time the 3 notes were first used. Dunno if anybody knows for sure, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

Hmm. I seem to have found the problem with disappearing lines in the time line. Whenever I copy and paste a keyframe, from then on the lines don't show up. If I click on the choreography, the lines are there, if I can sort them out...but not when I click on individual objects. Closing A:M and reopening temporarily fixes the problem. If I copy a keyframe by writing down the coordinates, moving the cursor, and typing in the coordinates the problem does not occur. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug? Still using V13, don't want to migrate to V19 til the current project is in the can.

Thanks for the clarification, I'm going to subscribe to v19 as soon as my last deposit clears, then we'll see what happens.

Ah. Clear now, thankee kindly. Now that I think about it, best if I do not try to talk Jason into a multi-seat deal, because the other computers are XP and who knows what will happen if I try to run V19 on them. As long as V19 runs fairly glitch-free on my W7 machine, and I can import the models & chors I make in V13/15 on the XP machines, I will be happy.

Okay, please elucidate. 18/19 won't run on W7, or I won't be able to import V13/15 files?

Hmm, lessee...my other computers are XP, and I'm going to keep using them cuz they're never on the web and I never import files, only export, so I ain't much 'fraid of viruses. So yer sayin' if I bite the bullet and license the current version...18?...it'll run just fine on my W7 machine, and be compatible with version 13/15 files I bring in from the other machines? Cuz I can't pay for V18 licenses for all my computers, and I shouldn't have to, I only use one seat at a time. Tho if I keep gaining weight, I'll have a seat and a half. Am I right?

Rodney, switching to direct3d helped...it doesn't hang any more, doesn't lose patches, rarely loses decals. Timeline still not working right, the lines always show for camera and choreography, but not for individual objects or bones. Sometimes I can get them back (for a while) by completely closing and re-opening A:M. Can't really be a video card problem because it was happening before I got the card, when I was just using the computer's native capabilities. Something else just started happening. I'm getting long lists of "attributes" in the pws. Where did they come from? Dankey Showin'

Hmm. Thought I posted this last nite, but don't see it. I've made about 1,000 models in A:M, but only now started to animate. I must be doing something wrong: A:M loses things. About every 5 minutes I get a real time render error message, so I save, and when I re-open the project, patches and decals are missing. Also, even more of a problem, in the timeline the lines and keyframes show up...and then they don't. Dunno what I'm doing to cause this, they just disappear, and they don't even wait for a save/reopen to do it. I click on a group and see the lines, click on another group, then come back to the first group and the timeline is blank. Along the same lines: transparency info goes haywire. The workspace and timeline will show 100% transparency, and the object will be transparent, but about the 3rd save, the object goes opaque, even though the workspace and timeline still show transparent. System: Optiplex i7, Nvidia Quadro K620 card, 2 monitors (4 monitors planned). Saving up for the latest A:M version, in the meantime working with V13 and V15 discs. Graci graci

The best addition for using A:M is a second monitor. Amen amen amen amen. I have three monitors and just got a new video card so I can go to five. Two of my monitors came from a landfill (one single pixel broken, NBD) and one from Salvation Army for $10. So it isn't a big financial hardship.

Hmm, that does change things around...hafta experiment a bit, I've never worked with some of those settings. Thanks for the pointers, I think I can get it from here.

That does help, thanks. Reducing initial velocity also helps. And adding a third surface, a 100% transparent copy of the bottle exterior helps. Each reduces the number of stray sprites. I tried still another surface, and the alpha-transparent squares around the sprites started to become visible. I'm not animating this yet, I'm just creating a still image, so I can go thru and remove the few remaining strays later. So, problem solved for the moment...still kind of odd that this happens. Yes, I'm talking about specular reflections. Glass has always been a challenge for me, I can't get it to look right. I could get something useful if I didn't have those sprites to deal with.

Also: can I get the lights to reflect in the glass without turning on Reflections? Or fake it somehow? With hundreds of sprites, the render time goes through the roof, and all those reflections jumble up the image.

Hi yall. I want to show gas molecules bouncing around in a bottle. I've got Collisions turned on to contain the molecules, and for the most part it works, but about 5% of them zip right through the glass. Judging from the angles, many of these are escaping on 2nd or 3rd bounce. (Drag set to 0.) Still using V13 (blush). Any ideas?

You know what? If you do quit to work on your animation project full time, it will stop being "what I want to do." Anything a person does all the time becomes boring, even sex - and once you have no income, you will feel compelled to work more quickly than you'd like. When you stop pushing the project and it starts pushing you, it's no longer fun, and you'll come to hate it. Alternate game: stay at your job, but work less. I don't know if you can get away with telling your employer, "I can work here half time or zero time, take your pick." You might plead medical necessity, real or invented, to reduce the chances your employer will decide you're just being a prick and fire you out of annoyance. Then you'll have about as much free time to work on the animation project as you can handle without the juices drying up. This approach has saved my sanity. I've been working on a writing/animating project for years. If I had not done it, and worked full time at a regular job, I'd have gone crazy. If I had quit to work on my project, I would have gone broke long ago. This way I have enough income to plow on with the project for as long as it takes.

I would experiment with distortion boxes. It seems to me that would be a good way to show how normal physics breaks down.

I dunno, the bending is what convinces my eye/brain that it's really paper.

That works pretty well. I can think of all sorts of magical uses for that.....

Emptying a vacuum cleaner full of sawdust onto a fire produces much the same effect. Luckily, we were having a Minnesota cold snap and I was wearing a jacket, so only the hands got burned. I feel your pain. Literally. Tuckerville...no Sophie? :-)

"I am paralyzed by the task of trying to get it exactly right." And if it isn't exactly right, it's almost worthless. People have no idea at all about how hard and time consuming it is to make quality instructional material. Lessee... it's a year and three months since I showed you the stuff I was working on for book 1. I'm just finishing book 4, books 5 and 6 will probably take me until November, then I gotta learn HTML5 and then finally I'll be ready to go back and start animating this stuff. Sigh. I'd really like to lend a hand but at this point I'm snowed under. Sigh again.

Hey robcat, remember that electron-thru-wire project I was working on? This would seem to be ideal. Can you elaborate or do a tute or something? Speaking of which, I got your first video tutes to play using the VLC player, learned a few things. More on the way?

Well, I did but I had the cross section lined up incorrectly. Thanks for the example, Robert. That did the trick. Make sure the spline ring is centered on the x y origin before sweeping.

Slightly off topic - one of the very few things I know about rigging. People have a tendency to place bones in the middle of arms and legs, but we're not built that way. Check out your own arm. In Disney's golden age, their training for newly hired artists included the observation that most organic things have a bony side and a fleshy side. To my very untrained eye, that's one of the things that identifies Disney animation. From a rigging perspective, that means identifying the bony side and putting the bone nearer that side. At least in my limited experience, that helps movement look real.

Robcat is referring to the horizontal splines that define the bottom of the top box and the top of the bottom box. Yes, there are two stacked splines after joining, and as I am a much clumsier animator than he is, I have made this mistake - it causes all sorts of problems. Before joining, select one spline or the other, and delete. That leaves the issue of how A:M will interpret the vertical splines when they join. Occasionally, depending on how the box was constructed, A:M will decide to join them oddly. Then you have to delete both horizontal splines, join the vertical ones, and add the horizontal ones back in. Just takes a minute.

I always thought it was interesting that Kodachrome was developed by a couple of "Leopolds," both musicians - L. Godowsky Jr. and L. Mannes, who were known as "God and Man" at Kodak. After Kodachrome they never bothered with chemistry again. Godowsky became a performing violinist and Mannes succeeded his dad as president of the Mannes School of Music.