phatso
-
Posts
622 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by phatso
-
-
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?
-
Yeah, I know, no discussing finances...maybe we can get special dispensation from the Big Guy. All I know is, nobody is going to go too far out on a limb without some idea of the numbers.
RC, there is no question whatever that it can be done better. But everyone who is thinking of becoming involved should be aware that doing it better is ten times harder than just doing it, and doing it really well is ten times harder yet. In my ebooks, I have often spent half a day pushing the wording of a single paragraph back and forth, trying to find that magic arrangement that will make the material not just understandable, but obvious.
Could a truly optimized ebook, with videos and, of course, animations, so light up A:M that it moves to the forefront for small and medium sized users? Sure. All it takes is money, people who know both A:M and writing, and about 20,000 man-hours.
Re: the tech ref, profitable to be sure, but that was in the rah-rah days. Writing a comprehensive study guide is a bigger project with a smaller potential audience.
I'm not trying to throw a wet blanket on this project, I'm trying to find a way to do it that's realistic enough to not collapse midstream. Even jacking up the purchase price $50 might not hurt volume if people understood the value proposition. But does A:M sell enough copies so $50 per study guide would bring the author/s enough money to compensate them for all that labor?
There is one other possibility, a monthly e-mag that's basically an electronic version of 3DWorld but devoted solely to A:M. Every A:M buyer would get, and be charged for, a 1-year subscription.
-
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.
-
"My original vision was that we'd get 12 people and each would do a new tut and BANG we'd be done."
Here's my experience on that. I took on a project that's supposed to total six books. First book of twelve chapters, six had been submitted by various authors. They didn't track, they overlapped in some areas and failed to cover others, they contradicted each other. Most were badly written and the authors didn't stick to the topics assigned. Three other chapters had been assigned to authors who produced nothing. The last three were never assigned; the project manager had given up and decided to write those himself. He never wrote anything. This was a paying proposition, with the promise of royalties, and still the performance was abysmal.
So I rewrote six chapters, wrote the other six fresh, and wrote books two and three. I wrote most of book four, but there's one chapter where I didn't feel qualified, so I started asking around for another writer. After a long search, I found one who made promises but has given me nothing except something he previously wrote. That will be useful in book five, but I find my poorly qualified self writing the chapter in book four because it's the only way it will get done and it's the only thing holding up publication.
Timeline: when I was in Dallas I was finishing book 2. Now I'm finishing book 4. That's about one book every nine months. By that reckoning I'm still a year and a half from finishing the project, though I tell myself I just darn well better not be. I'm not discouraged yet - maybe by October I will be - because I still think this thing can make me some money. If I didn't, I wouldn't have started on it.
So, as I say - if the A:M community wants a new TAoA:M, the A:M community needs to figure out how some $$$ can come of it. My vote would be to simply raise the price of a subscription. Anybody who values his/her time would know that the shortened learning curve more than offsets the extra dollars.
Somebody must know the answer to the question I asked before: how many subscriptions to A:M are sold every year?
-
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? :-)
-
(SMACK FORHEAD) So two seconds after I post, I figure it out:
1. Remove anything remotely advanced from the book.
2. Reassign those pages to more detailed instruction on the basics. The aim should be to get the newbie up to complete mastery of the UI, the simplest modeling, and the simplest animating as efficiently as possible. At the back of the book, include maybe 3 pages of teaser for book 2.
3. Print a second book detailing the stuff taken out of the first book. Sell it.
4. Print a third book on more advanced techniques. Sell it.
5. Print a fourth book...
Thus the necessary source of continuing revenue to pay the writers etc. If this suggests unmanageable printing costs, do it in e-book form - I've always thought that's how an animation learning guide should be done anyway.
-
Wow, a 6-month gap with no posts! I hate to be a wet blanket, but this is going to be a hyooj project. I oughta know.
My problem with the TAoA:M is that it's so oriented toward immediate results - "Here, look what you can do with almost no learning curve!" - that you come out of it significantly underprepared to progress on your own. I'm reminded of chord organs of the 1960s, where you had buttons under your left hand that played whole chords, so you didn't have to learn them. You got books with tunes written out for the right hand, with numbers for the buttons you were supposed to push. Problem was, when you got to the end of each book, there was nothing to do but go out and buy another book - you never learned to play on your own.
To me, trying to learn A:M years ago, the most glaring omission was a lack of detailed discussion of the UI, going through each tool and showing what it does. Even 1.5yr ago, looking over Robcat's shoulder, I learned a lot about the UI that I hadn't known. Project chapters should be interspersed with UI and procedure chapters, often very short.
My gut feeling is that, as badly needed as this is, it isn't going to happen this decade unless we figure out some way for the participants to get paid. I have always thought that we're dealing with an A:M V17 product with about V6 documentation, and that it's the principal barrier to getting A:M more into the mainstream. The saddest part is that the more advanced features never get used by the vast majority, not because they're too advanced, but because users never get past the basics. I personally have done probably 400 simple models in my work, but almost no animation. I still don't know how to copy a model without losing the rig. I know you're going to say "here, look at this thread," but how are beginners to look stuff up when they don't yet know what they're looking for?
Just out of curiosity - how many A:Ms are sold each year and what's the current going rate? (I'm still using V13.) How much would the per-subscription price have to rise to compensate the participants? I understand that the economics of animation software have radically changed.
-
Sure, if that's the intent. I ran across a guy who went through and "corrected" all the "errors" in some composition by Bach. What an idiot.
-
"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.
-
About never permitting silence (except for during a song), that is THE rule for sound tracks. Even a little ambient sound disguises the splices between the more important sounds.
Even the pros sometimes screw this up. I remember listening to the soundtrack from Jungle Book over headphones. Of course, that film was made back in the day of analog tape recorders, so there was some hiss under the dialog, clearly audible. And it was very obvious that each voice actor recorded their lines separately and then they were spliced together, because the hiss would go away between lines. Even a tiny little bit of background jungle sounds would have corrected this.
Trademark (Sound Mark) Examples
in Open Forum
Posted
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.