phort99

Is there a way in Animation Master or maybe through a plugin that allows you to apply an animation such as an AVI or an MOV and stamp it onto an object either as a decal or a texture? From what I can see the only plausible method is to save it as frames and keyframe the transparency of each frame, but this is extremely impractical. When I try to apply an MOV as a decal it crashes the program (resulting in 1 lost model due to not saving) and I can't figure out how to add an image to a texture object in a project. I can't even figure out how to save a 24-bit AVI to try using that, and GIFs (the original file format) are somehow entirely unsupported by the program (A big inconvenience which forces me to recompress my images in another format making them look worse). Any help would be appreciated, but from what I can see, frankly I'd be better off using Cinema 4D. I have a deadline of Friday night, making this highly inconvenient. In an entirely unrelated note that should probably be left to another thread, how does importing 3D models from polygon-based programs work, exactly? For instance, how does it convert to splines, does it juse peak every point?

Yep, you got it! Thanks for the quick reply! I enabled that not knowing what it was at some point and didn't disable it. I was about to try Cosmic Bowling and it was turning into a really confusing mash with that enabled, so I gave up on it 'till I could get this fixed. Thanks again!

I'm encountering a bug (or perhaps a feature) where, during animation, characters and objects leave 4 ghosts behind them in addition to their current state. These don't appear to be a rendering problem as they appear as solid 3D models appearing on even intervals. This hadn't been happening until a while ago, and I'm not sure what I did (maybe an accidental key command?) to cause it. This picture is an example of what I'm talking about, from the "take a walk" tutorial, as this serves as the best example. From what I can tell, it leaves one of these ghosts behind on every keyframe, though I could be wrong. This problem occurs on all projects with any animation, and is particularly annoying on "can you say that" since his face becomes a mash of lips, eyebrows, etc., and because having 5x as much to render significantly slows down playback unless on the lowest quality. Only the current state appears when rendering, though. I've had experience with the 3D programs Ray Dream 3D (now extinct) and Cinema 4D (still using). I've used both of these much longer than I have A:M, and believe it or not, I actually think A:M has a steeper learning curve in general. I do, however, prefer the smoother spline-based modelling system of A:M as well as more flexible animation in regards to bones (never could get them to work in Cinema 4D.). One more thing (rant, rave, super-long post), I've been having some trouble with instability and crashes, particularly when using "undo" when manipulating or deleting points. If I try to undo after deleting a point, often it won't come back at all or will appear in some random place 16 feet below the model, or it might just give me an error and flat-out crash.