Roger

It's easy once you know how. Maybe I'll practice rigging Tom before I try doing my dragon character. Is there a big difference when the character has oddly shaped legs? Thom has legs that go straight down but my dragon has really thick upper legs that kinda go out at an angle.

How about "force a character through an arbitrary opening", say, a keyhole? Perhaps Thom is on one side of a door and a black hole is on the other side, sucking him through the keyhole (in reality the black hole would rip apart the door and everything else, but this is a special case where its gravity only affects the particles in Thom's body).

Rob, Just watched the rigging basics video and have to admit you make it look so easy. Was there a reason you chose to use a fan bone instead of a smart skin for the knee joint? Also, if you were rigging Thom's torso, how many bones would you use for the spine? Would you use 2, 3 or more? I'm curious because it seems kind of arbitrary and I noticed that TSM seems to add a lot of spine bones, and I've seen other people using a lot of bones for the spine.

She didn't seem terribly "hipster-y"...at least, there was no mention of artisanal cheeses or fair trade coffee. I've never really been trendy or "with it", though (they keep changing what "it" is).

I remember hearing somewhere (perhaps in a post from Martin himself) that AM works better on AMD cpus (would be interesting to know the technical reason for this, is there some enhanced instruction set AMD is using that Intel isn't?). What is the performance difference? If it is in the neighborhood of 15-20%, that; along with the much cheaper per core cost, might make it worth considering AMD cpus for a renderbox. Anyway, if anyone knows, I'd be interested in getting a confirmation.

I struggle with some of the same things. I've thought about farming out rigging and have spoken with forum members (Robcat being one of them) but I feel like it should be something I should be able to do, it is just a big stumbling block right now. From one standpoint, I look at it like "well probably is not rigging his own models" so it certainly can't be too out there to delegate work to others (provided you are paying or sharing the credit or both) but from another angle it seems a bit like cheating somehow. Maybe I'm just being silly about it. Another thing that trips me up (and I suspect others) is we look at Pixar shorts (or anyone really talented) and become daunted by trying to match that look or that quality level. I think that is a lot more common with CG than other types of animation.

Very clever. That is certainly one way to put together a 4 man band

Adobe is pretty notorious for having security holes, at least in Flash, so this doesn't surprise me.

If you do an in-place upgrade of the OS without wiping the system, I don't think you will need a new license/code, it should just transfer over. Even if you were to wipe the system completely, if you backup your AM license key you should be able to copy it back later.

I was actually going to do some sort of goldfish, but I may give this another try using a rotoscope.

I guess I can try disabling the iGPU and see what happens. Any known issues with Nvidia/Quadro graphics? I've noticed sometimes when I draw a bounding box the selection sometimes disappears.

I needed a simple project to get back on track, so I thought I'd have a go at a fish. It is still really rough. This is very much going to be a stylized fish as opposed to a photo-real fish.

I have a laptop with an Optimus chipset, that can switch back and forth between an integrated GPU and a Quadro 2000. I have noticed that there are some problems when scrubbing through a timeline, it seems like it is dropping frames (Robcat knows what I'm talking about). Is this a known issue with integrated graphics? Or maybe it is something with the way optimus switches between the integrated GPU and the discrete GPU. I hate to completely disable the integrated GPU, it will kill my battery life. Is anyone else out there experiencing problems with integrated GPUs on laptops?

Glad it helped someone.

For all you guys out there using Macs, thought you might be interested in this: https://deals.cultofmac.com/sales/the-name-...-mac-bundle-3-0 I don't really recognize the other apps, but this would be a great way to get Camtasia for cheap.

Ah, but what fun would that be?

True. Sketchpad and pencils are cheap, and have the advantage of no distractions.

So things have changed in my neck of the woods and parking costs are really starting to bite into my income, even with the reduced amount that I actually have to be at the office. I've been thinking about taking the train but that adds at least an 1 to 1.5 hours to my commute. It would be nice to be able to do something animation or art related with that time instead of reading, sleeping, or playing around with my phone. Is there any viability to running AM on a windows virtual machine on a high-end Android tablet? Something with a Tegra 3 or 4 maybe? I would just use my laptop, but without a tray table or something to put it on (not available on the train I ride) I'm worried I'll bake my lap. Not to mention, a 2 pound tablet that lasts all day on a charge is a lot easier to haul around with you. My concern is that even if I can get AM running under a virtual machine, it is going to be unuseable without keyboard and mouse so maybe a laptop is better. While I love my laptop to death, once you add on the extended battery or charger it is a real bear to haul around. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I don't know how or even if you could integrate this with AM, but if you're just interested in playing around with planetary simulations and doing stuff like smacking asteroids into Earth or sending a rogue blackhole through the solar system, this might be something you want to check out: http://store.steampowered.com/app/72200/ Normal price is like $10, I think it is on sale now for $4 or so.

Just installed my brand-new AM subscription and I saw a new option during the install process...Timelog plugin? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess this lets you keep track of use but I haven't managed to find it anywhere yet.

$280k or so for a four year education at RISD? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Seriously, that is insane. I can't imagine trying to pay that back on even a six figure salary, let alone what you'd make at an entry level art job.

There is a lot of trial and error involved. You bump up the bus speed a bit, see if it is stable. If not, back it off. Bump up the voltage, see if it is stable, etc. You can get higher overclocks (or is it more stable? If forget) by increasing the voltage, but increasing the voltage increases the heat and means you'll need a better/more efficient heatsink. You have to be careful with upping the voltage, though, because you can fry your CPU. Used to be way back in the day when all CPUs were unlocked, you could play around with both the bus speed and the multiplier. You could get a 300mhz celeron and get 400 or 450mhz out of it, easy. That's an ancient example, though. These days they usually lock the multiplier on the CPU (unless you pay extra for one that allows overclocking) so you are limited to FSB overclocking. Some boards have auto OC settings, I think the ASUS ROG boards have something like that. You can usually get a pretty good speed bump with the middle setting (there are low, medium, high OC settings). You want to goose things much higher than 25% over spec, you have to fiddle around a lot or invest in more exotic cooling solutions.

Probably should have bought these when I had the chance. As far as Saturday morning cartoons go, I don't think those have been on for a while. At least, I can't remember the last time I went looking for them that they were on. Late '90s maybe? I think most stuff is just on Cartoon Network these days.

So for the time being I am working in v13 until I get my licensing issues sorted out. I thought I would start a goldfish model, something simple to get some practice in and I am happily modeling away and I think to myself "I should save this". So I got to File > Save Project as and I get a dialog with no place to input the name or hit "save". I can't resize it to get those things, either. Any thoughts as to what might be going on? I may be using v13 for a few days yet and don't want to not be able to save my work. I have posted a screen cap.

Well, I get if it was an entirely new laptop but just one component? Would it have done the same thing if I changed the memory? At any rate, I emailed support@hash.com so hopefully will be able to get this resolved soon. I guess I could just put the old drive back in, but that seems silly.