Roger

Five seconds or so seems like it would be the sweet spot. I don't know that I'm ready to enter anything like this, but it might be a good learning experience.

Pixar has a way of making anything into gold. I seriously think they could do a short on the life cycle of dust bunnies and it would be entertaining.

I am perhaps the worst person to give advice here, seeing as how I don't actually have anything finished, but I'd have to agree with Robcat. I have drastically reduced the scope of my project in terms of length and am thinking of cutting it even more, down to the bone. Ripping out anything unnecessary. I am considering shooting for a minimalistic (or at least more so) look like Fluffy or Andre and Wally Bee. I've also been working on getting my bills down to a point that I can live on what most people would consider a poverty-level income, in the event of job loss or making the leap to working on this full-time. I make way more than I ever used to, but my financial struggles have left me with an extremely Bear-ish outlook on the economy. My family makes fun of me for being frugal, but I like having money in the bank. But, I digress. Back to your question - I guess if your project has ultra realistic humans, environments, etc it better be really short. 5 minutes is maybe too much. Maybe try to cut it down to half? I knew a guy in college that was maybe 4-5 years younger than me, extremely talented and was a TA for one of my classes. He was doing some long-form short (like 10 to 20 minutes) in the Star Wars universe. I don't know if he ever finished it, or what, as I lost touch with him. But 10 to 20 minutes is way too much for one person, unless you are extraordinarily talented and have excellent time-management skills. So maybe scaling back the scope of your project is something you want to look at seriously.

Well, managed to get the pose slide back, but not sure how.

I created my pose slider for my squetch ball, it was there before I switched to cho mode, now that I'm in cho mode and scrubbing through my frames of my animation, I can no longer see the pose slider. I've tried clicking on the squetch bone and the base bone in the PWS, neither of those brings up the pose slider. Have I done something wrong?

Ok, I think I figured out what I was doing wrong. I double-clicked the chor icon in the PWS and I got my camera view back. Maybe I wasn't switching back to cho mode correctly?

What if I have a laptop with no numberpad? Will just hitting the "1" key work?

No, camera is still there in the cho, cho is still open but I have no camera viewport. All buttons having to do w/ the cam on the camera toolbar are grayed out.

Closed out my camera view so I could make some changes in bones mode. Now I can't get my camera view back. I don't want to start a new choreography, but that is the only way I can think right now to get the camera view back. I checked the View options but didn't see much there. What am I missing?

I was pretty shocked by this. I always sorta assumed he would be passing it onto his kids, but I guess they may not have any interest in making movies. Could be he's tired of all the criticism over the prequels and doesn't want to go through that again? Or maybe wanted to pass the reigns on while he was alive to do so? I wonder if this includes the rights to Star Wars or if this is just the studio itself.

I guess that makes sense.

I installed 32 bit AM but now I am getting the activation screen again with AM 64. I was able to activate but I don't remember this happening last time with v16.

Ok, that's exactly what it was, I wasn't in skeletal mode. I was able to successfully move my object. Guess I'm going to have to make a checklist/AM cheat sheet or something.

Ok, I think I figured out what I was doing wrong, I was not in skeletal mode in the choreography. Going to try again.

Ok, here is something odd. I can move the bone, but the object doesn't move, even though I assigned all the points to that object while working in bones mode in the model window (before I dragged it into the cho). Hrmm.

I'm working on an animation exercise right now, and if I try to just translate the mesh I can move that just fine. If I select the bone that I have assigned to the mesh and hit the "n" key and try to move it, though, not a darn thing happens. I am not sure what I'm doing wrong, I don't think I have anything toggled that I shouldn't. Any ideas?

Ok, well that did the trick. I briefly disabled my AV and it activated right away.

V16 does not run, I get "license expired". (or at least I did when it was still on my system) V17 attempts to activate but will not activate. I'm trying it now without my AV active.

Ok, thanks for the tips. I ended up uninstalling everything and then reinstalling v17 but still couldn't activate. I'll try disabling the AV temporarily and see if that works.

Well I removed the master0.lic file from my AM v16 directory, but I still can't get v17 to activate. Do I need to completely uninstall v16?

Guess I should have searched the forum first. I'll remove/rename my master.lic file, that should hopefully do it.

Anyone?

Just bought the AM v17 web subscription. Tried activating it, got the following error:

I've got a Quadro 2000 and I've also noticed some funkiness with my display in AM. A lot of times what will happen is it appears to freeze on one image, doesn't update when I'm trying to tumble or zoom in and out on a model in Birdseye view. It is pretty frustrating because I have to restart the app to get it working again. I haven't tried switching to Intel integrated graphics to see if I experience the same problem with the HD 3000.

It certainly can't hurt to get a card with CUDA or Open CL support, it just doesn't make any sense to spend $500 on a graphics card (to me) when it isn't going to accelerate your main program. If you do a lot of Photoshop and or Premiere, by all means spend $200 or so and get a geforce 660, that looks to be the current sweet spot for the Nvidia cards.