Roger
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Posts posted by Roger
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Sadly, and it pains me to say this, but you're not missing much.
I think unless they stick the landing on the 9th movie, George will be buying the IP rights back at a fire-sale price.
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Disney Star Wars....what can I say.
Spend $4 Billion on a golden goose and then proceed to strangle the eggs out of it.
While there were things I liked in Last Jedi I feel like it had very little connection to the previous film, and was less than what it could have been. And Force Awakens seemed an awful lot like a clone of A New Hope, but they did at least seem to be setting up some interesting ideas. Which Last Jedi then promptly threw out with the bathwater.
All these people had to do was film a competent adaptation of the Timothy Zahn novels or Dark Empire and they would have made all the money they wanted and more. Since it seems they had no interest in using George's ideas.
I've seriously never seen a franchise that is more hostile to its fans. But Disney openly tolerates its employees abusing and crapping on the fans. Seems like an odd way to go about making money, doesn't it?
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On 10/15/2019 at 1:57 PM, robcat2075 said:
The conventional rocket will be environmentally troublesome enough I imagine.
Yes, but several orders of magnitude less troublesome than a ship that fires a nuke out the ass-end every second.
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Does anyone think it just a tiny bit funny, that one of the first privately designed rocket ships that could be used for interplanetary exploration, looks not like anything that came off a drafting board at NASA but instead looks like something right out of Flash Gordon? I always figured we'd have something like Project Orion (if you could ever get around the environmental concerns) but if we've got to use conventional chemical rockets for a while yet, at least we can look cool doing it.
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Thought that this was interesting, as one of the early examples of a GPU that wasn't from Silicon Graphics:
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If anyone out there wanted to get Painter for cheap, now is your chance: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/painter-create-with-confidence?hmb_source=navbar&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=tile_index_2
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39 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:
A subscription (and the non-expiring version) will work on the computer it was installed on and that computer only. It can not be simply copied to another machine.
I strongly recommend the annual subscription, then you can always run the most recent version.
Hmm, I could have sworn I moved my license from my old workstation to a new one, but I could be mistaken. It may have just been a new hard disk in the same workstation.
I would go with Rob on this one, he is the more authoritative source.
I'm not sure how the $299 version handles the node-locking, but unless you plan on hanging onto that system for ten years, you're better off with the annual subscription. -
On 9/16/2019 at 1:47 PM, Hash Tinhorn said:
That is very informative, many thanks. Do these forums permit members to sell previous versions, or is that frowned on ? One thing is I did a self-build PC and it can be a bit temperamental, so I am keen to only own software which can do a swift exodus if necessary.....😀
Btw, is AM capable of doing photorealistic texturing and animation (or close) if necessary ? I saw there was a painter plugin, and I suspect AM could be pushed a bit further than some of the more cartoonish images, but I don't have that experience with it.
AM is indeed capable of doing photorealistic texturing and rendering (please see the links that Itsjustme posted).
There isn't too much problem migrating the subscription version from one system to another, you just need to make sure to back up the license file and copy that over to your fresh install. But you can't use AM on multiple systems that way, you'd need multiple licenses for that. And yes, reselling of licenses is frowned on, and while there isn't much to stop you from buying a copy off Ebay, you will run into the bugs that Robert mentioned, due to the way modern versions of Windows handle the old CD key system. Besides, don't you want the cool new features that have been developed in the many years since the last CD version was sold? AM is $80 a year for a web subscription license. That's less than a Netflix subscription. You could use it for 30 years and still pay less than you'd pay for a 3DS Max license from Autodesk
I will say that while you can do mechanical modeling with AM, please be advised it is not an engineering app like CATIA or Pro/E, there are no solid modeling features or polygon tools. While you could use it for prototyping (it will output .STL files and can be used with 3D printers) that is not its main use case.
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Friend sent this link to me, thought others might find it cool:
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Firstly, congratulations on finishing a short film, that's a big deal. It's a monumental amount of work. That's why we tend to see more stills and models of AM stuff than we do movies.
I think you've got an interesting idea here, but I wasn't sure what was happening.
At first, due to the lighting and the way the girl popped out of the trap door, I thought it was going to be horror. Then I thought, oh ok you're going for a buddy/friend adventure short. Then at the end I thought maybe we were back to some kind of horror? And then I thought maybe you were trying to say something about TV making puppets out of us?
Like I said, I think you've got the basis of a really interesting idea here. But, I feel like I watched two different movies at the same time.
I think it would benefit either from being reworked as full-blown horror, or to play up the buddy aspect of it and leave off the confusing ending about the child and people being puppets of the TV (why then would it need another puppet to put a battery in it?)
I liked the design of the TV character, if you are going for scary it looks creepy. There is a little bit of an uncanny-valley thing going on with the little girl. I think maybe having a 2nd look at the lighting/texturing of her would benefit, especially if you're going for cute and not creepy. I 2nd Rob's comments on showing her pulling/dragging the table rather than pushing. If you're not sure on how to animate something, act it out.
So to recap, stuff I liked: I think there is a more interesting story here, you need to decide on whether it is a horror story or a buddy picture and then go full bore with that idea. Number two: character design is cool (but maybe have another pass on the girl).
Stuff that is not working currently: lighting needs some work, the pulling instead of pushing thing with the animation, again: figure out which story you're telling and commit to that fully. I was confused by the ending.
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Go AMD
in Open Forum
AMD has released drop-in 12 and 16 core socket 470 parts:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-9-3950x-zen-2,39615.html
Price I've heard on the 16 core part is $750.
The 12 core AMD part for $499 beats anything 12 core and under in Intel's current lineup.
They have also released their new Navi graphics:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-navi-radeon_rx_5700_xt-rx_5700-details,39608.html
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Since there are some people on here that have a casual or not-so casual interest in the nuts and bolts of CG, I thought I would post this Computer Graphics bundle from Humble Bundle. There are several good books in the bundle, easily worth the $15 price to get all of them:
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What sorcery is this? When was this implemented?
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I found this amusing:
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I ran across this, there is a dataset for Notre Dame: http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/
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Robert --- thank you for conducting the contest and all your hard work putting the video together.
Congratulations to the winners!
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12 hours ago, robcat2075 said:
He was doing 4-bit Color Look-Up Table Graphics before 4-bit Color Look-Up Table Graphics were cool.
The man who invented paint-by-numbers has died at the age of 93
Neat, I never knew paint-by-numbers was the invention of one guy.
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On 3/23/2019 at 10:12 PM, robcat2075 said:
I'm completely not surprised by this. The whole thing is incredibly shady.
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And one last word about the budget laptops using the low-end dual cores (generally at the sub $300 price point): they tend to be lower power than a dual core system from back in the day. An AMD E-120 was a popular chip to put in budget laptops, but it is a sub 2ghz dual core chip. Other things that they do with these lower end systems to save on costs is they use single channel instead of dual channel RAM, slower 5400rpm hard drives (unless they use flash, in which case they tend to use a lower emmc flash module) and other measures to keep the costs down.
If budget is really tight you're better off getting a used higher end system with a discrete chip that won't cause problems with AM, or trying to get a more modern budget system that makes fewer compromises. -
25 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:
That has the Intel graphics however... which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't for A:M.
I have bad news: virtually every laptop, that isn't advertised as a gaming laptop or workstation/desktop replacement laptop, has Intel graphics. That is how they keep the prices so low.
With that in mind, Mark might be best served getting a laptop with a Ryzen 2500u or Ryzen 2700u, those are mobile chips with Vega graphics. They should be quite suitable for mobile AM work, but unfortunately I have never tested these personally.
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9 hours ago, robcat2075 said:
Now that I see it's an Intel "Pentium"... that seems pretty primitive.
I didn't know they were still making Pentiums.What are some other options for a cheap windows laptop?
That was my main concern with the laptop Mark posted, that is a lower-end chip I'm pretty sure.
If he doesn't mind going used, he can get an X220 with a 1 year warranty for right around $200, I think this one might even have a tablet mode. Throw in an AM license and he is still under $300.
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28 minutes ago, robcat2075 said:
I dunno... I used A:M for years with 2GB and twos core including all my AnimationMentor exercises and all of my TWO scenes and I rarely felt the computer was under powered.. That was with Windows 2K.
About ten years ago I moved up to a quad core with 4GB and windows 7 (because A:M wouldn't run on Win2K anymore) and that was fully functional for A:M. Now I have 8GB in it but I never really went past the first 4 until I tried rendering things for huge resolutions or with huge bitmaps.
Does the Mac have a system monitor so you could see how much RAM you are using when you are doing your A:M things?Yeah but Win 2k is much lighter on system resources than what Win 10 is. Win 2k I think will work with a minimum of 128 to 256mb RAM where Win 10 has a minimum requirement of 2GB. So Win 2k with 2GB is using much less of the total system RAM than a Win 10 system with 2 or 4GB.
2 cores is probably just fine for AM on the go but I'd try for sure to get a minimum of 4gb RAM and either an i3 or i5 dual core. Ideally you would want whatever cpu you get to have a fairly high base clock speed.
Disney Star Wars
in Off Topic
Posted
I've been thinking about this some more.
I really think that if Disney had gotten their story straight for all 3 films before filming and stuck with one director rather than switching in the middle, that they would have had a much stronger story. Maybe it wouldn't have been the Star Wars that George would have made, maybe not everyone would have been head over heels in love with it, but I don't think it would have split the fan base the way the new films have.
Disney has a tall order ahead of them, because this final movie has to try and tie all those loose ends up, heal the rift in the fanbase, and provide a satisfactory ending to the saga. I would not want to be in JJ Abrams' shoes right now.
I don't want to see this movie fail, because there might not be anything after this. I just wish Disney had paid as much attention to Star Wars as they did with their Marvel movies.
Finally, I don't think anyone truly had a problem with a female lead. What they had a problem with was a female lead that was magically good at everything, without any kind of normal arc along the Hero's Journey. There have been all kinds of strong female protagonists in recent sci-fi history: Linda Hamilton in Terminator I & II, Sigourney Weaver from the Aliens movies, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's character in The Abyss. I think if Rey had a more realistic character arc, she would have resonated better with fans.
**Final note: it is entirely possible to have both strong men and women in movies. I think The Abyss is a really good example of this, or the original Terminator. You don't need to tear the men down to build the women up.