Roger

Do you have a way to make square cuts? This will be critical for a functional piece of furniture. If you don't have a circular saw, you may want to rent/borrow one. I don't think I'd want to try cutting plywood with a handsaw or even electric jigsaw, you could cut it quickly enough with an electric jigsaw but it would be difficult to get a perfectly straight edge.

Oh I realize I am unlikely to make money off YouTube with my videos, for just the reasons you listed. I'd probably have better luck if I had had a camera running the time my dog came running at the couch and tried to jump on it and bounced off the front. I'm doing what I'm doing more for self-actualization at this point than any other reason.

Hello to you Martin! Glad you are back. I've been here off and on, I was either really busy with work or had something else going on during the TWO days because I honestly had no clue that Robert was the voice of the Scarecrow until just the other day. But I've been working on my film off and on. However as I've now reached "man of a certain age" status, I need to get more serious and actually finish this thing. Hard to believe I am 42. I was even going to do a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy themed b-day blowout with a few close friends, since I did nothing for the big 4-0 but did not get round to it due to other things coming up. PM me if you're interested in hearing what is funding my film-making aspirations, and the adventures (or misadventures, more accurately) surrounding said source of funds.

That reminds of the stories about DC Comics noticing in the 50s or 60s that issues with gorillas on the cover sold better, which led to tons and tons of gorilla covers. :-) 40K is a large number, so I'd agree that at some point it must have gone "mini-viral." I got excited about my view numbers last year (significantly less than 40K) until I noticed that a cat video that had only been up for an hour was in the 100Ks. It makes it frustrating when you realize that the effort-to-views ratio is greatly skewed against animation. But really, it's cool to know that you've made something that even a few people have enjoyed. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to start working on a project with a gorilla in it. :-) Hey man at least you have more than I do, I have a whopping 56 views for my Christmas card I did (most of those being people that are related to me somehow).

Martin, Very glad to have you back. Sorry to hear that things were so difficult. I guess I don't see what they had to gain by trashing AM? Although it also sounds like others were trying to pass your work off as theirs? BTW I bought the Kindle version of your book on Amazon, it was an interesting read. Anyway, good to see you around again. Still slogging away on my project, which reminds me I need to update my WIP thread.

Interesting. I've been thinking of exploring something like this for my film. I would probably go with animation on 2s for a smoother effect, though, this looks like you used 3s maybe?

Don't know how I've missed you in the years I've been a forum member, but welcome back!

Version 5 was my first "proper" version of AM after MH3D. Can't find the damn manual for love or money though. I imagine it will turn up when I'm looking for something else.

So what's the earliest version of AM that you'd consider "modern AM"?

I've sent my availability to Rob in a pm, M-W-TR-F I can do 10:00 pm to 11:30 pm CST or I could do basically anytime between 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm on Saturday or 10:00 am and 3:00 pm on Sunday. Since it doesn't sound like mornings are likely to be good on weekdays I've modified my availability a bit.

I agree with you, but if you want all this stuff then you need to find some way to raise $1-$5 million to hand to Hash Inc. so that this stuff can be implemented. I believe that there is only one programmer working on AM at this point, and AM is very much in maintenance mode, although we do get some major new features from time to time. And this is not in any way a criticism of what is going on with AM, but when you only have one guy actively working on it, there are only so many features you can spend time on.

As someone who is running AM with 20 gig of RAM right now, I don't think there is any point at all in going past 32, and the sweet spot is probably between 8-16 gigabytes. Would AM use the extra RAM? Yes, but I think you'd be hard pressed to model a scene that would use that much data. If I recall correctly, the hash patches are much more frugal with resources than an equivalent model made of polygons would be. Rob, how large was the largest scene in TWO? As a feature length project, that might be a good yardstick for people wanting to "stress test" AM.

You could also fake it. Maybe you could use a projection map and/or volumetric lights?

That's disappointing. Part of the reason I bought my 480 was for compute, disappointed now that I can only use it for single-point precision FP. I couldn't afford to spend double on a graphics card for the same functionality.

Bug report?

GPUboss.com shows the fury pretty close to the 480: http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-RX-480-vs-Radeon-R9-FURY Fury has better floating point, though. FWIW, I recently upgraded to a 480 and I'm happy with it. Haven't yet used with AM.

We have those in the US too: https://www.humblebundle.com/yogscast-jingle-jam My family also celebrates on Christmas eve. Sometimes we go to another relative's house, other times we stay home and then go to my aunt or cousin's house Christmas day.

I must be missing something incredibly obvious because I haven't figured out any way to make pine branches with the Treez plugin, only deciduous type trees.

I dimly recall that my Win2K machine stopped running the alphas I was getting from Steffan at either v16 or 17. He went to a new compiler and Win 2K was not supported so i needed to build a new machine at that point. By that time everyone was on Win 7. Really? Win 9X/NT/2k support continued through v16? That's a pretty long run.

Ok, I think I have a really good start at a pine branch here, what do you guys think? Now I just need to clone a few hundred of these to build my tree. Too bad I can't turn them into some sort of fractal hair emitter, that might make it quicker.

Well I just checked and I was quite surprised to find out that the Dennis CD is Win 9X/NT/Win 2k kernel. What version was the switchover to XP?

Well I'm going to do both the twinkling lights and the old-school, I think. I've been playing around with generating a pine tree via the Treez plugin and so far I'm not happy with the results, I don't really think it is meant for conifers/evergreens, and due to the nature of the branch and trunk style I think it may be better to just model the trunk and branches separately.

I don't really need to do either. I haven't decided if I want to go old-school lights or if I want to do the mini lights. Maybe I will do a mix, or try both and see which I like better.

So I've got a good start here on an old-school Christmas light. Not sure if I should add a point source light to it in addition to the glow material.

What year was version 10.5? Would it run under 95/98/NT? The oldest version of AM I have that is still marked as running on those is AM 99. I have the CD with Dennis the Wolf on it, that is the year 2000 CD which I thought was v12? I'm pretty sure that one had some major updates in terms of functionality. The reason I'm looking for something that will run under Win 9X/NT 4.0 (or worst case, Win 2k) is I need something that is fairly low resource, for purposes of my experiment.