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I have a question that I have just begun to notice. I have applied ver 19j and now each time I save a project I have a new set of folders for each save. Each save has several sub folder. The main folder is titled the name of the project and then a series of numbers that I could not decode. Under the folder there are usually two folders. The first is a capital letter such as E with a dash, so E-. Its contents are then followed with another folder with the name of the project and its folder has the project file. The second main folder under the top is labeled the name of the pc such as Steve-PC. Under its folder are several folders. one has a listing the the textures. One has a folder with all the decals, another has all the rotoscopes, another has maps, etc. Each save seems to vary with the content. As I load my project into AM it may take 3-5 minutes to load the file. I am wondering if I need to reinstall a earlier version. So my question to eveyone has anyone else noticed these folders as well? I thought it might be a problem with this machine but it is doing to my other copy of AM as well. Steve

i will have some stuff tomorow afternoon showing pics but i would like to know if any one would like to narrarate my project.. im making a scare statistics commercial (statistics that will make you want to do it) and i need a voice that if i give the words tomorow that they could have them done tomorow... this person has to be online from around 4:15 to about 7:45 or so Eastern Time so i can talk to them... i would prefer them to have a nice sound recording booth thing that will have decent narrator voiceing or something. please p.m me or email me if you can do this.. anyone is accepted... except 9 year olds to 16 year olders. thank you.

Hi everybody, I don't know if I have a glitch or what, but I have had this A:M software for a while and I am finally getting around to using it. I went through the first tutorial (still image of Keekat) and hit the "render to file" button, saving it as a targa file on the desktop as in the online tutorial and the final scene just renders black, no KeeKat. What did I miss? Thanks! Bob

Hi - after a few character models, I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of this program.... sort of I only have his beak done, but I thought I would post my progress as I go along, so I could get any suggestions from anyone to improve it. Pelican Image 0001 Thank Eric

This issue may not be fixable if it's an unavoidable side effect of how AO works but I'll submit it anyway. Here is a prog. render of the test model illuminated by a sun type light source. The model is a flat grey surface above which hovers four glass windows. Each window model (7 in. x 7 in.; 17.8 x 17.8 cm) is 4x4 patches surrounded by a tubular frame. The greenish glass has a 90% transparency. Each window is floating a different distance above the grey surface ranging from 2 in (5.1 cm) to 1/2 in. (1.3 cm). This is a final render(9 passes) of the model after you turn on AO = 100% with a sky blue global colour. Notice that the ambient light is still being partially blocked by the almost transparent glass and the shadow density increases as the glass gets closer to the surface. If you reduce the transparency of the glass, the density of its ambient shadow increases so clearly AO is sensitive to the surface transparency. But even at 100% transparent the glass still has a noticeable ambient shadow when its very close to another surface. Even stranger is a progressive screen render with AO on. This also happens in v19p. Embedded project is attached. AO_bug_v19pt5a_embed.prj

Just finished rendering the short anim for the gorilla model and stuck it up on my site w/ the 360 and some final images. Thanks again for answering all my forum posts while working on it. It's the 3rd model over on the top. =www.3dcharacteranimation.biz -Eric

A friend of mine and I have been wanting to re-create the battle of Wolf 359 in 3D format for quite some time now. It has been a year since I first purchaced A:M and I am still loving to work with this product. I feel I can start working on something that could take years to get done. But it will be done right. The Battle of Wolf 359 has been a major battle that has been torn apart, analyzed and theorized about for years, but no one has ever tried making a rendition of it other then a version made using Bridge Commander. My friend, Mark Nguyen and I wish to create one possible version of Wolf 359. A possible "chronicle" of events. I have created a teaser which can be seen at the following webpage: http://nekosei.com/stw359/wolf359.html Please do check it out. But that's not all. I would love some help with this project, so I am bringing this to your attention. We will need ships built and/or donated. I wish to ask for you to build one of 20 ships that we need. I've been hunting for the best schematics I could find and will offer them for your use in building. I am also attempting to find a set of decals that we can all share, and a font for the starship names and registries. "But there were 40 ships at wolf 359." Yes, there was. This is where a kind of reward comes in. As thanks for building a ship for us, we would allow you to build a second starship, either using your first model and modifying it, or from scratch if you prefer. So long as it's a design that could be from that era or slightly earlier. Obviously there were no Soveriegn or Defiant class ships then. Likewise it is doubtable an NX class ship would have been there. This offer isn't official yet, as we're not 100% sure of the exact types of ships we *need* yet. It could turn out that we need 25 specific kinds, and 15 randoms. But I do know this: We will need ships for a "decommissioned fleet yard", so just about anything from the past can show up in that scene. All help will be appreciated, full credits will be given on both the website and in the final animation. If anyone is willing to help, please let me know in this thread. All comments are appreciated reguardless.

Hello A:M community, my salutations as a new member and hopefully a new customer. I will continue my search readin thewebsite and related websites, but before or during this time I want to ask and hopefully get some answeres from experianced or begginer notices on the product and if I really should get it. I would love to start by Introducing myself, I am sirius, it is not my real name but itis rather a catchyname, I hope I shallbe spending much time here, and may I also add some of the movies or demo trailers of developement of movies I have seen here are great Now right to the point, I am working on a project for a movie/trailer introduction for a game in developement. My apologies but I am not allowed to release the name. But my placement was in control of the animation and movie section within my team. I have read stories, and seen many videos on the product and am very impressed. Knowingly I am a newbie to animation with outside tools, I have used maya and am learning still many documents in mayas' animation toolset. But I wish to save myselffrom many days of reviewing and reading over document over document of alias maya files and want to cut to a short almost "easy way out" In the animation industry I am nothing but what is called a newb and I am loking to further advance my skills by learning bones and althe joly good stuff. My goal is to start low but reference as much I can to become skilled from the communities influence, but I want to know about a quote I will state! Anyone can use it My only question is what about people such as me that have little or no talent at all in animation, that are looking for programs that can be used to teach us basics about animation and complicated parts so that we can use these skills to benefit us in further projects. I am a modeler and have that placed as a down frame so I am ready and willing on the modeling section using maya and a setof many other tools All I wish to do is get going and practice with animation before my project gets going. Complicated animations in a way is what I am trying to express here, such as sword,gun fights that can be compared to an almost animation capture such as tools likedevilmay cry have used for animating in game scenes, my real question here is, can anyone even someone with no talent in animation be able to use and learn from this tool ? That is my main concern, because maya costed close to 7 grand I want to make sure my investment into thisprogram will benefit me as well as thecompany I am purchasing from? Much appriciation in advance yours truly, Sirius

Hello, I've made a few sets for an animation project, and since this is my first time doing this kind of thing, I would like to get feedback (suggestions, stuff you like, stuff you hate). Anything will help. Thank you very much. p.s. the two city areas are supposed to be lit like it would be sunset...if they don't look that way, please inform me of my error. Also, the other images are from inside the mech.

This is my first attempt on something that I've done. I have gotten really addicted to Bioshock and love the Big Daddy's. Included i have a picture of a big daddy Front and side view of the original, and the front and side view of the one I'm doing. Please tear me away on your opinions and bashings. I haven't finished it yet, but what I have been doing *what you can see* has taken me around 7 hours more or less. Now as you can see, the base of the body isn't what it will actually be, it is just there to give me a general idea of where things will go. If you have any opinions that you would like private, or would like to help me, by making a 'little sister, or a splicer' then send me an email (Dragonboy1221@hotmail.com) Make the subject line "hash" so i know.

You don't want Animate Mode OFF. And you don't want that Red Border. It's a warning that Animate Mode is OFF. I never touched that. Leave that "not set" Animate Mode isn't about rendering. It's about keyframes you make before you render. Try my sample project and do what i do in the video starting at 21:04 MyronTitle001b.prj

Hi, my name is Jared Claybrooks, and this is my first animation project of decent quality. The subject matter is one of the boss fights from the game Earthbound. Ness, The Protagonist. Titanic Ant, The Antagonist. An image of the action. The whole animation won't be too substantial, maybe a minute and a half. I'd say that right now the project is about 60% complete, and could use some critiqueing before it's finished. thanks!

When I first read this topic several approaches to this came to mind... including use of Boolean cutters to remove letters. I tested that and it worked although I was having difficulty making it work as simply as I wanted. Then I thought... black background... colored letters... Why not just move a black colored patch over the letters to 'unhide' them? And that's what I ended up with here: Note that this isn't 'per-letter' as I didn't take the time to make sure each frame only revealed one letter. The final words 'and the' could be revealed just by moving another black colored patch back behind the patch that is displaying the title card (or models). Added the no frill proof of concept project file (see attached). TitleCard RevealA.prj

So I'm working through the different tutorials and right now I'm designing the flower. The problem I'm running into is my stem/bud won't move with the bones, but it seems everything else does. I've attached a picture of moved bones and the stationary stem/bud. Any ideas? flower.bmp

As you may know there is a group of us who meet fairly regularly in the Philadelphia area. We are called: The Mid Atlantic Animation Master Users group... or MAAM for short. Recently the idea came up to create animated versions of ourselves. I took on this challenge... uh... I was volunteered? Something like that. Anyway to start the ball rolling I did some stylized portraits of each person in the group. We have Hubakai, Entity, DDavis, Mechadelphia and of course myself, Heyvern. These are our Super Hero identities. During the day we are unassuming members of a small computer user's group but at night we become... I am not in the picture below. I was probably in the bathroom or getting a beer or something. Uh... well we don't have uniforms yet and we are still working on the logo. No specific plans for fighting crime. Maybe watch some movies on a big screen TV and eat nachos. However we hope to model these characters in AM and bring them to life. It has been a while since I used AM but I am going to take a stab at modeling... myself. We'll see how that works out. We have not completely decided on our "Special Powers" but so far we are in agreement that my character will be the comedy relief. I will be Shaggy AND Scooby in any animated adventures that may occur. Keep an eye out for updates. -vern

Use v19.5a to open the attached embedded project of the jungle queen's head which has been decaled with text with an alpha channel. The image on the left shows a real time render of the head. Progressive renders produce the more correct image on the right. alpha_channel_decals_in_real_time_render_embed.prj

Open the attached project in v19.5a. It has two versions of the same model. On the left in head_jungle_queen_v19pt5a_no_avg_normals.mdl, you can not change the normal weight of averaged normals because there is no "Average Normals" YES/NO switch in v19.5a. You can try changing the value of "Normal Weight" but it has no effect. On the right in head_jungle_queen_with_avg_normals_from v19p.mdl you can change the normal weight of averaged normals because this model was opened first in v19p and the "Average Normals" switch was set to YES. v19pt5a_no_avg_normals_embed.prj

Hello (again) everyone! My name is Sean Wall. I've been playing with A:M since way, way back. I was involved in a small way with the "Scarecrow of Oz" movie project too (texturing). I've always wanted to be an animator since I was in my 20s, but real life always got in the way. Well, I'm in my 50s now but I still want to be an animator when I grow up! 😄 I've tried other 3D programs and while they're certainly nice and have lots of features, I keep coming back to A:M. I think feature-wise it's got the most complete set of tools in one package without having to resort to plugins. It makes me laugh how many 3D packages still don't offer lip-sync built in -- A:M had this *way* back! Anyway, I just re-watched "Tin Woodman of Oz" and "Scarecrow of Oz" and it got me inspired to pick this up again and finally make something of my own. I've always enjoyed the A:M community and I look forward to chatting with you folks again. I'm also happy to see Martin has returned! He's hinted that maybe another movie project may happen? Regardless, it's nice to be back! Good to see you all. -Sean (CaptBobo)

Hi, I deleted my project that I was working on by mistake. Does anyone knows how can I get it back? that was my first model and I really wanted to save it. Help please...

Progress has been made on the new project. Tech and Dan are now fully modelled and can blink, wink both eyes individually and have a full set of pose controlled phonemes. The girl on the left is the avatar of YouTuber Geminitay who makes videos on a group server called Hermitcraft. She will not be appearing in the new project, I'm using her as an experiment to see how well the mouth I've made will fit into a skin in that style. A lot of female Minecraft skins use this style of having the eyes low down on the head and it doesn't leave much room for a mouth. Not that it matters as Minecraft characters don't usually have mouths. So I am planning on installing a mouth and seeing how it looks in practice.

Hi This is one of the first projects I did in 2000 with animation master. I am trying to get a reel together for my website and thought it would make a good intro. I did a new render of it with ao. You can see here the improvement in me and a:m over the years. I atached the old and new one. 3dfroglogoold.mov 3dfroglogonew.mov

My friend and I are going to be taping off sections of our schools steps to look like concentric rings when viewed from a certain point. We're just about done with everything we need to complete it. So, I thought I'd share it with you all, and see what you think.

I ran across several things related to some of the above musings and want to add one here because it's trivial enough that I'm sure to forget it. The thought is that now that A:M is set (by default) to save a Project just prior to rendering... It could (at least theoretically) be made to compare that saved Project to a Previously saved Project. The difference between those two Projects could therefore inform the renderer if anything of significance has changed. Some classifications and tests would need to be trialed but this coupled with channel data could narrow the field considerably with regard to the emphasis needed for the renderer. I'm trying to imagine what success might look like and I confess I'm not seeing that clearly. I suppose we could start with a dumb user like me who just simply forgot he just rendered a Project and tried to render it again. This might be Class 0 where nothing has changed and since nothing has changed the previous render is fetched and presented. I will admit that case would be very rare. But Case 1 might be where only one thing has changed... say... last time I rendered out to TGA quality but this time I want to render out to VGA. So, although no data in the Project itself has changed the renderer's requirement has changed. The renderer, knowing that only the desired resolution has changed might prefetch the previous render to display as a preview and update that upon the completion of each newly rendered frame. A tagline would let the user know the image being displayed wasn't final. Would such a thing be worthy of code? Probably not without many other optimizations thrown in for free. But this suggests three basic categories of interest with regard to change optimized renderings: 1. Iterative Changes: The Project File differences (current and previous... for additional optimization the user can overwrite what is considered previous) 2. Internal Changes: Change occurring in Time and Space within the Project itself. The renderer knows that of 15 objects in the scene in front of the camera only one object is recording any movement therefore that object and what it interacts with receives the priority. 3. Renderer changes: In this category data is collected and improved upon with every rendering. Two primary values are recorded prior to rendering and those values are weighted after the render. The first value is determined (in boolean fashion) by what options are selected for rendering. Let's say that all of the values of the settings equate to 128 because almost all are turned off. This then is the ID of the underlying settings that drove the renderer. Subsequent renders are then compared first to other renderings with an ID of 128 and then to the those of other IDs. The second value is the weighted value that can be changed by other factors to include data derived from Cateogries 1 and 2 as well as results such as average render time per frame and over all render time. One of the things this approach can inform is that of determining a desired render time before launching a render. Let's say I want A:M to spend all of its resources for the next five minutes to render my scene. Using the data collected from previous rendering it can suggest settings that will be optimal for me. I can overwrite those but that weighting would have to be balanced somewhere else... or I'd have to increase my estimated time for the rendering. And this is also where composting and masking might can come into play as well as split rendering where I choose what objects in the scene are truly necessary. As I (optimally) want the results of my rendering back in 1 second per frame this time around.. I'm willing to sacrifice a few things. And oh by the way... I know for a fact that these five frames are going to be exactly the same so... I'll indicate that as well via the enhanced Stepping options. Okay, I'll stop there. I was only planning on writing two sentences. And I'm not sure I go those in... .