Search the Community

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

This was the first project I did in AM. My nephew was trying to make a career as a racing driver and this was an attempt at raising some sponsorship. It was only intended as a fist pass at the idea and, if the company was interested, then we'd get the polished version done. It never got finished because, they were interested at first but, just as we started to look into it more, two of their marketing dept died with stress related problems so we got lost in the process. The nephew, Ben Clucas, then 17/18 now 29, is still working as a racing driver, albeit not on the plane initially hoped for. There are lots of clips of him on Youtube, including an amazing race at Phillip Island in Australian F3, were he won by 0.17 of a second, when he'd been third at the second to last corner... simon Ps Be warned second ever project on its way... BB.mov

I asked a few months ago about file structures for people working on a project and was very appreciative of the responses received. I'm trying to plan a project which I hope to spend next year working on, could anyone kindly point me to a resource for overseeing the running of a complete project? I have no real experience in this area and have always relied on memory and catching up when needed. I'd like to try to do it better this time. Its not so much the particular details of individual areas such as models but the overall structure of a project and how to keep track of it as it unfolds? Any help gratefully received. Thank you. regards simon

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

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

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

I recently updated to V17 and am using it to render while animating in V15 at the same time. I will move over to V17 when I get the current short done. In the meantime I have a couple of questions on some changes that seem to have happened between the versions on the way the projects are saved. I'm used to the way V15 saves out the projects as separate files and have adapted to that system. In V17 it seems to save it out to separate folders each time with the file structure sequence inside ? Also, the previous project does not load automatically when the program is opened and needs to be selected under the project heading on the top menu. These are minor changes and just need adjusting to on my part but, in case they are not, have I missed something and need to reset or are these standard changes ? regards simon

wheatfields.mov wheatfields.zip half without image and half with

Hi guys working on a train project and I have 2 questions that maybe you can help with first question smoke when i export out as a jpg or tga I get smoke in the finale render ( test mov jpg has smoke) when I export out as a movie I get no smoke however when I place an image such as the stars in the background I get my smoke ( test mov has smoke because of star png background ) is that normal for movie export or do i have to turn something on 2nd question models do you guys mdl to scale say something is 20 feet do you mdl 20 feet I've been doing what feels comfortable is there a rule ? thanks j TRAIN_MOV.mov

As threatened. The second ever project in AM. This was the original version. It later got re animated and edited down to three days rather than five but, that version has some horrible compression artefacts on it and still has a large file size. This has been chopped a bit but ( WARNING ), the music is still as annoying as ever. There are many things I'd change if I did it now but I was pleased with it at the time. ( about 9-10 years ago). I still like the idea though. The figure models were adapted off the CD at that time. Rather inexpertly, as you can tell. simonLC_320.mov

Man oh man, I've had post project blues before, but never for this prolonged a time. It's a weird thing. You work on this project that takes up all of your time and it's the reason you get up in the morning and the reason you are so late going to bed. Then in the last stretch, it's exhausting and it's tough sticking with it to the end. And then it's over ...and that's it. Suddenly you don't have to get out of bed in the morning, your reason for being seems to have just checked out. I've been trying to jump back into another project, but I can't seem to break out of this funk. Part of me just thinks that it was such a prolonged marathon of work that I just need more time to recover. There's also that element of the pain of the last part of it being too fresh in my mind. Some friends and I used to go canoeing once a year when we were in high school and college. By the end of the trip, I was usually horribly sunburned and exhausted and trying to remember why I thought this was fun. But then, a year later, I'd forget about all the suffering and want to do it again. I don't guess enough time has passed for me to have forgotten how hard it was to do that last project. :-) Add to it all the normal life problems (my younger brother has been diagnosed with hodgkin's lymphoma, a highly treatable cancer, but one that still will require six months of chemo and he's symptomatic, so he's in pain and shrinking down), and I'm just not being able to turn over the engine with my worn-out spark plugs. I'm certain it will pass, but I'm going to stop announcing projects until I have one that makes it past the initial "hey, that'd be fun to do" stage.

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.

Hi, Okay...when did you people move from saving mainly the project file to mainly saving the chor file? Why did you do this? What advantages does this have? Is there really 'any' difference besides the .prj and .cho file extensions? What else is there to this? What else, if anything, are you using chor files for? FYI: I have only used saving chor files for large models that exceed what I call the workable patch limit--once you pass a certain patch count (at least in V14) response time becomes unworkable. Cheers, Rusty

Decided to Do a little Fan Art Model of one of my favorite characters from Dragon's L.

bicycle.mov bicycle.zip

react.mov bowtie.zip original done in 2004

Hi my name is David. My first post and first clip done in AM. It took about eight months. Its a Christian based animation so if that is not your thing please don't be offended. Sorry I took the link down. Video no longer on youtube.

Unsure of the source for images used from 2009 rendered in 17 Lightning.mov lightning.zip

misplaced project file

That's right folks, we are now, officially getting this old boat underway. You will need to do a few things to get started. First and foremost, you most watch the intro video that robcat put together (many thanks Robert). This video will bring you up to speed on the set, how to use it, and how to render, submit etc. Very well done. View it Then you need to get your very own copy of the project. Here it is: RearWindow_Assets_B.zip So with much anticipation and ballyhoo, I declare this project off to the races. [Edit] Uploaded the project to the forum, instead of ftp...

Installers: Windows: Windows 32Bit Windows 64Bit SDK: v19.0 SDK UpDate 0007210: [Net Render] NetRender Crashes during startup (sgross) 0007216: [Interface] Clicking outside of Chor locks out Manipulators (sgross) 0007222: [Bones/Rigging] Deleting bone causes crash (sgross) 0007225: [_Other] Crash on v19 model load (sgross) 0007217: [_Other] Crash on load of old model (sgross) 0007214: [Interface] Accent color of Windows does not change window color of tiled windows in A:M (sgross) 0007213: [Particle Systems] Hair width over length is somehow repeated several times (sgross) 0007208: [Hair] Crash on reset of Hair Parameter (sgross) 0007137: [Dynamics] Dynamic Constraints broken (sgross) 0007203: [Net Render] NetRender nodes close with format error (sgross) 0007200: [Interface] NetRender interface spelling correction (sgross) 0007194: [Net Render] Actions render incorrectly in NetRender (sgross) 0007196: [Modeling] Crash on Copy of Groups (sgross) 0007195: [_Other] Crash after edit of Expression (sgross) 0007189: [Bones/Rigging] Crash on delete of multiple bones (sgross) 0007186: [Bones/Rigging] Path Constraint target list crash (sgross) 0007185: [Bones/Rigging] Bone name trouble (sgross) 0007184: [Bones/Rigging] Crash on Bone Drag (sgross) 0007162: [Rendering] Surface transparency causing Hair transparency (sgross) 0007188: [Sounds] Playing any audio in A:M sets system volume to zero (sgross) 0007175: [Plugins] Mirror Constraints not working? (sgross) 0007180: [_Other] Crash during Backup? (sgross) 0007181: [_Other] Crash on Revert (sgross) 0007179: [_Other] Crash while renaming Pose (sgross) 0007177: [Decaling] Crash while examining decals (sgross) 0007178: [_Other] Crash on PRJ close (sgross) 0007176: [Modeling] CopyFlipAttach adds unnecessary dot suffix to new names (sgross) 0007174: [_Other] Crash loading PRJ (sgross) 0007173: [Realtime] OpenGL3 Hair with textures drawn not correct (sgross) 0007172: [General] False rounding for float/double values (sgross) 0007171: [Realtime] OpenGL crash, if a scaled copy for the realtime texture needed (MipMap) (sgross) 0007166: [Sounds] Sound stops before end of play (sgross) 0007157: [Rendering] SSAO not working (sgross) 0007165: [Composite/Post Effects] Feature: allow Blur greater than 15 (sgross) 0007160: [Realtime] Fluid particle false shaded render after load (sgross) 0007159: [Rendering] Crash on render (sgross) 0007129: [_Other] v18 D Box PRJ no longer works (sgross) 0007155: [Rendering] Fluid Particles render as Camera Background color only (sgross) 0007154: [Particle Systems] Blobbies don't die, don't resize (sgross) 0007152: [Particle Systems] Can't Bake Blobbies? (sgross) 0007153: [_Other] Default Resolution in Camera settings: Change from VGA to HDTV - 720p... (sgross) 0007146: [Lighting] Use Front Realtime Light reverts to OFF after onscreen render (sgross) 0007142: [_Other] Reverting property in Chor doesn't * project (sgross) 0007147: [Materials] PRJ saves forces unwanted keys in Material instances (sgross) 0007148: [Rendering] Custom Frame list renders only first frame multiple times (sgross) 0007143: [Plugins] Simcloth doesn't simulate (sgross) 0007145: [Net Render] NetRender Memory Allocation Error (sgross) 0007144: [Images/Animations/Rotoscopes] EXR missing from allowed image import types (sgross) 0007139: [Rendering] Shaded/Wire Renders don't show "Show Grid" or Rotoscopes (sgross) 0007138: [Rendering] renders use CPU SSAO instead of GPU SSAO (sgross) 0007140: [Animation] Euler/Vector/Quat default selection not retained (sgross) 0007134: [Net Render] NetRender nodes get stuck on "Loading Frame" (sgross) 0007121: [Materials] Increase the viewport size of a material? (sgross) 0007151: [Particle Systems] Crash on change of Attribute to Combiner (sgross)

someboxes.mov someboxes.zip

Robert and I were discussing the EXR format and I wanted to share the project file based on Jim Talbot's Leopard Queen image. The project was demo'd at SIGGRAPH 2005 by Greg Rostami. I must assume it is called Boris becuse of the artist Boris Vallejo whose style is captured in the image. Still haven't found the video of the demo yet but perhaps it isn't far away... maybe even on one of the Hash Inc SIGGRAPH cds. Update: I may have found the composite video. It is in .swf format so am attempting to convert to MP4. The CompDemoProject file attached only includes the EXR file. Will also upload the the Project file (which should also be on the A:M Extra CD and DVD. CompDemoProject.zip

Hi, I'm only charging this female comedian whose in England $200 to put together an intro to her prod cast (first time I ever charge and 'money' for animation work). I took this project mostly so I could track my time and see how my estimate stacked up to reality. Estimate 8 hours/work hours to date 21 and still much to do, LOL. One thing I need to create are 'energy balls'--a special effect--either an animated material or an animated decal (or both). Here's the description: Spheres which are clear energy (almost look watery to give a hint of reflection but mostly clear, yet you don't see THROUGH them to other spheres) and the halo around is an almost fluorescent green. I see this green a lot now when I'm watching sci-fi videos. If you saw Prometheus it shoa lotp alot. Effect like subtle shift of reflection to indicate activity as opposed to a static ball. It's important that they don't like like a solid object, or water, but just 'energy'. I have several ways to go but am looking for fresh alternatives and ideas. Thanks, Rusty