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https://youtu.be/z5nBA45DvRo Andrew Kramer has announced a November release for Video Copilot's Element Version 2. Element is an Adobe After Effects plug-in that offers realtime GPU based 3D rendering, right within the After Effects application. Version 1 was a big hit but had obvious drawbacks in that with realtime GPU you can not generate shadows or reflections... well, with V2 he appears to have jumped those hurdles, and threw in realtime sub-surface-scattering and refraction as well! The shadows, refraction and SSS look pretty nice, and the reflections use a bit of a 'cheat' as realtime raytracing is still unobtainable. It is kind of amazing! Prices and upgrades have not been figured yet, and the release date is 'November'... Element 1 was less than $700. What does this mean for A:Mer's? It offers a possible 'alternate render' solution, something some users may never need- others may have been longing for... PLUS- the fact it is REAL TIME is a bit of a bonus! Another new feature being that obj imports in Element will support accompanying .mat files... which A:M's obj exporter is capable of generating. Element ALSO supports .obj sequence imports- so exporting actions, textures, and models from A:M looks all possible... and with Elements new 'physical' materials users may want to leave some of the attributes blank for texturing in Element with their robust presets and easy manipulation. Element V2 may be 'luring' users from C4D, Max, modo, Maya for their rendering needs. Among other new features(there are many I am missing) is a 'primitives' generator, but Element does not claim to be a modeling program at all. The 'speed of realtime' is actually limited by your graphics card and the speed of your After Effects... as he demonstrates at :25 where loads the engine model into his AE RAM-preview... that is the 3D renderer working 'zippity-click' FAST!!! The render QUALITY may be open for debate, especially with inaccurate non-raytraced reflections, and 'who-knows' about the anti-aliasing smoothness (I have Element V1, renders were 'not bad' from what I saw... I got busy learning other apps and it fell thru the cracks...) But from what we can see in this demo... renders look pretty good! Still are some features users are requesting... would be good to see mdd support... but Element V2 looks like something to keep an eye on as a complimentary program to A:M!

Hi, I must be missing something VERY basic. How do I create a rendered version of a frame of scene/choreography? I have a choreography, I don't want to render the entire choreography just a single rendered frame from within the choreography Make sense? Oliver

Hello Everyone, I am having a problem with rendering a scene at the correct length. I have a scene that is 14400 frames long, and I am rendering at 24 Frames Per Second. But I am getting a file that is a little over 8 minutes long when it should be 10 minutes. Does anyone have any experience in which render options I should choose to have the file rendered at the correct length? I have a clock in this scene, so it is important that it is the right length. Thanks in advance to all those who help. Andrew

Playing with features I had overlooked in the past... I see in the Choreography that I can turn ON Radiosity. A quick forum search turned up nothing (been having bad luck with our search engine... google almost does better...) I remember back in the day Yves put TONS of time and information into this subject on the forum... is it still around? Has Radiosity improved with the newer versions of A:M as far as render times go? Is Radiosity an alternative to or does it work with A:M's lights... raytraced only? Is radiosity whats known in other apps as 'global illumination'? Now that I have NetRender maybe I can take a little more of a hit to my render times if it means more realistic renders...

Let's hook-up to this as an alternate renderer! http://www.animationmagazine.net/vfx/pixar-releases-free-noncommercial-renderman/

Anyone else get these unusual render frames... I left my PC(nothing else running) to render overnight and saw I have some frames that take unusually long... 5 hours 34 minutes when the frame before was 2min20??? A:M V18.0G 64 bit... using SSS hair.

I tried rendering a chor. file in the bitmap format, and the sky became black on the rendered picture. When I rendered as an avi, the sky was light blue as usual. I would like the sky to be light blue in the bitmap. Any ideas?

Well, no mistake about it--I'm a train wreck! I have had two or three issues in the last week or two, and another occurred last night. This time, however, I had the answer, because of the help I received previously. Here's what happened. I use version 15i. It is what I've used since I started in November 2011 when I started into this. I have been working on the same project since then and was afraid to change because I want it all to look consistent. Yesterday, I was updating a file I did about two years ago trying to make it better. It is a scene that is so large that I can only look at it occasionally in shaded or shaded and wireframe. It will not go from frame to frame in real time in either of those. I also frequently have to click on something and wait for computer dynamics to calculate for a minute or two (or however long) before I can move a bone or a control point. Frequently, it won't show me where it moved it to until after it computes dynamics again for a minute or three. In other words, it is horrendous to work on this file. There are 21 participants in the scene that has a background with various buildings. I rendered the file to get a look at it, so I could go back and fix various problems. During the next six or eight hours, I fixed as many as I could. I backed up frequently to keep from losing my work. It became late, and I decided to render again while I slept. Then, to my horror, I found that the file would not render. It would load, and it was viewable on a frame by frame basis in wireframe, shaded, and shaded and wireframe, but it would not do a final render or a temporary render. I noticed then that Windows had updated and that Java wanted to update. I let Java update because I worried that somehow the old Java had gone bad. It didn't help. I did a System Restore to an earlier happier time, but that didn't help. I tried to render another file to see if it was just this file or every choreography. The other choreography rendered just fine. Horrors! A corrupted file! Would it ever render? Then, I remembered an earlier difficulty I had yesterday (or last week) when a choreography would view fine, except that front view was upside down. Fuchur had given a wonderful piece of advice there about importing the choreography into another choreography. I tried that on this file, and it worked! The file would render! There were a few problems, however, that I should mention. There were a new camera, a new rim, a new ground, a new fill light, and a new key light. My old ones were there also and were called 2 (e.g., Camera2). The new versions were causing me to lose my camera and light settings. I could have looked them up on my records or in the file itself and reinserted them, but one-by-one, I moved the old ones above the new ones and omitted the new ones. (As I did this, I kept checking to see if the file would still render and if I could still save it under a new name. One time, before I moved the old ones above the new ones, I omitted the new ones, and the file would not save. That's why hierarchy is important here.Maybe, it's always important.) Now, I basically have the old choreography file, but it will render. It took an hour or so to go through all of the recovery attempts, but it would have been much more difficult to start again on the changes I had made. I wanted to throw this out there to thank Fuchur again for the earlier information and to show how this Forum really helps. I also thought someone might someday have a choreography file that won't render or that might have lost part of its functionality in another way. Here is another thing to try. I want to thank every else who has offered advice and support also. I highlighted Fuchur here, because his advice directly led to this solution.