A couple of questions

[breakthelocke]

1. I've set up an environment for my character, and I've found it to be really laggy with only some of the props in there (there's alot of trees). Is there a way for me to turn off the trees or something so I can animate my character without all the lag? and then turn them back on when it's time to render?

 

EDIT-- even when the object is set to hidden, it's still ultra laggy

 

2. That leads into the next question- should I be animating my character in an action window and then load it into a chor. ? or just animate right in the chor?

 

3. Is there a format of video that saves the alpha channel? Or do I have to render it as a targa sequence?

 

4. I need some advice on final rendering and compositing. any general advice is good. I have after effects for compositing. Anyone have any info on matte paintings for backgrounds? thanks!!!!!!!!

[johnl3d]

format for video with alpha is qt animation or the tga sequence that works for me. action is one way to animate character say for a walk cycle. I let the experts answer more completely I just tinker

[Caroline]

Could the lag be particles? You can turn these on and off by pressing Shift + 8.

 

Also, pressing Page Down a couple of times makes a big difference - Page Up & Page Down are the real-time render quality.

 

Animate in the chor is easier, unless it is an action that will be reused by this or other characters. In which case an action is better, which can later be dropped on a character.

 

I'm just experimenting with compositing in A:M, using Twisted Brush to do a background, and seeing how much I can get away with in 2d, like trees and such.

 

You can put tgas on layers in the choreography, or use a tga as a camera rotoscope.

[rusty]

1. I've set up an environment for my character, and I've found it to be really laggy with only some of the props in there (there's alot of trees). Is there a way for me to turn off the trees or something so I can animate my character without all the lag? and then turn them back on when it's time to render?

 

EDIT-- even when the object is set to hidden, it's still ultra laggy

 

2. That leads into the next question- should I be animating my character in an action window and then load it into a chor. ? or just animate right in the chor?

 

3. Is there a format of video that saves the alpha channel? Or do I have to render it as a targa sequence?

 

4. I need some advice on final rendering and compositing. any general advice is good. I have after effects for compositing. Anyone have any info on matte paintings for backgrounds? thanks!!!!!!!!

 

1. If you have a lot of AM windows open in the background (like modeling windows, action, material etc) it can cause big lag problems. Also you should be able to expand the model properties and click on the active property and make it inactive and this should help. Do it with everything you are not animating. Also I lock (icon to the right of model in PWS) everything I'm not animating at that moment. Another big helper is to simply leave out complex models until you render (in your case maybe the best idea). Note: if your camera does not move and your characters do not go behind a background model... render all of your background models separately and use the image as the background -- not only will your PC work faster but this will really reduce your render times! Instead of rendering a tree 300 time you only render it once!! Understand? In fact, ANY thing that you can only render once and use the image instead of the model is the way to go!

 

Edit: Knowing what you can render and then use as an image can be tricky... if you try to do this with the ground, you could lose the character's shadow. If you say okay, I'll render the ground with the character and other background stuff I'll make an image of and use... then shadows of the background items may be lost of the ground (so split the ground into two grounds)! Plan carefully.

 

 

2. Animate in the chor mainly. The chor is where you place your set, lights, camera, props (do not put these in an action! do not render from an action unless for a test and then do shaded only!). The action is also for animating when you want to animate in a vacuum so to speak (only the model and perhaps one or two secondary model know as an action item) then you drag the action on to the character (or model) in the chor. You need to get hold of Anzovin's Non-Linear video.

 

3. answered

 

4. Too general a question to answer here... sorry. I could go on forever. :-)

 

Rusty