Skycast now available as a free download

[JohnArtbox]

It's a new year and in a crass grab for better karma we've decided to release Skycast as freeware.

For those who don't know Skycast is a spinning light generator for Animation Master. More details are available at

skycast.artboxanimation.com while the software can be downloaded from here

skycast.zip

Enjoy

[youngman]

Thanks for your genorosity John,this will definatly come in handy for me.

 

Jay

[C Cargo]

Thank you

Perfect timing for what I'm working on. I'll give it a try.

 

c

[Rodney]

John,

This is an outstanding resource and a great contribution to the A:M Community.

I know from personal experience working with Skycast.

 

There has got to be some very good karma heading your way!

 

Thanks!

[Dhar]

Thank you. Very generous of you.

[Tai Shan]

Thank you for generously providing this to everyone. I didn't know Skycast existed, but it will be helpful for me too.

[johnl3d]

Big thank you !

[itsjustme]

Thanks, John!

[nino banano]

Hi John...Thanks a lot for share it us...

[serg2]

Thanks, John!

[Tralfaz]

Thanks very much John. The sample animations on your website looked great!

 

Al

[trajcedrv]

John, thank you very much! Great Chrismas present for us all!

[nimblepix]

Thank you sir.

May you be richly blessed.

[HomeSlice]

Thanks John. That's awesome. Consider yourself karmically enhanced!

[ptiversen]

It's a new year and in a crass grab for better karma we've decided to release Skycast as freeware.

For those who don't know Skycast is a spinning light generator for Animation Master. More details are available at

skycast.artboxanimation.com while the software can be downloaded from here

skycast.zip

Enjoy

 

Thank you John, I'll accept this as an early Bday present.

[The Caller]

Thank you for the excellent share!

[Ersatz anime]

Nice. I actually owned it, but I never got around to using it - tend to focus on toon renders. I guess I'll take it for a spin again

[Rodney]

Bumping this up as I ran across the subject of John's Skycast and recalled how well it served many in the A:M Community.

 

John's site has been down for a long while but I think Skycast still works.

We'll have to test and see.

[John Bigboote]

Wow- thanks for the replay, Rodney... scanning thru all those avatars of users 'past'... sad- how vibrant and dynamic this forum used to be, every day it was such a pleasure to open the A:M Forum to see who was up to what, and what wonderful accomplishments were being made, and the deep conversations about animation, art and our favorite software.

 

I remember trying to make my own skycast rig, it is meant to emulate global illumination (GI) and create natural soft shadows with a deep, rich ambient occlusion look, right? I remember it took advantage of the multipass renderer and many-many passes were needed which made it a little render intensive for animation purposes. Maybe I should give it another look as well!

[John Bigboote]

Played with it a little today... still works! Trick is to activate the .exe file where you specify your lighting setup and color map... it spits-out an action file that you apply to one of the 2 available .mdls and you are set... set your motion blur to a dividend of 100 (100, 50,25,20,10,5) and render with multipass same as you specified in the .exe.

 

Drawbacks seem to be:

-the effect is not functioning on the 1st frame as I imagine it has nothing to compare the motion blur with (no previous frame.)

-It forces you to use motion-blur- which some times you may not want. The effect works best at 100% MB, but character animation does not always look good at 100% motion blur...

[Rodney]

Thanks for reporting back on that Matt!

Very good to know.

[John Bigboote]

Well- hang on now... more testing needs be done... came in this morning to see my overnight render has a lot of 'flashing and flickering' to it. Maybe I missed something-