news from AM 2020 ?

[olivier]

Hello,
I am a " former( older ? )" (15 years) French user of AM.
I followed the evolution of other interesting 3D software (3dsmax, carrara, blender, ...). Blender is becoming a major player in the 3D world, but I remember that Animation Master had great potential a few years ago.
Its only major weakness was the slowness of its rendering. When we see the new rendering engines such as Arnold, octane, cycles, eevee, and many others! has it adapted to this development?
I plan to reuse this software that I like by its very logical structure but with its protection system by machine key, I cannot test the trial version (windows problem?)
Do you have opinions, advice or reflections on this subject?
thank you in advance

teo ( olivier turbet )
Art / Motion Designer

[robcat2075]

Hi, Olivier!

A:M is much faster today, largely because we have faster CPUs and more available RAM and A:M has been optimized in recent versions to take advantage of the advances in these.

The benchmark scene that took 20 minutes to render on the computer I had in 2009 takes only 2 minutes on the computer I have now, which is still about four years old.

Also, NetRender is now included in A:M so you can take advantage of multiple cores on one computer or across your home network when you are rendering more than one frame.

A:M does not devote more than one core to a single frame nor does it use GPU-computation. Not yet anyway. A:M will be slower at rendering than some other programs. That is not a deal-breaker for me because A:M is better for me at modeling and animating.

Do i want to give up the better modeling and animating environment i get with A:M just to have faster rendering?

No! (en français!)

Rendering is something the computer can do while I'm doing something else. Modeling and animating is something I have to do at the computer no matter what program I use so it is better to use the program that is better at that.

That is why i use A:M.

If you have more questions, do ask!

 

 

[Bobby]

I chose to modeling and animating in A:M and test-Render came out as Shaded & Wireframe until I was satisfied with the animation and then exported (.obj sequence) to rendering / compositing / editing in Blender.

I don't have any knowledge of script writing, so I have to import .obj to put in the Blender's Scene in frame order. Which is something that is repeated Is a boring job And takes longer than animating in A:M

Lighting in Blender is easier than lighting in A:M and Blender can render quickly. And get the image to be very realistic

Unfortunately, the Materials and Decal in A:M cannot be exported with .obj, but luckily, the configuration of Surface properties in a group in A: M models can be converted with .obj to some Shader values in Blender, such as Diffuse Color, Diffuse Falloff, Transparency.

I also made a clip as an example.

[olivier]

hello,

rendering with blender ?

[robcat2075]

4 hours ago, olivier said:

hello,

rendering with blender ?

I've never messed with it, but in general, A:M can export everything in chor as a polygon model and can do that for all the frames in the chor.

You take that series of OBJs to some other program and render in that.

If someone who actually does this ( @Bobby ) wanted to write up a tutorial on the complete work flow I'm sure that would  be a useful reference to have here.

[olivier]

hello,

do you have an example of the same scene calculated with AM and blender and the corresponding times?

Thanks