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Messages - AlecJames

Pages: 1 [2] 3 4 ... 16
16
Ongoing Anim8or Development / Re: Animated Parameteric Plug-in Scripts
« on: January 07, 2021, 08:24:26 am »
I agree that water effect is really good :)

17
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Probably Stupid Question: Posing A Figure
« on: December 30, 2020, 02:53:19 pm »
In the scene editor, click on rotate bone <R>.


Click on your bone and the rotate bone gizmo will appear.



Click on one of the rotation rings and drag it to rotate the bone.



18
General Anim8or Forum / Re: "Rigging" A Model
« on: December 21, 2020, 03:31:17 pm »
Rigging is the process of building a skeleton and attaching it to objects or an object, using figure mode.

I use two different ways
1) Each bone has an object attached, the bone influences all the vertexes in the object.  I think the simple walk Robin tutorial uses this method, it works well for stick figures.
2) A single object. Each bone has an "influence" on each vertex/point.  Check out the manual section figure-->Skinning

You could break your object up in point edit mode, then in edit mode, build ->split solids, copy and paste a part to a new object.

Or you could keep one object and use skinning to assign the bone influences.  This takes some practise. I prefer painted weights. I recommend experimenting with a single cylinder with two bones.  You can change the strength of the painted weight brush in build -> weight brush.  Change it to 1 and it will be more obvious what is happening. In the pic the blue bone influences the blue parts of the object, the red bone influences the red part of the object.  Notice I am in flat shaded view so I can see the vertexes I am painting.  Switch to sequence mode and test - it is easy to have influences that are only seen when the bones are moving.



19
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Bump Maps Don't Seem To Work
« on: December 14, 2020, 09:47:34 am »
Its Intel Graphics HD4600 but

its a Dell precision laptop (5 years old) so it has both the 4600 and an amd firepro m5100.  I recall when using OBS there is some power saving setting in windows 10 that forces OBS to use the other graphics card, I will look....

I just asked Google:  Settings -> Display -> Graphics settings; set Anim8or to use the fire pro:  It's the same; GLSL no bump map in the workspace, ARB works OK.

I never really understood the detail about this, I just learnt that if it renders but doesn't show in the workspace, change the setting :)
   

20
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Bump Maps Don't Seem To Work
« on: December 14, 2020, 07:41:10 am »
Sorry.  I had written an essay about it and was proof reading it when Davdud101 got in with the solution. My summarised one liner went to the other extreme. :)


21
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Bump Maps Don't Seem To Work
« on: December 13, 2020, 01:03:22 pm »
I had GLSL (no bump map); changed to ARB and the bump map appears.




22
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Quality
« on: December 11, 2020, 06:36:06 am »
There is a difference between the poly count and the movie resolution.  I would also add the most significant factor which I think is the ability of the artist.

I'm not an artist, I just tinker with Anim8or to make work presentations or amusing ditties.  I often think things don't look right and I'm sure someone with more artistic flare could make it look loads better, even at low poly and low res.

I know that if I use a low poly object and set the smooth angle "wrong" it will look blocky or as if it has seems. As I increase the poly count I get better appearance at the expense of longer render times. 

If I set the movie image resolution to 320x240, I will get a fuzzy pixelated result.  If I set it to 1920x1080 (1080p) I will get a nice clean image but it will show all the creases and defects in my models.

The bell has 1752 faces so looks pretty smooth.  The video is available at 1080p (you may need to set the youtube viewer settings).

But is it a quality animation?    (well it sounds OK :) )

 
[/youtube] 




23
If you have access to microsoft one drive and you save your anim8or projects to a location that is syncing to one drive, you can review the file version history and open an older version if needed (via the web interface, version history, open).

I will sometimes make a copy of my anim8or file as well, not so much for backup but so I can change my mind and go back to some key stage.

24
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Textures & Materials: Make Or Break Question
« on: November 23, 2020, 12:17:50 pm »
Create a cube. Convert to Mesh. Switch to point edit mode. Create a material, call it red and make it red.  Select the front face of the cube and apply the material to it. Create a material, call it blue and make it blue.  Select the top face of the cube and apply the material to it.

You now have a cube with 3 materials, the default, red and blue.

Textures are used to make materials.  In the simplest form a material is a solid colour.  You can also select a png file as a texture for a material property.  The most common thing I do is to select an image for the diffuse property of the material.  If you have a picture that you want to paste onto the cube face, in materials, click textures, click ... next to diffuse, click "load texture", select your image file, it appears in the list. Click the texture name in the list of textures to select it then click OK.  Then repeat the texture selection (you don't need to load it this time because its loaded already) for the ambient property of the material.  Apply the material to a cube face and it appears that the image is pasted onto the cube face.

Once you've done above try -
In the UV editor (click the UV button), you can move and scale the image on the side of the cube. 

Once you've done above try -
You can save the object as an obj file, and import it into a UV mapping program like Roadkill or UV mapper (@all are there better tools today?)  UV mapping allows you to apply a single image to the whole object and precisely control which part of the image is on which face.

Good luck and let me know how you get on....



25
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Is it possible...
« on: November 11, 2020, 04:32:36 am »
The transparency is set on a material so to fade a figure you would need to change the transparency of every material used on each object of your figure.

So the quick answer is no.

--------------------------------------------------------

But if you really had to:

I've assumed you want to make a figure fade out of a scene by changing the opacity settings.

I tried to do this with a controller script, but I couldn't because the material.alpha and material.[attribute functions] that I wanted to use only appear to work in object mode, I get a script error in scene mode when I try to use them.  Maybe someone else could suggest a way to modify the material.alpha from a controller script?

This leaves two options -

1) have multiple figures, e.g. 10.  each with a different level of transparency.  Then use visibility keys to change figures so they fade out.  This involves loads of work,  I wouldn't do it this way unless 2 does not work.  The only reason I can think of for 2 not working is if you have multiple figures all fading in / out with the sequences overlapping.

2) Use the visibility key to make the figure disappear where you need it to fade.  After rendering to video, split the clip (using a video editor) where the figure disappears and add a cross fade.

26
Anim8or v1.0 Discussion Forum / Re: Rigging bones of Mannequin...
« on: October 21, 2020, 04:39:04 pm »
What goes wrong?

27
ASL Scripts / Re: Animated Textures Using Controller Scripts
« on: September 13, 2020, 03:08:34 am »
I made an example in this thread   https://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php/topic,5728.msg43026.html#msg43026

I just tested it on version 1393 and it worked (I saw the splash in scene mode), if you want to test it, copy the zip contents (use v2) to c:\temp\ because I have some hard coded paths. 

What do you have in your script on line 54?

28
Thanks Steve :)

29
I tested adding spline segments and then using undo / redo in 1390 and 1391 and I don't see any problem.  But the problem will likely be in the detail - there will be some difference between my procedure and yours.

30
On the crash issue, can you make a simple project / procedure that reproduces the issue? 

While I've never used it, there is an autosave feature https://www.anim8or.com/learn/manual/2_basics.html#auto_save.  (I must try it out :) )

I save regularly and my save location is synced to ms one-drive.  In the one drive web interface I can restore a previous version.  I need to know roughly when I did what, but its saved me a few times.  (I think this works with the free version of one drive.)

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