Anim8or Community

Steve,

Thanks!

I'm pretty sure it's the 32bit limitation that's biting me.
I'l just have to try to find a workaround -- like using separate meshes, perhaps.

FWIW, the model is of the Valles Caldera supervolcano in New Mexico. It's not as big as Yellowstone, but it would still ruin someone's day if it decided to blow its top.

A followup:

Unfortunately, Terranim8or is limited to meshes with a max of 1K subdivisions on a side (1 million vertices) and has a bug such that the resulting mesh is rotated 90 degrees with respect to the surface texture coordinates. While one can reproject the surface texture using Anim8or's texture UV feature, it's still quite annoying.

Also, the free version of L3DT is limited to using textures that are 2K on a side.

*sigh*

Trevor,

People use hightmaps with a variety of sample depths, which is why I was so vague. Most recently I've been struggling with GeoTIFFs with 32bit floating point values. The GeoTIFFs have been winning.

I understand that Anim8or's displacement (if implemented) would be limited to processing gif, bmp, jpeg, and png formats, but that'd be fine, especially if it supports the 64K shades of grey provided by the PNG standard. (256 shades sometimes can result in visible height steps.)

Thanks for the reminder about Terrainimator. I'll investigate that and L3DT.

FWIW, Blender has a Displace option, but it's very difficult (for me) to use and isn't providing the results I need.

Thanks, again!

Edited to add:

Although the original Web site no longer exists, instructions for Terranim8or v7.10.1 are available at http://web.archive.org/web/20120302161126/http://biederman.net/leslie/terranim8or/instructions.htm
and its Zip file can be downloaded from http://web.archive.org/web/20120302161126/http://biederman.net/leslie/terranim8or/download7zip.php/?filename=/Terranim8or7101.zip

New feature wish:
2D grey-scale image (heightmap) to mesh generation

I'd very much like to import a greyscale heightmap image and have it deform a planar mesh into a 3D object. Black would cause no displacement, while white would cause the maximum specified displacement.

Alternatively, has anyone written a script which could do this?

I understand, and that does work, but there are cases where people would like to be able to run Anim8or who don't have admin privs. It'd be really nice if it weren't necessary at all.

Steve,

I'm very sorry, I wasn't clear enough in my responses. Those two terminal logs were for *successful* runs of Anim8or. I truncated them because you said you didn't need them past the line containing the CPU= information, but I included a couple more lines.

The terminal output  includes only two lines for a failing run of "Anim8or -traceinit" on a computer where it has never been run before:

begin: InitInstance()
call: AppInitRegistry()

I have attached a partial screengrab of such a failure, including the error popup "Anim8or has stopped working". Please let me know how to provide whatever additional information you need.

You don't have to wait. Microsoft provides a tool to manually download the upgrade at
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

When you run it, you can opt to do an in-place upgrade or create a DVD or USB installer kit. If you select the latter, you can later do a clean install if you want.

Be sure to do a full backup of your computer before doing the upgrade, just in case.

Unfortunately, Windows 10 defaults to being spyware. Make sure you go through the Privacy settings and turn off all of the options. If you value your privacy, you also shouldn't use either Cortana or Edge. There are a lot of apologists who say it's no big deal because just about all the tablet and phone vendors are doing it, but I think that's being irresponsible.

In most cases the upgrade procedure can upgrade a fully patched Win7 SP1 or 8.1 with no problems at all, although it does download over 1GB of patches in addition to the base upgrade files.

On my computer it invalidated the previous disk search cache and had to rebuild it from scratch. While that's running, all disk accesses are *very* slow. If you have many files, it could take several hours to re-index everything, as it did on mine. Of course, if you do a clean install, there's not much to index, so you probably wouldn't notice that happening.

A clean install, wiping out all your files, can only be done after you've done an upgrade and the activation procedure has successfully registered your computer with Microsoft's servers. Otherwise you need a Windows 10 product key: your old Win7 or Win8 key is not valid for Win10.

Nvidia's GeForce Win10 graphics driver still has some issues, which might be the cause of some problems and slowdowns. Its discussion forum is 81 pages already, so you might want to skip to the end.

See https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/860152/official-windows-10-353-62-game-ready-display-driver-feedback-thread-7-29-15-/

Some Firefox weirdnesses can be cleared up by disabling Firefox's hardware acceleration, which is enabled by default.

Bug:

It would be nice if Anim8or did not need to be run once from an Administrator account.

The first time Anim8or (any version, including the most recent v0.98a [build 1179]) was ever run under Windows 7 (x64 Enterprise in this case), it crashed immediately with no error messages when it was run from an account that did not have administrator privileges.

It crashed (with no error popups) every time it was run until it was been run once from a privileged account.

When it was run from an Administrator account, it ran with no errors.

When it then was run from a non-privileged account, it generated an error popup complaining that it could not register a file type but otherwise seemed to work fine.

The next time it was run from the same non-privileged account, no error popup appeared and it worked fine.

My guess is that when it was crashing, it was trying (and failing) to create an entry in the system registry and was not failing gracefully. If that is what was happening, it'd be nice if it tried only to create entries in the registry of the non-privileged user.