Anim8or Community

Well, I'm a fan of the Add edge, Cut Faces, Topographical knife, and Straight / Curved Path tools, and I feel a few more basic tools dealing with 2D curves would be alright. The same goes for more helpers for getting correct positions on faces, along edges, correct angles, and alignments to lines (MOI 3D has these, see 3rd attached image. I can elaborate later or just have a look online yourself ).

Holding Shift while rotating something could show at mouse position, an overlaid (HUD) wheel with lines divided into 45 degrees that you can snap the rotation angle towards. See the 2nd attached image.

It would also be nice to have an integrated "Select similar faces" in the program (by default) and with a similarity threshold variable (range (0, 1] with 1 meaning only identical faces get selected).

Lastly, perhaps some extended repeat / copy tools.

-- Everything is shown in the 1st attached image. Inspiration comes mostly from Moment of Inspiration 3D (MOI 3D) and SolidThinking. I know Anim8or is a polygonal modeler, and that several of the shown tools would require various settings for adjustment of this & that, but they would be practical, imho. In the other programs, these tools are k-step procedures, that is "select point 1", "... point 2", ..., "select point k" in order to finish the procedure. I'm not sure how things should be done in Anim8or, but at least the suggestions are here now for everyone to give feedback on.

Last but not least; I know there exists a bunch of neat scripts already, but I feel that Anim8or can be even easier to use if some more functionality is more readily available like buttons on a ribbon etc. This is partly why I suggest these tools in this post, say there exists two Loft scripts already but they are hidden away in the Scripts list, and would be handy to have by default anyways.

I'd like to explain better but it'll have to be in later posts, not atm.

Glad you guys are trying it out! I discovered a major bug with the comb thing--I kind of broke it in one of my last minute changes before updating -- I uploaded v1.2a with the fix!

kreator, good to see you stress testing PHUR! 3 and higher reverts to a transmap shape only. I know this causes potential problems with the base mesh, as far as I can tell you have two options: Convert to mesh and apply a transmap material separate from the base mesh, or give the base mesh a huge-scaled planar uv map so that a completely opaque part of the transmap covers all of it. I prefer the latter option unless the base mesh is already unwrapped and needs its own texture.

The same idea applies to geometric fur as well, since you could have potential conflicts if you want to use a texture map on the fur strands (my minotaur uses gradient color maps mixed with some ambient color). You'd have to either convert to mesh or scale the base mesh's UVs to a location on the map that has a suitable color, unless the base mesh looks good enough as is.

The more realistic or in-depth you want the PHUR, the more thoughtful you'll have to be. If you take the time to create a base mesh that you are happy with, and take the time to comb the PHUR how you want it, then there won't be much preventing you from finalizing it by converting it to mesh and then customizing the materials. However(!), if you really like your PHUR and want to back it up just in case, simply copy and paste it and the combs into a separate object before converting the PHUR to mesh and deleting the combs. Like I said before, the .an8 file size imprint is extremely small for parametric shapes, so there's no reason not to.

I know I'm kind of rambling now but I also noticed that Anim8or does its general processing with only one thread. So you need a fast core to reduce the generation time, and more than one core if you don't want to lock up your entire computer until it's done. I'll be emailing Steve a list of ASL requests, and multithreading is going to be one of them.

captaindrewi: I'd forgotten about the more abstract. Good to see you using it in style

johnar, thanks, but I may end up vanishing just like tha- *poof*

Did you guys ever discuss multi-threading in Anim8or? It would be super awesome to at least have basic support for threads in ASL.

Hah, awesome, thanks. Also thanks for making them metric.

Incidentally, which would be more work: a C API that supports Anim8or's native undo, or an undo-enabled script VM? =)

A C API sounds rad.

Thanks for the boolean operations script, NickE.

I'd say an inelegant undo function is better than no function.
Steve, what about one of the following:
- Save everything at each point in the Undo history and let the user choose between keeping it in RAM OR on the HDD/SSD. I'm on 32 GB RAM but wouldn't really mind Anim8or having to load from disk if it meant the Undo support would at least be there.
- More work, but; an Undo system that saves the differences, aka delta-patching of sorts. Could still have the choice of keeping history in RAM or on the disk.
- As tazdij suggests; track every command & script with their used parameters (run them in a macro-like fashion upon undo / redo, would be problematic with very demanding scripts timewise, though)

Could at least be a temporary solution, I'm sure users would like just having the possibility to undo scripts at all.

I meant to say it happens when one spline/edge is selected at a time - if one segment is mouse pressed by me, it's length shows at that segment as expected, but then another segment's length also shows at that unselected segment, be it spline or edge. (This is what happens some times. A pattern has so far eluded me though I think there may be one.)

When selecting several splines/edges at a time things work fine. Deselection of previously selected segments & knots when adding a new one works fine, display of knot coordinates works fine.

I will throw together a picture with several screen captures to show how the unselected segment length jumps between segments when I click around on splines/edges.

EDIT: Picture is attached along with system specs.