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Ian Ross has just released a book on Anim8or. It's perect for a beginner and a good reference for experienced users. It contains detailed chapters on every aspect, with many examples. Get your own copy here: "Anim8or Tutorial Book"

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Topics - wallyrut

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Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Importing obj surface normals
« on: December 06, 2016, 08:44:31 am »
I exported an icosahedron with hard edges from Wings3D two ways, one with surface normals, one without. When I import these into sme other 3d apps, they look as expected, the obj with surface normals showing hard edges, the one without normals smoothing the edges. Anim8or shows both the same. It looks like Anim8or is ignoring the imported surface normals and calculating them just based on the smoothing angle. I have seen people having this problem in Lightwave, and found this comment on a Lightwave forum:

"Since I know that Lightwave's OBJ importer ignores vertex normals"

I tried un-checking the "use new OGL renderer" option, but render still shows soft edges. Does Anim8or use the surface normals when present in an obj file?

Wally

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General Anim8or Forum / Rendering Anim8or scenes in appleseed
« on: December 03, 2016, 02:31:10 pm »
I am glad to see Anim8or is again undergoing active development. I had checked out this program a while back, but it looked like it was no longer being developed or supported, so stopped using it. I am experimenting now with the latest build, and it looks good. I have been using Poser, but was never happy with Poser rendering. I found appleseed (check it out at appleseedhq.net), a really great open source renderer that is generating a lot of interest in the cg community. Appleseed does rendering, but has no facilities for modelling/animating. Exporters have been written for Blender, Maya and 3ds Max. I wrote one for Poser using Poser's Python interface and have been very pleased with my appleseed renders of Poser scenes. I have just begun working on an Anim8or to appleseed exporter. So far I have verified that I can extract camera and object position vectors and orientation quaternions from a .an8 file and convert them to 4x4 pose matricies for appleseed. I have code for exporting Poser lights to appleseed lights, so I can adapt that for Anim8or. When I get things a little farther along I will release my Python script as open source so the Anim8or community can join Blender, Maya and 3ds Max users in experimenting with appleseed.

And now a question. It looks like I can only set the camera FOV property. All the other software I have used allows me to set the aspect ratio. Usually I can set focal length and film dimensions. I know I can set render width/height in the render tab, but is there some way to do this for the camera?

Wally

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Anim8or v0.98 Discussion Forum / Problem with camera roll
« on: December 03, 2016, 02:12:07 pm »
When positioning the camera with Enable Roll un-checked, the camera does not appear to have any roll in the display or render, but if I double click the camera, the PYR properties show roll. This appears to be ignored by Anim8or in displaying the scene or rendering, but it is exported in the .an8 scene file. I discovered this because I am writing an exporter in Python to export Anim8or scenes for rendering in appleseed, and after converting the camera orientation quaternion to a 4x4 matrix, sometimes I would get a render with everything looking ok except the scene was rotated around the camera optical axis. If I set the roll to zero in the PYR entry field of the camera properties dialog before saving the file, the scene renders in appleseed with correct camera orientation. I also wrote a Python method to take just the camera z-axis and compute a camera pose matrix with y axis up. If I export the scene without zeroing the camera roll, I can convert the camera orientation quaternion to a 4x4 matrix forcing the y axis up, and then the orientation is good, so apparently the camera orientation quaternion has the z-axis correct, but it is including the unwanted roll.

Wally

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