Anim8or Community

made this the other day - the third and last preview for a CGI short film, which is finally finished after 18 months in production (18 months to make the film, that is, not to make the trailer ).

you can youtube.com/watch?v=9uV6s4ts69s[/youtube]]see the trailer on its own by clicking here, or if you want to see the whole series so far (including the first two films, and all of the trailers), you can youtube.com/view_play_li[/youtube]st?p=EBEE2325C05BC305]watch this playlist instead.  the finished movie should be online sometime this month, once i've had a chance to show it to my friend, who directed it.

hope you enjoy

- colclough

well, technically it's my third, but the first two were just low-res test versions of this one.

the object is a lowpoly mesh, originally created by selecting all of the faces in an irregularly-shaped object and doing an Extrude Together, then subdivided to 4 working / 5 final divisions.  the material is a sort of glass / crystal effect, with the transparent attribute, and IOR 2.  the scene includes fog, but that doesn't seem to have rendered.  there's just one local light in the scene, with unmemorable settings

the render took nearly 2.5 hours, and used 134614270 rays.  apparently.  that's what the bit underneath the render window said, anyways.

i have no idea what it's supposed to be, really, it was just my first experiment in ART materials and rendering - i only downloaded 0.97 yesterday - and i thought it looked kinda cool.

.an8 attached in case anyone wants to have a look at it.

- colclough

i've noticed that you can't set the divisions of a sphere to more than 32x16 without subdividing the object, and i was just wondering why that is?  is it something to do with how the code works, or is it just an artificial limit, to stop people making ridiculously over-polied objects?  i find it's sometimes a problem, especially when making really big spherical things, such as planets (yes, i sometimes build planets!  who do i think i am, slartibartfast or someone?  ), and i was wondering if there could be a way to remove the limit?

or maybe have a switch, so users can turn it off themselves if they really need all those extra divisions...

- colclough

nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, at least on this forum (haven't searched the old one), but how about a scrollbar on the sequence/scene mode timeline when it gets too long to fit in the window?  every other video or audio app i've used (movie maker, audition and audacity, Flash, etc) has one, and i think it'd make life a lot easier when you're working on a long scene if anim8or had one too.  the current click-on-the-last-visible-frame-then-press-the-right-arrow-key method is kinda awkward

any chance of implementation in the next 0.97 release? 

- colclough

you know we've got reference images?  well, how about reference videos?  exactly the same as a ref. image, but with a video rather than a static pic.

i know anim8or doesn't have any video playback stuff at the moment, but the fact that the renderer can handle multiple compression options, seems to suggest that steve is able to tap into the available video codecs, so i was just wondering, how much work would it be to include in-scene playback functionality?

it'd also be cool if you could make a reference image or video visible in the renders (i guess just have a boolean switch in the ref. image's properties, to set whether it renders or not), so that you could use them to create moving backgrounds, or video/computer screens in your models, etc.  example: if you were building a futuristic city, you could place a 'reference' video on the side of a building to make a giant advertising billboard, a la Blade Runner.   

any thoughts, peoples?

- colclough

i'm currently working on a pretty big short-film project, almost entirely in anim8or, and i've got to the stage where i have dozens of objects, several figures and sequences, and 20 or 30 scenes - and my problem is that it's all in the file in no particular order.  basically i started by making the simplest things first, but i'd now like to be able to rearrange the order my objects appear in the 'Object' menu, so that all the bits of set are grouped together, all the props are grouped together, etc etc.  and in scene mode, i'd like to be able to put all the scenes in the order they appear in the movie.

now, i know it's possible to open up the .an8 file in a text editor and rearrange the code manually, but that's quite a formidable task in a project of this size.  it's also possible to do it with the 'Import' commands, but that takes ages, and is a pain in the neck.  so what i was thinking is, for each program mode (object, figure...) it'd be really great to have a 'manager' panel, where (for object mode, for example) you could rearrange the order of your objects, easily duplicate objects, and manage object importing/exporting - i was thinking it could be done as a list box thing, sort of like the 'List Items' box, but with some extra controls on the side to allow re-ordering and other stuff.  if this was implemented, then when you import objects from another file, you could use the same interface to present a list of all the objects in said file, and you just ticked a checkbox next to each one that you wanted to import, and then pressed an 'import all' button when you were done, rather than working through an endless list of message boxes.  you could also take the 'Delete Object' command out of the 'Edit' menu, and make it a part of the object manager, allowing you to delete multiple objects simultaneously if you so desired.  and maybe 'Object Settings' could be moved into the 'Object' menu and/or the manager as well?  i don't know about everyone else, but personally i don't think having it in the separate 'Settings' menu is the best of arrangements.

so your 'Object' menu would now look something like this:

New Object
Manage Objects
-----
object01
object02
object03
etc etc etc
-----
Object Settings

and the Object Manager would include the commands New, Import (always enabled), and Settings, Move Up, Move Down, Duplicate, Delete, Export (enabled when you have one or more objects selected)

...and then, a similar system for Figure, Sequence and Scene settings, which (i'd guess) would be able to share a lot of code with the Object one.

well, that's how i'd do it, what do the rest of you think?

and steve... any chance of implementation?

- colclough

hi all
i'm working on a short movie in anim8or, going to be about 6 minutes long, and it has some scenes of a medical nature.  i've already built all the sets and characters, and some of the props, and i've animated more than half of the film, but i still need one more set of models, which is a selection of innards, for a scene in an operating theatre.  i need 5 pieces, including a beating heart, and i'm not really sure how to go about making that sort of stuff.  i usually do geometric stuff... 

i was wondering, has anyone else out there modelled internal organs and might be willing to share them, or does anyone know where i might be able to find some, or if not, then is there anyone who's good at modelling organic stuff and would be willing to make them, or offer me some advice on how to do it?

i don't need them to be photorealistic, as the film has a rather stylised, geometric look, but they still need to be organic-ish, and recognisable as body bits rather than abstract reddish-purple blocks / blobs.

i guess it's a bit off-the-beaten-track and all, but if anyone can help on this, it would be much appreciated.  you'd get a mention in the end credits, of course 

thanks in advance!

- colclough