Anim8or Community

Steve,

Thanks for the response. I got a preliminary version of my exporter working last weekend and have rendered some Anim8or scenes in appleseed. I note there is a scripting language for Anim8or. I've only taken a very brief look at i. Looks like it is C based. That's good for me, as I'm familiar with programming in C. My exporter is written in Python, because Poser has a Python interface. I was able to bring over a lot of code intact to use in my Anim8or project. It would be nice to be able to run my script directly out of Anim8or, instead of extracting information from the .an8 file, but I don't know if it makes sense to re-implement it in ASL. I am using Python modules to present a GUI for the user to interact with, and also to parse/write xml files, as appleseed scene files are xml.

Wally

Yes, I saw the smoothing angle property. This works ok for simple models, but I have models for which this strategy doesn't work. Here's a comment from http://www.okino.com/conv/imp_c4d_selective.htm on this issue with C4S:

"As noted in the previous paragraphs, CINEMA 4D does not naturally use the more common and accurate "explicit vertex normals" capability as is used with most 3D software. Rather, meshes are associated with a "Phong Tag" that allows new vertex normals to be computed internally on the fly, based on a cut-off smoothing angle. Unfortunately these re-computed vertex normals are prone to errors in their computations, especially for single meshes with both smooth parts and abrupt angular parts, such as is often the case with CAD files (ie. a rotor assembly). Having a single cut-off smoothing angle for an entire complex mesh just does not allow for proper vertex normals computation - this problem is shared exactly with the Lightwave animation system for which its smoothing angle (its own concept of the Phong Tag) is associated with the material assigned to the mesh."

I've found this observation to be quite true. It would be nice if Anim8or used the vertex normals in the obj file. I suspect the only workaround right now is to split a model along hard edges that are shallow, but this is often impractical unless the model is simple.

Wally

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