Anim8or Community

Hey guys, long time no see.

I've mentioned before that I haven't been active in the Anim8or community much, as I've started focusing on Traditional animation now. However, I still borrow Anim8or once in a while because it's still helpful when I need guides on perspective. (Heck, I should post some of that work so you can see)

Anyway, I was inspired the other day by an image that popped into my head, and decided instead of drawing it, I was going to render it entirely in 3D.

Now, back in my heyday of Anim8or usage, I focused far more on animation and wasn't really interested in making realistic renders of still images. But now that I've actually tried it, I realized not only does rendering still take a super long time after all these years, but now that the processing power of the average computer has improved exponentially since then, the renderer isn't even taking advantage of the resources available.

This image which I rendered took around 30 minutes at 1080p using Scanline, raytraced shadows with softness, and anti-aliasing. It contains 4 lights, 3 are casting shadows.


Now I realize 30 minutes is nothing by industry standards. But what concerned me is that while Anim8or was rendering, it was only using 12-13% of my CPU and not even touching the GPU!


For reference, this is my setup. Certainly far better than that old Dell Latitude I used to have back in the day now that I do a lot of high-end video editing:

(Total RAM is 32GB)

Certainly my PC is capable of faster and more powerful rendering. Has anything been done over the years to make it possible to boost it?

I made this as an icon for the Anim8or Discord Server (Join here). It turned out pretty cute so I thought I'd share it.



Although... he is missing his signature Flamingo legs.

How would the group be used?

Would it be casual visits or structured around events, e.g. demonstrations / tutorials, etc.?

Mostly casual chatting/showing off and a way to get quick questions answered immediately. It could have most of the same channels as we have here on the forums.

I don't know what 'discord' is other than what I see by glancing at their webpage, not sure that I get it.  If you have a multiplayer game then I can see that voip and shared scene views improves the gaming experience.   How would Discord be used?

Discord is the new, better group chatting program opposed to Skype, and it's knocking Skype out of the water as far as performance and features go.

The site's description can be misleading. Yeah it's good for gaming, but its primary feature is a group chat system with categories.

As opposed to Skype, you can make different "channels" in your group with different topics where people can chat about different things in different rooms, all on the same group. You can even add permissions on who can post where and see what.
Voice chatting is immensely improved as instead of one person calling everyone to chat and bothering everybody, there's a voice chat channel always open that you can click to join and talk to anyone who happens to also be in the voice chat room.

Hey guys, here's a finished clip! I actually posted this some time ago, but I hadn't posted it here!

I'm not sure if that's even the right word, but it seems like no matter how far I'm zoomed in and I try to rotate something, it always rotates at the same increments.

When something isn't aligned exactly parallel to the ground, my instinct is to rotate it until the lines are straight. If it moves too much, then I zoom in and think it will move at smaller increments relative to how far I'm zoomed in. But it seems to be rotating the same amount no matter how far I'm zoomed in, or how slowly I move my mouse.

Is there a setting to change this sensitivity? I'm guessing not, but I thought I'd bring it up because I can't fix this and it's driving me crazy:

I had been using perspective grids before. It worked but it was VERY tedious and made background art a lot less fun.

Now that I'm finally back to work on Galacticats, I'm trying again to design the dog's ship.

There were a lot of changes I wanted to make, but unfortunately I somehow lost the original file. It was just gone. I did a search through all the files on my computer on both drives, and it was nowhere to be found. I guess it got left behind when I changed computers, and then got wiped with what was left on my laptop. I think that by rebuilding the ship model, the overall shape has improved a lot.



The idea is generally the same, but I added these opening ear flaps that reveal engines, which I really liked that my friend OrionShipworks from DeviantArt suggested:


I also changed the color. The more I looked at it, the more I wasn't fond of that rusty orange color. So the obvious answer was to take the cats' ship, and invert the colors. And it looks AWESOME. Now I have a new color scheme for the dogs' ship (minus the green). I mean yeah, it's got pink on it, but it still looks ANGRY, you know? I'll definitely be adding some embellishments to it, possibly making a Galactic Canine Empire logo. But I'll probably brighten the maroon color so it pops out a bit more from the background:



And finally, here's an animation of the "ears" opening. There are no outlines yet so it looks a bit weird, but you get the idea.