Mazer, you asked about A:M’s non-CA abilities.
A:M’s spline modeling is amazingly undeveloped, given the time that has passed. It once ruled in organic character creation, but over the years, amazingly little has been added to its toolset. A 3rd-party user/developer has created several mostly-free tools that are extremely useful, and bring A:M’s modeling abilities up a notch, or two, but it is still totally spline-based, with not enough additional help provided in the way of patch, spline, or point manipulation, and this is not the ideal for mechanical or architectural modeling. Sharp or small-radius edges are more difficult in A:M than in other modelers. They are not impossible, but without the add-on tools, they are time-consuming to create and work with, IMO.
Consequently, most A:M users stick to organic characters, and you rarely see nicely-done mechanical models. Most of them tend to look like a clay-mation model: a little too rounded on all the edges. Mechanical objects can and have been done well in A:M, but A:M has the exact opposite problem that the older polygon-based modelers had. They did mechanical modeling better than they did organics. Now these poly modelers have new tools that make them more or less equal to A:M’s organic modeling strengths, but A:M has not improved its own weaknesses at all. The 3rd-party plug-in tools help some.
As far as crashing, A:M has just gone through a period of instability that would have brought down lesser companies. In all fairness to A:M, v10, just now out, appears to be ‘better’. The problem is that ‘better’ is still not necessarily ‘acceptable’ to those who may have the quaint notion that software should never crash, and A:M’s history suggests that this is a temporary state of affairs. Hash is run more like a shareware company, releasing software that has not been adequately debugged, and fixing it as they go, all the while adding new features and bugs. An amazing number of these bugs, IMO, are fatal exceptions of some sort, or cause corruptions to files, or require an exit and restart. Many of us on here have endured this last year of crashing and corruption, and you will see some of our frustrations surface in this forum. Again, v10 is beginning to get the rep of being abnormally stable for a Hash product, so many of our complaints may not be relevant to the version that is now shipping.
I know that one significant A:M studio has switched to LW/Messiah, and that another uses LW for modeling, A:M for CA, and LW for rendering, I believe. All of the guys at these studios will rave about A:M’s CA ability, but not much else.
IMO, A:M is best used on a simpler scale. Don’t try to create a Final Fantasy, or even a Shrek. Use A:M for it’s strength to learn CA, and create something that will showcase what you’ve learned. Whether out of knowledge of this, or by sheer luck, Victor Navone has taken the exactly ideal path of creating short animations with a simple character that showcase his animating talent. Think VegiTales. Think Alien Song. Sure, you can do better textures, and more complex models, but the more advanced you try to go, the less likely you are to finish or even to accomplish your goal of learning CA. If you try to do a realistic human model because you saw what Den Beauvais or CommieKeebler has done, you may never even get to the animation part.
Keep It Simple. Do an anthropomorphic pencil with two eyes, floating eyebrows, and maybe a mouth. No legs, no arms, no hair, no clothes, no spring systems, etc. Now, you will be able to get into the animation part relatively unscarred, and with most of your hair intact. Create a story for your character and animate it. The animation part is what is going to be important to employers, if that is your goal. They won’t count your A:M modeling ability as very important, because you will have to learn a significantly different modeler anyway, and in a studio, modeling is usually done by one person, while animating is done by another. So if you get hired by anyone base on your A:M output, it will probably be for your strengths as an animator, not a modeler.
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