The great bug hunt!

#24

This is a pet peeve of mine. Most companies do not keep an accesable list of bugs that’s been reported to tech support

Open source projects on SourceForge.com have a section for viewing and reporting bugs

High end companies like Veritas will email users when a new bug is discovered.

IMHO, Having a user accessable list of “issues” is the most important thing a software company can do to support its users, based on a very old concept/invention.

Before written language was invented, knowledge had to be passed around by a bunch of people sitting round a campfire. So if Mr.Oog dicovers that spearing a mamoth in the butt just will make it mad, not dinner, anyone who wasen’t part of the inner circle when mamoth spearing was discussed may waste lots of time with fruitless butt spearing.

Now, if Mr. Oog paints a picture on a cave wall showing the problems that happen with mamoth butt spearing, then when a newbie mamoth hunter joins the tribe, he can RTFCW* and see what to avoid doing on the hunt. If he discovers that the 1/4 diameter spear that worked on rabbits is incompatible with mammoths, and must be upgraded to the 1 inch version, he can add that to the Cave Wall.
So, when another newbie joins the hunters, he won’t spend days trying to use a 1/4 spear on a mamoth’s butt
If new discoveries of things that don’t work when hunting aren’t documented on the CW, then a newbie may spend a week trying to use a club for the hunt. He’d be pretty pissed when talking about it by the campfire, Mr. Sapsucker says “yeh, Oog told me last year that clubs don’t work, but I didn’t put it on the Cave Wall. By the way, would you like to buy my new “Club with Rock on Top”? I used it when I made this deerskin blanket, it should be good for all your hunting needs.”

Hopefully, this made my point that if hunters errr, users can look at an issues list, then lots of time and frustration would be saved by not trying to make a known to be broken feature work.

*Read The Freaking Cave Wall

#25

Dear DearMad,

Since there’s times when I need to access more than one CD at once, and need to test how some programs I write work off a CD, I use CD Space 4.
http://en.cdspace.com/e_htm/e_home.asp

Since with this program AM resides on my hard drive as a virtual CD, I don’t need to keep a physical disk mounted in my drive.

l8tr, Jay_K.

#26

I aggree that we need a decent list of known bugs. It is Hash’s job to supply this. Asking everyone to be a lone bug squisher is fantastically inefficient. I once posted such a suggestion on the mailing list but it somehow never made it on there (well I never saw it anyway).

I may give it another go later. I wander if it is a sackable offence?

#27

If you openly post a repeatable bug here in this forum. I’ll bet you. . . a while dollar. . . that it will be fixed within a week.

This is a PUBLIC place. You will get their attention.

#28

Jay,

I didn’t want to waste the HD space with images- I just made myself copies of the CD so I have a backup. I run it off the copy and keep my original CD tucked safely away.

#29

Ok, Here are one or two things that have been realy bugging me for a good few months (off the top of my head).

Rigging…

  1. I want to be able to orient a bone like a null and then animate its offset. I could do this in 8.5 and it was very handy. I use it for toes. I have a model that I made in 8.5 where this works. I can bring it into 10 and animate that toe without rotating the null that it follows (the heel null is a child of it and I don’t allways want it rotating with the toe). Maybe this is a stupid rig, but it seems more stupid not to fix such a little thing. It is doubly annoying because I can see the offset channels moving in the timeline but the toe isn’t moving.

  2. I would like to be able to store “lock IK” information in a pose and be able to turn it on and off in an action. I can make the pose and turn it on but then it wont turn off again.

Moddeling…

  1. Stitch is great, but it doesn’t work all of the time. About one in 10 times it will move the CP in hand over to another cp and connect it there. This is annoying enough but of course undo doesn’t do the job here.

  2. When building a model, I often find that newly created splines appear to have Gamma or Alpha set. Then I click on a CP and it resets to normal. A minor thing but irritating and a waste of my time.

Chor…

  1. I have had information just dissapear! A model or channel information goes. Maybe linked to problems that I had in an earlier version where projects would crash as I saved them (an unforgivable type of crash).

  2. I have turbulence set on a volumetric light. Each time I load the project, another instance of it appears. This makes for a slow render with funny volometrics. I have to delete the turb. each time I load.

Misc…

  1. I want to have a whole load of objects (tendrils) aiming at a null so the null controlls those objects.
    If I try importing a tendril lots of times into a model, its smartskins dissapear.
    If I try importing them as action objects… well that is another story.
    If I try making the relationships in a chor (what I though to be a fail-safe method), they are gone when I load the project.

I could go on but I have a voice in my head saying “are you getting paid for this? Get a life you boring b*****d”.

It is possible that the above are all my fault, but I rarely get a reply from hash and cannot talk about this stuff on the list. Plus they blatantly are not my fault.

Lets keep them coming. It may be boring but Hash might start reading this stuff so we don’t have to waste our time indevidually sending it in.

#30

I think this is a good idea. I personally still use 8.5p++ and have some workarounds and known things that freak out.

Should we break this up into different topics for each version? 8, 9, 10.

I’d love to know what is the scoop on 9.5, as I am still trying to do some work in it.

Anybody know if black specks in renders was fixed in 9.5?

  • patrick j. clarke
#31

I’m using 9.5 and it crashes instantly when I try and rename any path object. It would be great to have descriptive names for these paths, but I’m stuck until my v10 upgrade comes which I hope will fix it.

#32

just tried it in 9.51e and it worked fine. Do you have something constrained to to when you rename?

  • pjc
#33

I think that at least half of the people on this list either don’t have A:M any more or they don’t have the latest version and if we are going to send Hash this bug list we need to have it up to date. So what I think we should do is compile a list of bugs that v8.5 and v9.5 have and then ask those that have v10(latest version) to test the bugs out to see if they are still there.

#34

Sounds good. I’ve started.

#35

Nates44: Exactly… I uninstalled A:M during the 10.0 betas, and, frankly, I don’t feel like installing it again until people start raving about the vastly improved stability (iow, possibly never;)).

#36

If a glowing object is clipped off the side of the choreography the glow fades down and creates an ugly bar. You’d think the glow would extend all the way to the edge.

When you lower toon line bias to get more lines you get hideously awful smudges. So you have to crank up the bias to at least 30 to get rid of this, but with fewer lines certain details (like noses and lips) disappear. The pic below has a bias of 15 on the legs. Default is 20, that creates smudges too but I lowered it so they’d show up better.

Both these pics taken with v10c.

#37

One bug that keeps on bugging me is a partical error. When I alter the partical’s color change ( animated color changes) in the material viewer then go directly to the choreography mode and render the particals on a model A:M freezes.

Win2k

#38

Hi again,

Dearmad said:
Skevos,
Sorry mate, but you’re talking too much like a consumer for my taste.

I struggled very hard to figure out what you mean by this, and all I can come up with is that you’re suggesting that it’s OK to read and post here, but not to complain? Leaving aside the fact that I don’t think my previous post was complaining, doesn’t this approach seem a bit inconsistent? It’s OK to rant about AM (agreed), but not okay to merely question the purpose of a thread?

If you don’t like this forum, then change it by shaping it yourself.

Isn’t that what my post was doing? By seeking clarification on the purpose of ONE thread (not the whole forum)? Given the anything-goes nature of this forum, I’m surprised to see a “veteran” react this way.

That’s the point of this forum.

Agreed.

To sort of backhandedly threaten to leave if it doesn’t turn out to be what you want seems a little poorly thought out.

How was it backhanded? Seemed a pretty up front statement of intent to me. How was it a threat? You give me too much power! What can I do to this forum? So one person (me) is going to give this forum a month to prove itself. Big deal. Would you rather we all uncritically accept this forum without complaint?
Sounds like the rules of another AM place… :wink:


Contribute where you can. Ignore the threads you find stupid (another advantage over the email list system).

I think this is where we really disagree. You say I should ignore threads I find stupid (I haven’t found any such threads yet, including this one). I say that questioning the purpose of a thread perfectly OK. Time will tell which is the best approach I guess. Assuming I stick around… (grin)

Rant when you get frustrated to relieve the pressure behind your weary eyes, and then go back to working on your projects a happier boy.:bounce:

As long as I don’t rant against the forum? :slight_smile: Let’s not forget that I saw a lot of merit in this thread and said so, it was only one out of three possible outcomes that I expressed some skepticism on - maybe you should reread my post. Maybe I should add more smilies to my posts! :slight_smile: (though there appear to be limits on how many I can use)


But boycott a forum

Boycott? A one man boycott? This bothers you?!? Are you trying to flatter me? :slight_smile:

where free speech is tolerated,

As long as I don’t question a thread’s purpose… riiigghhhttt… :wink:
Feel free to point out the error in anything I’ve said Dearmad, just don’t tell me I can’t say it! Unless there are rules here I’m unaware of.

noise is easy to filter out, images can be tied to messages easily (and not hosted at some crappy 90k/day bandwidth web host as so many people on “the list” do)

A big, BIG advantage of this place. Mind you, 30k isn’t that large, but I understand why there are limits. It’s great that “newbies” have a place to post small WIP images without the hassle of uploading to a web page and all that. I was new to FTP and HTML once, I remember what it was like…

, and you decide the tone of things yourself? I don’t get it…:hmm:

We can agree on that! :wink: (joke) I think you read my whole post but only replied to one paragraph in it! Most of my post was saying that most aspects of this thread are a good idea!

Dearmad also said:
I think the moderators should open a non-post thread that only they can post to and move the helpful posts from this thread into there. This could be our input thread, and the other (less noise in it) thread could be the reference.[/B]

Great idea. A sticky thread called “AM vX.XX Work Arounds and Known Bugs” or similar. A quick place to go if someone discovers a bug and wants to find out if they are alone or if others share their pain or, better still, know a way around it. I agreed with this idea in my previous post…

BTW, I still experience your OpenGL woes in v9.Xx and v10x, but my video card (Matrox G400) is well known as having OpenGL issues in a window (as opposed to fullscreen). So I’ve always assumed it was my card.

#39

Hi again,

Originally posted by jaymackey
SNIP
This bug is almost as bad as a fatal crash, you just don’t lose any of your work. You still have to stop and start A:M if you want to keep working on the material, as far as I know. Is there a way to correct the problem without re-starting? Thanks.

On my system, yes. Just click on the topmost +/- symbol, to close the whole tree. Then open it again. All works well then. If you can’t SEE the top most +/- symbol, just click where you know it should be! Works for me. Another approach is to keep the list in the PWS longer than the visible PWS, so that you have a scroll bar. Scrolling can “refresh” this error away.

As always with any work around - your mileage may vary! :slight_smile:


Skevos, I think that shaming Hash is impossible,

Heh - that’s not quite what I meant - I was suggesting that shaming them was not productive, not that they are shameless! :slight_smile:

and that is not the goal of this thread. The goal was actually stated in the opening post.

I found it unclear - maybe that’s me.

If I understand everything Dearmad said above, I think I agree with him completely.

Fair enough. See my reply to Dearmad.

For those of us that still use 9.51e, there are some legitimate reasons for discussing bugs with this version, despite what Hash and Steve might think. Especially, if they have no plans to fix the existing ones in 9.51e.

Agreed - I said as much in my original post to this thread. That paragraph near the end of my post seems to have captured people’s attention without the earlier parts of it doing the same. Ah well! :slight_smile:

Ohh, if only Hash could be shamed into fixing 9.51e!

I’ve actually submitted a minor feature request to hash for v9.51e (allow it to load with the 2003 CD in the drive, that way swapping back and forth from v9.51e to v10x is a lot less painful). But I can see why Hash don’t want to make changes to v9.51e, I guess. The subscription model, combined with the many online releases, is an unusual approach to software, and it took a while to get used to. Coming from LW, where patches were few and far between, it was refreshing - warts and all.

Then again, I’m a hobby 3D animator (though AM has paid for itself many times over thanks to a few small corporate animations), so my demands might be different to others.

#40

Originally posted by weggingt
If you openly post a repeatable bug here in this forum. I’ll bet you. . . a while dollar. . . that it will be fixed within a week.
This is a PUBLIC place. You will get their attention.

I want to believe you. But I don’t. Yet.

In my experience artists don’t respond well to that kind of pressure/attention/feedback (yes, programmers are artists IMHO). Remember, Hash doesn’t have a marketing department (customer-arse-licking-department) as far as I know. We’re essentially dealing directly with the artists themselves. There are many advantages to dealing directly with the artists. And a few down sides.

BEGIN SLIGHTLY FLAWED ANALOGY:
Ever bought an art work direct from the artist rather than through a gallery? Sometimes it’s a great experience. Other times they tell you to GET OUT because they don’t like something you said about their art, or because your shoes are an unlucky colour. A gallery would almost never do that. But artists? Well. Accusing an artist of being arrogant is like accusing the sun of being hot! How many talented artists are famous for being great listeners? How many are famous for their great dealings with the public? And the more talented the artist, the more prickly they can seem sometimes. And the Hash guys are very, very talented! :wink:
END OF SLIGHTLY FLAWED ANALOGY

Maybe I deal with too many arty types in my life, so this sort of reaction (both Martin’s in his email and the ones here) is just like water off a duck’s back to me. (shrugs) Maybe I’m just hard to piss off… :slight_smile: On the other hand, I’ve NEVER seen Steve get shirty, either privately or on the list.

But I have an open mind and I’m willing to wait and see if you’re right. I really like the CGTalk forum - the ability to post images in messages is reason enough for it to exist. All the other stuff (freedom of speech, venting, etc) is gravy. :slight_smile:

#41

It’s not so much that SDS are “better” for modeling, it’s the fact that they give a much more pleasant rendered result. With Sub-D’s you can concentrate on shape and not smoothness. I’m a much faster modeler in AM than I am in LW, but I spend the time saved in AM trying to get smooth surfaces.

The problem with splines is in the way they are sampled in the renderer. If normals are sampled too frequently, you get creasing. If you take a SDS model out of LW and crank the sampling up in the renderer to something like 12, you’ll get creasing just like AM.

Avalanche has taken AM models into Maya with a proprietary importer, and they look great when rendered, so I know it’s possible.

Joe Williamsen

#42

BTw, I still need to reply to your other e-mails but here a crash goes:

  1. Boot up A:M
    1.5 Verify your undo level is set to 20 which is the A:M default when you
    install it I think

  2. Do a simple line (that is two control poitns). It should be a line… it
    can be anywhere on the modelling screen.

  3. Select the whole line (click on a dot then / or just select the whole
    thing) and 2nd mouse button click-> plug-ins-> wizards-> duplicator

  4. Leave all values at their default except: change repeat to 50 and
    rotate on the X axis to 5. Make sure “extrude” is clicked… like this:

  1. See the results
  2. Press and hold ctrl+Z (i.e. UNDO) until undo goes as back as it can
    (it’s set to 20).
    You should see a bunch of lines that are no longer linked as if extruded
    and some will be gone. Like this:

  1. Select the last line in the whole sequence (just like step #2).
  2. now do the same duplicator / wizard thing with the same parameters
    except increase the count now to 720 instead of 50. Like this:

  1. AM shuts down. I see this:

Frequency: 100%

:thumbsdow :scream: :shame:

#43

It’s AM 9.51e… Would be nice to see if someone sees this in version 10c…

I guess it’s time for me to change my video card… oops… I am on a Toshiba laptop with a geforce 4 mx so I must be out of luck:D