Can an experienced AM user (or maybe a bunch of you) comment honestly on the strengths and weaknesses of this product? Make comparisons to other softwares if you like. Not necessary, but they all have strengths and weaknesses to compare agains.
Thanks
lor
Take a helping of non-linear action editing, a dash of sprite-based particles, and a handfull of Hair plug-in… Mix it up in a bowl… It’s good.
BTW, I am paroding the website www.oddtodd.com , it’s good for inspiration when you feel like you have nothing left. Anyways, yes. A:M has many strengths in terms of features, the weakness is the robustness of those features. If you spend the time to learn how A:M ‘thinks’ you should be able to pull off amazing results. However, if you rush into a project and throw all the features together at once, things start getting flaky. It’s like a recipe, there are certain steps when baking. You don’t want to be still modelling while you have a particle emitter applied to your model. Thats like putting on the frosting on raw cake dough and then baking it.
Blegh!
some of My A:M renders
http://www.polygondragon.com/3d/hairtest.mov
http://www.polygondragon.com/3d/new_ramen.jpg
http://www.polygondragon.com/000bp_render.jpg
and latest WIP:
http://www.polygondragon.com/3d/AA_Pass.jpg
Here’s a brief apples to apples strength of AM:
A friend of mine is getting into XSI. His wife is a teacher, so he was able to purchase the advanced XSI for something like $300. He called me over to his office to show me something he was working on. He had taken a walk cycle and applied it to a character. Now the character could walk in place. After saying how ‘awesome’ that was, he then showed me that with a simple expression (an expression is a mathematical relationship) applied to the character, he could now move along a single axis at the same rate as the walk cycle so that his feet wouldn’t appear to slip. Having the character turn though… that’s a more complicated expression.
Later that week after he gushed a little more about the awesomeness of XSI, I showed him the equivalent in AM. Since you’re new (the old guys know where I’m going) I’ll tell you. Same deal. You have a character. You apply a walk cycle. You also have a path (that can turn and go any direction, left right up down). Using a handy path constraint (no expressions) you simply tell AM how long you want the character to take to get from the start to the finish. There is a similarity in that you must know how far the character is supposed to travel in one step, but instead of applying that knowledge to an expression, you just put that number in a field called (get this) stride length. Now when ever this action is applied to a character on a path (remember from before?) AM will know to move the character that amount down the path, whichever way it goes.
AM’s biggest strength, as I’ve come to see it, is that it takes very high end concepts (read: those also found in more expensive software) and makes them usable. Under the hood, it’s got to be every bit as complex as any other piece of software out there. However, what AM shows the user through the interface is usually a well thought out, elegant solution that strips out the complexity that remains flexible.
Another way of stating the words of Pdaly there (not to take anything away from you) is that Am is built specifiacally for character animation. That isn’t to say that you can’t in principle do anything else with it - but the workflow is streamlined for one person or a small team telling stories with their computer.
The hash team very much have animation in their blood. They arn’t just any old bunch of programmers, they really want their users telling stories without having to be experts in cg. They have managed to do this without sacrificing any power and expressions and relationships are availiable if you want them.
I have only been using A:M since 2001… and from my little experience I think A:M’s strength is in it’s ease of use as (pdaley) perfectly stated, it’s modeling and animation tools… I find them so powerful, easy to use and understand…
Hi
AM is my main 3D package and I love it.
The only thing pushing me for using “other” packages… the import/export.
As a freelance, I can’t do everything by myself so I have to buy models and as we all know, AM doesn’t do very well at Importing. It can do it but not very well.
My 2 cents…
I happen to know of a place where you can buy very high quality models built for Animation Master. . . .
:bounce: I’m looking for a little girl … about 6 years old and her parents. Semi realistic characteres.
So please if you know a place where a can buy those “people” in MDL … please … please…
I’ve got those 3 characteres from Daz but can’t use them in AM.
Cheers
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thanks …almost every week I check Wegg’s site.
