Feature Requests

#41

Yes, I think it was added quite recently (9-10.5) But it is there now.

Why I didn’t think of copy/flip/attach before I don’t know. Thanks for the tip!. However it would be nice to be able to do this without relying on it all being allong one line.

#42

I don’t know how feisible it is, but I’d like to see collision detection introduced to the process of modelling and animating. Much like you can make a rig react to the ground when dragged too far down, I’d like to se that extended to…say…not being able to move an arm through a body.

#43

I would like to request an auto-spline interpolation method. Spline interplatation that automatically adjust your f-curves to be smooth with out overshoot. I know max now has this as their default interpolation method and I like it.

#44

Originally posted by John Keates
I will kick in here with the request for a faster renderer. I have been playing about with multipass and I like it. However, it is realy fustrating knowing that those big clouds are being rendered 16 times when they only need one pass.

Ok. I’m going to play devils advocate for a few of the responces here. Lets start with this one.

I believe this is is more of a compositing issue. If some thing has to only be rendered one time then indeed why are you rendering it with the rest of the stuff? Break it into a seperate project and render it out ones, and then either comp it using A:M’s comping capabilities, or more likely using a program like after effects. This type of comping has been done since the early days of Animation. And if you say because you animation can’t interact with it, then it may need those passes for interactions with what ever happens to come in contact with it, so a single pass isn’t and option here. Just an oppinion. It’s an interesting idea, but not one that I see as overly practical.

#45

Originally posted by Roger Eberhart
[B]1. A knife tool - This would allow us to quickly add detail to the model. I see it primarily as a way to add edge loops, say to an arm. Go to front view, hit knife tool, drag a line across where the new loop goes, and bingo. Certainly much faster than the current method, which usually involves me hiding half the model.

  1. Break spline without altering the curve. This is the obvious counterpart to the new add points without altering curves. Why have one without the other? [/B]

Part 1. I think a knife tool is a bad idea when dealing with A:M patches. Hash splines, though capable of conecting in many diferent ways and remainign valid would not work well with a knife tool as people who don’t understand the diferences between a poly and patch modeler will wind up slicing there 5 point patches into 6+ point patches, and turning 4 pointers in to a 5 pointer and a 3 pointer side by side. also what about if the knife isn’t all the way through the model? then you wind up with a 5 point hooked area… Just messy… I’m sure you can see the problems with this kind of tool in A:M. A more practical and likely solution is a subdivide patches tool. This could add geometry in a way that A:M can actualy deal with. In fact I’m going to submit a detailed discription of how A:M would handle this with diagrams to hash as a sugestion. probably won’t be implamented till around v11.5 or so, but if you can’t wait you might try zevel http://www.kci-group.com/z/zevel.htm it infortunatly offset the splines, but does add extra geometry. Or you can use stich, but it does lack the precision to keep your spline evenly distributed.

Part 2. Well this is actualy a good feature idea. why not submit it to Hash?

#46

Originally posted by antonyw
[B]

  1. 5point patch & hook render without any problem(smooth).

  2. REAL smooth function(now I need to waste a loooooot of time for weak the cp to make it smooth,(the result is never smooth). POLYGON have smooth and subdivion, so they dont need waste time on that.[/B]

Try v10.5 with porcelain.

Originally posted by antonyw

6. Make the spline more like Nurbs(just like), so that we can turely trim the surface and it wont affect the other spline Bias(of course the above No.3 must no any problem otherwise useless).

I’m not sure why you want a trim in A:M? If you are after a hole, you can use a boolean, if you are thinking of then trying a filet, extrude or intrude from this for mechanical purposes, then with creative use of booleans, and other objects you can achieve prety much any shape you would want a trim for in these sitations. The only other possiblility that comes to my mind is for some thing like conecting a characters arm, facial features, or other such nurb use that is not needed in A:M as it can do this kind of thing with out trims due to how the spline system works. I’m not putting down your request for this feature, I’m just not sure why you need it in A:M?

#47

Originally posted by daft
[B]I have never understood what fur is doing on the A:M features list:). How many have been using fur since it was implemented into the software, and has it ever worked. Think I tried it one´s and my whole system crashed…

:buttrock: [/B]

You need to play with the hair in V10.5 it’s been totaly reworked. Hair renders much faster now. It has eliminated many of the aliasing artifacts that use to accompany it. The ends now fade to tranparency making the hair look softer and more natural. There are realtime rendering options for it so you can actualy preview things like kinkyness and thickness easily. You can control many of the attributes of hair with maps now. There are hair splines, but they arn’t quite perfected yet.

#48

Originally posted by Kalimol
Antonyw–after all of that, especially the nurbing and price, what would be left of AM that would be any different from any other CG program? Why even use AM?

Well even though I agree with you, I can tell you a few. A:M’s animation interface. The integrated NLA/ time line is one of the best features of A:M. Also you can animate points of a posed character to make small adjustments to the surface. Or how about the ability to layer a UV decal over any point on a model from any angle even if it overlaps other already placed UV maps. This feature is probably my favorite most over looked mapping feature in A:M because there is no need to play the stupid seam streching and blending game you have to do in other UV systems.

Personally, I’d like to see a complete texture map generator (which would apply a decal over the entire model and output a .tga that could be painted in)

This is kind of strange that hash has not implamented this yet. The reason I say it’s strange is that if you export a model as an AV2 or a 3DS and turn up the genorate maps to a value of 128 or 256 you can get prety decent maps of your materials burned to images and plopped on to an exported model; however, there is no way to my knowledge to get these maps back into A:M with the models intact. Yep silly, and it was put in as a feature request. :wink:

a 2D post blur attribute that could be attached to a material (for, say, blurred reflections.)

Well this is in the works right now… it’s called post effects and is a new feature in 10.5 not sure how well it works yet, but I know this is the kind of thing it’s going to be used for.

And I would definitely prefer to see an emphasis on stability over things like fur and particles and weathering that never seem to work correctly.

Ouch! Not sure what problems you had with particles, but this is the first complaint I’ve herd about them other than that they didn’t motionblue untill version 10.5. The hair was a problem, but is much better now… Oh in a previous post I didn’t mention that hair now can casts and catches shadows and reflections. And as for weathering… well ok weathering hasn’t proven it self all that usefull to me as of yet, but I havn’t tryed in in 10.5 yet. so can’t say if it’s working.

[Edit–And some more versatility in the materials would be nice. Drag & drop attributes and access to all of those funky decal channels through procedurals would be a grand start.]

YES, I agree.

#49

Originally posted by John Keates
Texture painting. If there is not going to be good export support then this would be great. It would be great anyway in fact.

If they implament the burn maps feature that already exists for exporting to AV2 and 3DS formats for A:M models then one could simply burn a simple material on their surface, export their model as a 3DS model with maps, and poof instant access to a fully UV accurate model with the maps that you could simpely load into your favorite 3d paint program. Of course this is dependent on A:M using the original maps for the export… if not hopfully the uv order would remain in tact so one map could easily replace the other… oh well this is speculations at this point.

#50

Originally posted by koon69
What about clicking on a cp and being able to bevel. I know there is a plug in but every time I try to use it I get some weird results.

Not familliar with a plug-in that bevels one point, but I would say that that is the problem. beveling a single point runs the risk of errors mentioned with the knife tool responce I made a few posts back. Zevel http://www.kci-group.com/z/zevel.htm is a form of beveler if use properly.

#51

Originally posted by Goon

Dolly. I only have 8.5 but i dont remeber having a dolly function and since the perspective gets messed up if you zoom in perspective mode this is critical.

You can dolly by holding ctrl while zooming in the camera view This will both dolly in and out and adjust the focal length of the camera producing a great rack effect in 10.5, but to turn it into a dolly just rest the focal length, and poof instant dolly. To adjust the focal length with out adjusting the cameras position just hold shift while zooming in the camera.

Are the constrain to axis back? In 8.5 you can use 1,2,3 to hold a selection to xyz axis and move. I dont like the transform widget that you have to call up to do this otherwise.

1,2,3 = global x,y,z movment axis restriction (restricts the axis for rotation to skew as well)

4,5,6 = local (point normal based) movment axis restriction (restricts the axis for rotation to skew as well)

Modeling: the rebuilding patches/textures maps takes an irritatingly long time when working with high patch count models.

Just disable real time textures in the options>rendering>realtime(8.5 tab only)>show decals to stop this from happening.

#52

Originally posted by SouthernLaw
The ability to enable toon rendering on a per-object basis. I can do a couple of passes and then composite to get that effect now… but sometimes it would be so handy to do it all at once.

This can already be done. Every attribute has individual toon control. By setting the toon option to shaded the object renders normaly, setting it to one of the other toon modes and it will render toon shaded. Just make shure when you turn on toon shading in the rendering pannel you don’t tell it to over ride the objects or every thing will toon render. obviously toon lines also have to be set on a atribute by attribute basis.

#53

Originally posted by Bill_Young

I believe this is is more of a compositing issue. If some thing has to only be rendered one time then indeed why are you rendering it with the rest of the stuff?

I understand what you are saying but would like to make two points.

  1. It would be good to have some more compositing controll withing AM. AM is marketed as “everything that you need to make animations” and already has the basics of compositing tools. It would be cheaper, faster and easier if we could just set a layer to “only render in one pass”.

  2. My comment was meant as a general one about speed. The clouds were given as an example. Another example would be where you have a character with a big smooth belly. The edges of the belly need more passes (for AA), but the centre will render almost exactly the same for each pass (a waste). For more of my blathering on this issue, look at the “speed in 10.5” thread. What I am after is some kind of stochastic approach or something.

I aggree with many of your other comments though. You obviously know what you are on about.

#54

Originally posted by eboy
My AM wish list:
2) Update the renderer - even the 10.5 version cant hold a candle to say C4D or Lightwave in terms of quality and speed.
Even budget apps like Cararra have far better renderers.

Have to inquire about this. I can’t say that the other renderers arn’t faster, but you specificaly state that they are better quality then 10.5. Now seeing as 10.5 is the fastest I’ve ever seen A:M’s renderer (still not the fastest), but many of the old artifacts that I use to notice have been almost all resolved in 10.5 using multi pass, and the second I spot a new one I pop it off to try and get it resolved. I do know a few features are still missing, but in the works. The missing features are more advance then what somthing like cararra can do currently so they can’t be what your talking about. So please explain.


4) Sub division like surfaces.

Wouldn’t mind seeing this one my self… Actualy I’m very curious abot the up coming hamapatch shareware version… As people probably alreay know it models almost identical to A:M in many respects, but they are implamenting sub divs into it. If it has the manipulation freedom that the patch modeler has then I’ll have a new subdive modeler. Check out hamapatch at: http://www.geocities.com/hamapatch/program/index.html#2f
and the screen shots of the upcomming shareware version:
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Ginza/6625/laputa.html

#55

Another request…

I would like to see a modelling feature that handles multiple selectoins in a more flexible way (as in wings for example).

An example would be to be able to move/extrude cps away from thier normals on an indevidual basis. At the moment and “average normal” is taken and all the cps are moved allong that.

Also, it would be good if spline rings could be re sized/rotated/scaled indevidually at the same time. An example of this would be where you want to make all the fingers on a hand get fatter at the same time. At the moment, if you select all the fingers and scale them, the whole mass of digets anlarges together when you want each spline ring to grow out from its own centre.

It would be great if there was a button that could deal with this in a universal way so thateverything from objects in a Chor. to bones in a model could be rotated indevidually or as a mass depending on whether the botton is pressed.

User interface heaven = programmer hell.:stuck_out_tongue:

#56

Hey, Bill_Young, you were writing your last message as I was writing mine and it looks like it might answer my dreams. That Hamapatch looks pretty damn usefull to me. Mind you, it would certainly be preferable to have this stuff in AM as one of the strengths of the program is its cozyness.

#57

Ok, I’ve made many comments about other peoples wish lists. I’m sure people would love to have a go at mine. ;p

Just so people know, there is a simple back up utillity like PRJsaver will make your life easier. http://www.amxchange.com/flash.html

Knowing that here is my list:

  1. I would like to see the ability to copy and paste material nodes and their sub heirarchies

  2. I would like to see a full fur mode, like a modeling mode for dealing with hair. Hair is a must have in any character animation package of any decency. To drop this would be more detramental then benifical. This needs to be improved not removed.

  3. Improved SDK documentation. Belive it or not many parts of the renderer are directly accesable through the sdk suposedly, but heaven help me if anyone knows how to access this stuff.

  4. Suprise suprise, Subdivs. Simpely because there are times in a production you need to be user friendly, and subdivs are a modeling format that renders as good as any spline system, they can be controled from the surface as can be seen in LW. Some implamentations let you controll the mesh at several levels making it easy to make grose adjustments using a low detail mesh, and then switching to a detaild mesh for subtle mesh tweaks.

  5. Procedural Map burning for A:M models with the ability to keep the resulting image referenced uppon export to 3DS & AV2 formats.

  6. A subdivide patch sequence that splits patched based on their orentation the the other patches selected with them. if a horizontal row were selected then it would split them right down the center hooking the ends unless the ends were touching. If this happend it would make a spline loop. If a vertical column of patches were also selected then a cross would happen where these two selections overlapped. the exception to this rule would be that a vertical and a horizontal selection could not end in the same spot because of a duel hook issue so and exception would be thrown here. Also you could not end a selection in a 3 or 5 point patch, thought you could use these to redirect a spline subdivision with the exception that no other selection could share that 3 or 5 point patch as there is no way to determin the exiting trajectory in this situation. This would alow for the subdivision of all patchtypes, and result with all valid 3,4, and 5 point patches with hooks only treminating in 4 point patches with only one hook per subdivided patch. Compex thought process since I’ve not slept all night ;p

  7. A bed… oh no wait thats where I’m going when I’m done posting this message whichis right now.

#58

Over all I’m really happy with A:M, but most time I have to deal with LW or Maya, so what I really need is a motion exporter to Maya or LW…hm fbx would be fine. Biovision ist a good solution, but has no support for handbones.

It would be so much easier to model and animate in A:M than in Maya or LW …then export to the host application the studios are running…(here in Germany).

Martin

#59

AM is looking alot healthier these days. :thumbsup:

Another thing I’d really like(can you do it already?) is to pick a group in the workspace and be able to drag it onto a bone and have the grouped CPs controlled by that bone.
Thanks

#60

TurnEdge type function. So we dont have to break and re-attach splines if they go in the wrong direction.

Fix that annoying rebuiling splines, texture maps, etc stage, slows down modeling to unacceptable levels at high resolution.
(I know you can split of a part, but having it take a minute per spline when re-attaching them is just a pain in the ass)