I upgraded - HELP!

#1

So I went and did it, figured if I don’t upgrade now I might as well say goodbye to the hash train altogether and get LW, and since I have made a little bit of cash out of A:M this year… why not? The dollar isn’t going to get any cheaper.

Got it today, package was valued at 10$ so no import tax. Nice. Thanks Steve, I guess… :slight_smile:

Of course the CD contained 9.5 which I managed to crash about 10 times while waiting to DL the latest (Is there a “more stable” version I should be using available at the FTP??)

Initial impressions…

How do I get rid of that wizard twerp’s hat?

Render seems faster, but interface is a lot more sluggish

The “open” dialog cannot be resized and is too small. The preview window is cut off. It bugs me.

Most of my chors crash the program on startup. I’ll eventually figure out what I need to remove through 8.0 but any pointers are welcome…

I depended a lot on the sketch texture to do a “fixed lighting” on my characters, now it seems the sketch material is recognized but all values are reset to black & white. Any suggestion other than go through every material in every character and redo the colours? I guess that’s a weakness of procedurals… can become obsolete. Maybe I’ll start using bitmaps more.

The new render preview confuses me. It don’t stop renderin’…

Whee! I got openGL… models look smoother.

The “wireframe showing through in toon renders” bug is gone… clean renders, finally. joy!

Choreographies that do load seem to have their camera data lost or jangled

Gawsh the interface is slow. How much ram do I need? AMD 800 with 256 ram is obviously obsolete by now… sigh.

Anyone else done the jump from 8.0 to 10 recently and has some wisdom to share? It’s going to take me a while to convert my stuff and get up to speed in 10

Maybe can get 8.5 to run with this CD and use it to upgrade my models& chors sequentially?

Fuh.

#2

Hmmm… me like the unpickable option in choreography… very handy to avoid picking the wrong model all the time.

Pity… interface… so… slowwwww…

#3

Originally posted by Bugle
Is there a “more stable” version I should be using available at the FTP??

I believe there’s a 10.5 beta, which is rumoured to be the most stable thing since 8.5, with a handfull of new features as well.

#4

Actually, 10.5 was released awhile ago. Or, are you saying the beta is more stable than the release?

#5

Oh. I thought 10 was the last full release and 10.5 was still alpha/beta…never mind then.
Still, Bugle , you say you updated to 10, you should give 10.5 a go then.

#6

I grabbed the version from the updates page, so - yep, I’m on 10.5 … wheee. Bleeding edge baby! Guess what I’m wondering is if I should be on 10c or something like that… y’know, for stability.

Ticking off the grid seems to have improved interface response a little, and I think I know what causes my old choreographies to crash the program… material effectors

I signed up to the community thingie to look around and now AM tries to connect to the net every time I start it. Zonealarm says NO!

I like the “mirror accross y axis” feature, will come in handy when modifying existing models.

How do you get a model to act as a mirror… I tried a chor with a mirror but now it is opaque. I wanted to check if toon lines finally appear in mirrors… group properties don’t seem to have any effect, do I have to use materials?

continues tinkering

#7

D’oh. Reflections were off. Ignore that.

I had large fonts set in my system, setting them to normal fixes the open dialog.

Where do I find that nifty porcelain material thingie anyway? It’s not one of the default material types…

rummage

#8

do you have advanced properties on?

#9

Hash CD: Data/materials/Geometry/porcelain.mat

#10

Zandoria> Thanks!

I wonder if the CD’s material is the latest version though, it seems to only open one option and I seem to recall there were more from discussions here… I’m looking around in the FTP but no sign of it there.

Finkster> Yep. Advanced is me, heheh. I’m not really used to having to look things up, after using 8.0 for such a long time it fit me like a glove

But seriously, can I get rid of that damned wizard hat? The little bugger doesn’t do anything when I work anyway, so it’s not even an annoying assistant like the microsoft word one… looking for a toggle switch to kill the assistant triggers a crash Oh well…

Anyway, the quest continues… Me likee the 360º smarskins.

#11

The material on the CD hasn’t changed. The difference is in how A:M uses it.
Create a shortcut to the material in your Library palette, and drag that onto your model or group. (Importing the material into the PWS, can cause a crash).

#12

Ok, thanks. I don’t think I’ll be using it much yet, most of my models are for toon shading anyway and they look smoother than in 8.0 already without the porcelain.

I’ll probably have to crack it out if I try to do any volumetric stuff, since then they tend to look like little prune faced devils, heh, but that’s what happens with anime style characters and realistic shading…

I figured out how to get rid of the assistant - I got a little program called “killprocess” I use to close stuff down (Works better than CTRL+ALT+DEL) so I zero in on the assistant program and nuke it… it doesn’t seem to affect the rest of AM (Except at closing time, when it gets confused because it can’t find the assistant in order to close it)

Probably not the wisest thing to do with an already unstable program, but it really, really bugged me :slight_smile:

I kinda like the new interface, it seemed a little odd at the start, but I’m starting to get the underlying logic… i.e. using the continuous render preview bounding box while changing materials let’s me see the effect of changes immediately and the thumbtack icon makes sure I can keep focus on the right element. I was expecting something clunkier from all the negative comments about the interface.

#13

can you just right-click on the agent and close it? He doesn’t show up anymore on mine, so I think there is an option to turn it off–it’s just been too long for me to remember…:shrug:

#14

Yes, but the hat remains. My way gets rid of the hat

Purely irrational, but stuff in the task menu I can’t get rid of really, really irritates me :slight_smile:

hopes the guy who animated the wizard isn’t around and gets offended :slight_smile:

#15

Originally posted by Bugle

I kinda like the new interface, it seemed a little odd at the start, but I’m starting to get the underlying logic… i.e. using the continuous render preview bounding box while changing materials let’s me see the effect of changes immediately and the thumbtack icon makes sure I can keep focus on the right element. I was expecting something clunkier from all the negative comments about the interface.

I have always liked the new interface over the old one myself so I never really understood all the whining and complaining. The only thing that caused me any problems was the stitch tool… messing up my learned keyboard shortcuts was painful.

But for the rest of it, the properties panel now remembers what is expanded so that if I want to change say the embedded property for a whole mess of models, it;s no longer: click model, click file tab, change property. now it’s just click model change property one click out of the way. same for surface attributes etc. all in all a good thing and when you consider the fact that we have relationships now… setting one relationship up in the old style interface would be a much longer process while you hunted down the tabs that you needed (and for some things you would have to click the channel button to make a channel active in the first place… ick)

9.0-9.5 did have some rough edges in the interface (tacking for instance) but 10.0-10.5 have really cleaned these things up and now it’s the best of both worlds.

-David Rogers

#16

I was never a big expert on the old interface and I rather like the new one. The worst thing that I can find about it is selecting smartskin relationships. There is a whole load of stuff to get through before you get there. It would be nice to have some kind of shortcut. I guess that is what the filter is for but it still isn’t working for me.

#17

Can’t find “flat shaded” I guess it’s been substituted by the override shading-cartoon preset

I’m glad the double click to edit is gone, I always used to double click by accident while manipulating stuff in the chor and open an unwanted window

Anyone use the “anime eyebrows” material, I tried it a couple of times but it drew the toon lines on top of everything, not only the model’s hair… must check if they fixed that

Am I right in thinking poses only go from 0-100% now? My old imported poses still seem to have -100 but the ones on the CD model seemed to be positive only. The pose folders are going to come in handy…

Say, dropping poses into chor or action doesn’t seem to work… are we supposed to drag to 100%? That’s fine by me but it used to cause problems with constraints if they weren’t dropped. I’m assuming this has been fixed…

#18

Hello… first time poster, I just upgraded as well… :slight_smile:

Am I right in thinking poses only go from 0-100% now? My old imported poses still seem to have -100 but the ones on the CD model seemed to be positive only. The pose folders are going to come in handy…
You can right click on the poses and hit on “settings”, there you can select the max. and min. for the pose, so they can even go beyond 100 and -100… the default is from 0 to 100, not sure why they didn’t made the default -100 to 100 like on the old versions… the “on/off” poses I’m definitively loving… :slight_smile:

One thing I haven’t found how to do in the new interface, though… in the old one (old as in 8.5, which is the one I upgraded from), I could select the “key entire model” thing, and then click on graph button, and then select all the keyframes and set interpolation in all of them at the same time (including muscle keyframes)… as is it now I seems to have to do it on a bone by bone basis, and can’t find how to even see the graph for muscle rotaton.

#19

In the PWS timeline, in channel mode, click the Bones folder of the action–all of the channels will appear at once, and you can bound select the keyframes to change their interpolation all at once.

#20

Ok, colour me confused regarding poses… I’m trying to order my poses into folders, but after 3 tries which created folders which were not for poses, I created one from the main model icon that did the trick. Now I can’t find where the folder is in the PWS to drop the poses in…

Ahh… found it in the model properties… no wonder I was confused, that area was so seldom used before…

I’m still confused about some things in the new layout, but so far it seems very well suited for the user who knows the keyboard shortcuts…

Now let’s see if I can get a pose to change group properties and stuff…