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This is a long time personal project that I've had on my mind to write, script and animate. I finally put it together and It's a little awkward. I've used A:M to make low-fi "retro cgi" art, over the last few years. However, I think the software is very capable of making any variety of style or appeal. I've never done a video essay and it did not come naturally to collect my thoughts and lay them out like this. I'm glad i did anyway! The video essay on YouTube

Wow, that was amazing. What a great essay. Those 'y2k CGI aliens' aren't dead, I'm working on a full length movie they feature in. Still using AM v13s, seven pc render farm, windows 7, no internet connection, no plugins, no subscriptions and most definitely NO AI. At all, none, not even upscaling, I'm rendering the whole thing 4k and most of it 16pass multipass at a few hours a frame. I'm only 30 mins in of 75min after six years of production with likely another 5-7 years to go. Also all orchestral music is done on 16 vintage roland synths and even using hardware reverbs and effects. Pretty much the most slow and tedious way of doing it but it's completely future proof so I can make movies until I die lol Don't get me started on people moving to Maya and other software, most of my team back in the 2000s constantly went on about moving to Maya or Soft Image or whatever. The funny thing is, my mate is also making his feature film but using Maya and Houdini and modern pipelines. He's constantly having licensing issues, can't open old models without renewing subscriptions and can only run one copy on one machine cause its too expensive to have more. And something even more funny, he was over the other day seeing my workflow on my old PC and I pressed play in the AM timeline; two shaded characters and a wireframe set, and an embedded reference video, started playing at the same time at atleast 30fps. his mind was blown "I can't do that" he said, I can only watch it realtime once I've rendered it. (That said, he's a pretty good artist and his film will be awesome.) The trick with AM is to lean into what it's good at, curvy lines with razor sharp edges, reflections (lots of reflections) and keeping things simple. I can't stand the look of modern CGI movies, some of them are completely unwatchable with ridiculous amounts of colours in every shot. And the lighting and surfacing is so real all you see are pimples and eyebrow hairs, it's distracting and unnecessary. I also hate all the animation as animators think they are actors, shoot video of themselves and act like they think animated characters move. The result is it's all the same, it's all shit, over arcing over animated mess. Ok, not all films but most of the slop that comes out now. Oops, sorry for the vent. Your video is very inspiring and makes me feel I'm on the right course and all the work is worth it. Thankyou! Dylan

That is 51 frames of ASCII images

Some other attempts. Viewing an illustration of Lovecraft I modelled a sculpture for it. Then I was inspired by the ShadowRiders from In the Ban ofthe Ring. gif won't load. discord Finally I illustrated a screensaver from Win98 to Quake.

Also, I had the pleasure of attending multiple Hash Bashes that Martin put on back in the day and even got to direct (badly) a couple of scenes on Tin Woodsman of Oz. The old Hash crew were great to hang out with and Martin is a legend and a great host. It's a pity what went down with his team but he soldiers on to this day. Robcat is a godsend, his level of knowledge on all aspects of AM is unparalleled and his videos and advice have been a key part in me making my movie. I'm also working with Aldrich who's here on the forums and makes any new models and characters I need. Another Hash legend I don't post here much but I sandbag and watch whats going on. This is an amazing community of extraordinary people and I'm proud to be a part of it. Go AM! Dylan

Wow @Yopachi, I didn't realize how much I needed to see that. Outstanding essay that captures so much or the Animation:Master experience (and early 3DCG history) in such as short video.

I'm still plugging away, mostly with backgrounds sets. This latest was more of a reflection exercise as I usually avoid blurs and reflections. I was fighting this shot for quite awhile trying to get just the right camera angle... just the right reflections... etc. etc. The moon is one of my (pat. pending) 5 point patch circles. (and it'd be good to keep the moon in place for parallax purposes) I made no attempt to update the proxy trees. Project file should have everything embedded. LakeFrontPark.mp4 LakeFrontPark.prj

I'm on the third part of the animation. I made sequence of a Thunderbird on Forrest Stubborn. One of a teaparty, walking scene of Parker & Brains. At last I tried a scene with Lady Penelope. I.m not such a great character modeller. My attempts ended in a granny like figure I'm a bit ashamed for. Fortunately it declines the time period I'm in. I have the idea the camera is a bit trembling, or the image files are rendered in a misligned way. https://mad-red.com/animationmaster/

I've been having a blast and exploring a lot. Here, have a pic: Okay. What exactly is this? This is just a quick illustration of a utility I threw together that allows for extracting parts of models based on Named Groups, saving them out as separate models. the shape on the top is the original model and the 3 shapes on the bottom are those three sections extracted from the model and drag/dropped back into the Chor. A simple example but particularly useful for complex models where we might have parts that lack detail and we want to extract that part to plus it up and drop it back in separately. The simple interface: For the moment I'm keeping all groups inside the extracted models to ensure that groups that effect the extracted splines and patches still get the effects of those assignments. This does tend to cause an error in A:M when Groups don't have any assigned CPs and I'll likely add a pass that removes those Groups in the extracted models. As a more complex example, let's say we have this town square with a number of proxy buildings, pave stones, fountain: If barely seen in a shot the proxy will likely be fine. But for those objects we need to plus up we can extract those and plus them up. If we extract the Barber Shop for instance: We can steadily improve upon it until it meets the needs of our production. This update is still in the 'proxy' arena but its starting to look a bit more like a barber shop.

There is a trend of youtube traffic going strait to discord as a sort of after party. lots of gen z and alpha are already used to this pattern and might not ever step foot into a forum otherwise. could be a way of netting more animation master traffic for younger audience. and I'm gonna push the traffic this way if i can. but my suspicion is that the kids wont come over here unless they are serious about learning. so there are two functions and they can feed into each other. rodney is right about the real time nature there is already some quick back and forth and learning going on

Do we need an alternate to the forum? Is there something the forum is not doing?

TWINSDANCE.prj

Two static entities for Quake I made with the Animation Master! craneA.mp4 craneB.mp4