AM Revisited

[gazzamataz]

As some of you might already know I have been re-working the project I created in AM back in the 2000s (Bella Bear). It didn't make any headlines other than a nomination in the International Festival of Cinema and Technology animation festival in 2007… But it was fun to do. Anyway, I kinda stopped using AM and setup as a freelance 3D Artist/Animator in 2010 and used various other 3D software since studios in the UK tended not to use AM.

Recently having decided to re-visit my project I have been converting it all over to other apps and found that my knowledge of AM is VERY rusty… One of the things that I am finding is that although other 3D apps have better render engines .i.e. GPU rendering, AM is still surprisingly great for character work (which I feel that is what it was intended for anyway). The whole concept of having choreographies, actions (especially using stride length) and models all separate is something I still value today and so innovative. Also the way you can do lip-syncing without other third party plug-ins is so easy. I wish my current app had those features since it would make it quite a lot of what I do easier.

It is a shame that the render engine doesn't support GPU rendering but even though AM is now over 20 years old it still has features in it that make it shine.

Just my two penneth worth

[Roger]

I would dearly love to see GPU rendering at some point, as well as automatic and transparent support of any number of CPU cores, given that we now have 16 core CPUs that are available as consumer-grade hardware.   Not to mention the 32, 64, and higher core systems that are available with enterprise hardware being decommissioned.  

Have been using AM since I was in college, and I still prefer it to other software that I've used over the years.