Because V15g has also some feature requests included, some word about the new features.

* 0005451: [Interface] Enhancement to Selection Filters (sgross) - resolved.
The filter menue has now some more options , it's now possible to save and load filters from a external file ,
its now possible to create filters from a selection in the chor and filtering can now used with logical expressions.
I think Robert (robcat) can and will explain this better than I , it was his feature request :-)


* 0005213: [Rendering] Can't render SSS when using Render Mode or Render Lock Mode (sgross) - resolved.
Rendering SSS is now possible also in the render mode , not longer needed first a Render to file , to get the effect .
In the render lock mode it will be not possible .

* 0005442: [Realtime] Bones and Null objects should be colorable too.... and it should work in Chor-Window too (sgross) - resolved.
Nulls, cameras and lights can now be colored and hidden , fuchur can explain this better I think :-)

* 0005433: [Rendering] Save (render-)settings for a rendering in txt-file / Save Rendersettings in the prj-file (sgross) - resolved.
For render presets (advanced must be unchecked in the options dialog in this case) it's now possible to change all rendersettings (including filename , resolution and so one)
task for fuchur

* 0005419: [Constraints] Attachment/Pin Constraint (sgross) - resolved.
with the group constraint it is possible to attach a group to a bone from a different model . The constraint need to be created from the bone of interest , than You can
select in the constraint the group from another model .
soulcagers on the front please :-)

* 0004819: [Interface] Right-Click on a feature-button (for example Lathe or Distortionbox) to get to its properties? (sgross) - resolved.
on the pc with Ctrl+RMB , on the mac Shift+Ctrl
opens the option dialog on the corresponding properties page

other things they have no report entries

- radius for the magnet mode can now changed numerical via Tools->Options->Units->Magnet Mode Radius
- some patch related operations (refind patches,refind normals) speeded up on multiprocesor machines (PC only at this time, has only appreciable effect on high patchcount models)
- Newton plugin now switched to ngd v2.10 (pc only , ngd v2.10 mac is not released yet, on the mac ngd v1.53 is still used)
can now simulate with much more objects (here can agep say more , I think :-)
has a new chor propertie "Solver model"
"fastest" it's the best solution for most of the simulation problematic and it's very fast (around the half time as the "precise" solver needed for the simulation)
"precise" best, but slowest solver
"2" -> "256" fast,not so precise -> slower,preciser
activate now automatically "reduce keyframes" , when the plugin detect that more than 1 million keyframes will be created
simulate now at with the same timestep , equal which fps is set in the projectfile (convert before simulation start always to 25 fps and after simulation back to original fps)
- new plugin included "Newton Physics helper" (pc only yet , mac will follow when the ngd v2.10 is released for the mac)
create bones and/or correct bones position for Explode_ and Newton_ groups, created from the "Explode" plugin or handmade groups (only needed for "Dynamic Explodeobject" or "Dynamic Breakable Explodeobject")

This will be huge for animators working on characters with many bones and nulls. I'll make video for it in a few days, but basically:

-CTRL-select the bones in the chor you want
-click on downward triangle at top of PWS
-choose "Filter from Selection"
-enter name for filter, hit OK

a tab will appear at top of PWS for that filter.

Filters can be saved individually from that same menu or all at once for later reloading and reuse

You can use these filters tabs to quickly isolate sets of bones/nulls that may be related for animation purposes but may be widely scattered in the long alphabetical list in the PWS.

examples:

spine-neck-head bones

facial controls, mouth controls, eyelid controls, eyebrow controls

finger bones, left finger bones, right finger bones


Any arbitrary set of bones that is useful to you can be filtered to display together now.


Note:

The character's "Bones" folder in the Chor must be already expanded (in the normal "All" tab) for the filters to be able to display their particular items.

And of course, bones must have at least one key on them to show up in the chor, whether in a filter tab or the "all" tab


Thanks for implementing this, Steffen, and vielen Dank for all your work on A:M!


edit: some additional explanation:

Thank you!! Decal rendering is working without the artifacts. (I have had to stay of 15d with cd version) however the decal is not showing up when modeling as it was before.
Steve

0005442: Some of you may know the situation where you got many cameras in an object to easily acess certain areas, no matter how the character is animated. That is for example useful to animate the expressions on a face and in many other situations. Before v15 (g) there was always the problem that the cameras couldn't be made "unvisible" and "unpickable". So you often clicked on a cameras area. It was not only only the camera-lines itself but the whole area between these which was pickable, which made it much more difficult to select anything else. This although applies for lights and nulls, where it could be a bit tricky to select the right once if you used many of them.

This is now solved and additional to that you can now color these objects in different colors to minimize clicking on the wrong elements like it was possible with bones itself.
The thing that cant be done is to colorize bones in the chor, because they are instances of the once in the model-window. Anyway this is a great helper for preserving the overview.

0004819: This can be a real timesaver. You can now access the properties with one click and you dont have to search for the properties in the Options-Menü anymore.

0005433: This one is a bit tricky to explain. As some of you may know (I did not before this request ) you can create own render-presets in the simple-render-mode. Till now it was not possible to save although output-options (like where to save in which resolution, etc.) Now you can create an own preset, share it with other instances of A:M or even with other computers. This will speed up rendering on different computers because you dont have to setup everything again for each of them. Another possibility is, that you want to rerender a part of an animation. You very likely don't know exactly which rendering-settings you used the first time... now you can just save a preset of the renderingsettings with your project and reuse it later.

Thank you very much Steffen!
Great update and very helpful new features

Especially thank you for solving the CD-problem. I am quite sure this was one of the hardest things here and I think the CD-people are very happy to be current again!

See you
*Fuchur*

Um.... Wow!

Those are some really powerful enablers and time savers.
I'm still pondering the possibility on some of these.

Rock on.

Thanks, Steffen!

gosh....
Where do I find time to learn all these new/updated "things" ????
I must experiment this newton 2.1

thanks hash team

Nice work ,many thank's

Thanks for all the work Steffen! Much appreciated.

In case others are confused, I have to Ctrl+LMB a feature button to get to the properties.

Edit: And of course thanks to Jason too.....and any other Hash employees currently working.

Thank you!

Selection filters, and bone colors will be very helpful to me.

Michel

AND--- it is available to disc owners right away? THAT's BIG! Stefan--- somewhere in your talks of the new Newton engine you mentioned the words 'Ragdoll Physics' ...does this apply in this release?

Great work Stefan and Jason!

Thanks Robcat and Yoda

The video tut will be much appreciated

All right 15 g locks up when applying a decal. I noticed one the models had a problem after loading it into 15g. I reset the decal and now AM locks up and will not apply the decal. I will keep trying to explore this

Steve

I survived a quick test on a vase, so you may have some specific combination of circumstances?

I reloaded the model and the left side was there such as the left Iris decal but not the right. And all the other decals will render but no real time display.


Steve

try toggling "show decals" on and off

CTRL-d

try switching OpenGL<--> Direct3D

Thanks Robert, I turned off the decals and turned on the decals and that brought all the right side back except for the eye. I just went to the stamps and reapplied the decal and then reset the settings on refelectivity and she is back.

Steve

Hi Shelton,

I highly recommend you to activate the Draw and the View-Toolbars!
This will prefent such misunderstandings in a huge way because you can always see how A:Ms Realtime-Settings are...
Go to an empty-toolbarsection and rightclick, go to "Toolbars > Draw" and after that to "Toolbars > Views".

I position them at the bottom of my A:M screen near the time-feature if you got the space there.

*Fuchur*

Steffen is my hero!

Here is a render where I have simulated 5000 (!!!) objects. Each object is about 400 patches, which means about 2,000,000 patches in the scene

Click to view attachment

That is fantastic! Thanks again, Steffen!

Steve I found after grouping parts and making that the sss group I lost the colours I had on some parts when I turned sss off untill I removed said parts from that group

Very impressive!

Thanks Steffen

Oh, of course there is another feature I didn't mention, although it "only" speeds up things.
-> OpenMP

The findinig patches algorithm (and some other stuff, but here it will be most noticeable) is now multithreaded, that means people with quadcore-cpus (or n-core) will need less time for those operations.
This will only be noticeable for handling larger patchcounts, but it speeds up things for me (4-core Phenom II 955, 3,4 GHz each) up to 2.5 times.

People may ask for rendering here, but till now this is not possible. The final renderingalgorithms are not multithreadsave till now. Anyway the progressiv renderer (green one) is although using OpenMP now and will work about 2 times faster on 4core-machines too.

"Why not 4 times?" - Since A:M wasnt enveloped as a multithread-application the operations are not optimized for that and dont get everything out of it. But 4 times faster is anyway not really possible... it is at max 3,x-times because of communication between the cores, memory-sharing, etc.

*Fuchur*

Thanks so much, Steffen!

Agep, great animation!

By the way, the download page does not render properly in Firefox:
http://www.hash.com/2007web/updates.htm
I took a quick look at the HTML but nothing jumped out at me right away for what could be causing the problem.

It looks fine from here. PC WinXP SP3
FF 3.5.3
IE 8
Chrome 3
Safari 4

Maybe post a screenshot of what you are seeing?

I have always noticed that many hash pages (website only - forum is fine) don't display correctly for me with Firefox (nor IE - which I don't use - but it has different display problems) - but with respect to FF - I thought it might be because I'm using an old version: 2.0.0.16

winxp pro sp3

3rd screen shot is with IE 8, 4th is with FF

I'm not seeing the same things you are Nancy. Do you have some kind of security rule that prevents you from loading the contents of an iframe? Is IE blocking Flash content? I noticed the url for the "Calender" iframe starts with " //www.google.com/calendar/embed? " -- maybe the double slashes at the front of the url is confusing your browser? But then, I don't know why it would work OK for me. This one has me stumped.

Google Chrome
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Firefox 3.5
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

IE 8
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

Safari 4
Click to view attachment Click to view attachment

I dont think this is a right thread to discuss something like that, but for me, it is working as it should.
-> FF 3.0.14 (never had problems with FF 2 neighter)


*Fuchur*

Another use of this feature is to make a filter for bones you want to delete.

For example in TSM2 there are some hidden bones, like "1 left foot IK tagger", that can get keys on them when you switch IK/FK. Usually not a problem, but sometimes it can cause weirdness. Deleting them solves it.

I made a filter to round up all those odd bones so I can easily delete them whenever I need to without having to scroll thru the long list in the PWS to find them.

I recall there were some bones in Squetch like that too although not persistent as the TSM2 ones.

Sorry for the late answer and the wrong thread; I'll keep it short. My view is similar to Nancy's. I have:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
There are some improper image references, but I don't think they are causing the problem. (See "104")
<img src="images/head3.gif" alt="Hash Support" border='0' "104" height="32" />

Not sure if I need to report something, wanted to check with anyone else. I have 15g cd. A model created in 15d imported into the system. I can not select the model in the chor. I have to go to the pws and select it there. I can select all other objects inside the chor but not the mdl. thought it might be a bones issue but the chor, skeleton and other buttons used in the chor are greyed.

Steve

Make sure it is set to pickable in the PWS (hand icon)

So far I haven't been unable to select something in the chor.

Did per-pixel displacement get taken out? I just started working with 15g, and it seems like it's back to the old method of displacement mapping...

I had this a while back and found the cp's were locked ,unlock and all was well

David identified the problem with the rig here

Can someone do a quick test render of a stereo image with A:M 15g?
I'm just getting black frames.

I get black frames IF multi-pass is on.

Also, is anyone else having a problem with Magnet Mode? I turn it on, and it works fine for one or two clicks, then all of a sudden it's not magnetized anymore.. I still see the sphere of influence, but I'm only affecting one CP at a time. I found that if I turn on a distortion box and turn it off again, when I go back to magnet mode it works for a few more clicks, though.

Seems ok here. I noticed sometimes the influence circle doesn't show, but the magnetism is still working.

Ahh! Thanks Robert.

First I want to give a big thank you to Steffen for taking time to track down the cause of a problem that I was having with decals losing their path to the image. It turned out to be a problem with my image sequence, where all of the filenames had two tga extensions. This was an error caused by my habit of tagging all my files with a version number which I usually enclose in brackets. Anyway Steffen tracked it down to my error so I just want to say sorry for wasting your time and thanks for finding the problem.

With that said I want to test the waters before plunging in with another error report.

Could some of you see if fog is working in 15g? I am not able to get it to show up for some reason.
(Don't worry. Found my problem.)

Thanks.

Don't worry! It's working beautifully now.