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Jamie - all messages by user

2011/9/29 9:39:12
Bat Manuel (first Video) funny video. well made as well! You could upload it through your account here on Muvizu and have it on the front page
2011/9/21 16:26:58
Feedback on Muvizu - 5th September 2011 (ENG) Danimal wrote:
When I try to open a set I was just working on yesterday I get an error saying the file cannot be loaded because it's an unknown format.



Hi Danimal,

Could you send the set file that won't to bugs@muvizu.com and we'll take a look into what is going wrong. Also a quick description of what is in the set would be useful (e.g. imported objects? audio? character movement? etc...)

Thanks,
Jamie.
2011/9/20 11:16:45
Ambient Occlusion and UV Maps Dylly wrote:
When I first set up the sketchup exporter I followed Jamie’s tutorial and put in a ‘pink’ bitmap called toto.bmp. I’ve now discovered that this pink map was affecting the colours of imported objects. I’ve since changed the colour of this toto.bmp image to white and the colours are a little easier to work with. Having made a very basic sketchup model I decided that it needed Muvizuing up, ie odd angles to doors etc. I then watched the new tutorial on importing models and was struck by the colours and shading on the industrial conveyor model and decided to have a go. This is where most of my problems cropped up. Generating a UV map for the model I did in UV Mapper and mapped an .obj export of my model. This seemed to work in other applications, but I cannot for the life of me work out how to produce a map which I can apply to the .ase file in Muvizu, and as for an AO map I managed to work out how this was done in blender but getting the UV map into blender is another kettle of fish.
In desperation I opened up the .ase files of both the industrial conveyor and my compset.ase and noticed that the conveyor did not refer to a toto.bmp could this be part of the problem?



Hi Dylly,

I've spent some time looking into this problem of yours and have some results. The first is that it was http://www.muvizu.com/Profile/glasgowjim/Latest/ (glasgowjim) not myself who made the tutorials

Secondly, the toto.bmp is a bit of a red herring. You don't need it at all, all it does is provide a default image or material for when the one referenced in the sketchup model does not exist on your hard drive. This is the 3rd point, or tip rather, what I do when I am doing a model is to select all of the model, right click on it and select "Entity Info" this should show a question mark thumbnail icon which means there are multiple materials on your model, by clicking on this and scrolling to the top of the list you can select the default (blank texture) this should remove any unexpected material references on your model and avoid the whole toto.bmp situation. You made need to double check the whole model as sketchup works in a double sided face mode, which means you have 2 textures per face. One for the front and one for the back and sometimes one side isn't updated when you do this. This then is the next point, having looked at your model, I suspect the reason it does not look right once you import it into Muvizu is that half your faces have the back pointing out and the other half have the front point out. Once you import it into Muvizu this means that it will look like part of the model is missing. There are 2 ways to fix this, you can import the model as double sided in Muvizu (but if it's a memory intensive scene you probably don't want to do this) and the second way is to find the face that are the wrong way around in sketchup and right click on them and then reverse the face. The ASE export plugin (HardPCM's version) can use either the white or blank face to export or the blue / grey face. Personally I prefer the white / blank faces to be pointing out as, like you've noted about making a white toto.bmp file, it makes it easier to texture and see the colours. Lastly, looking at your sketchup model, there are a few optimisations you can make. Inside of the rubbish pipe you have a lot of un-needed lines (vertices) and faces mostly these are around the "bolts" on the pipe as you have the entire sphere still inside the pipe, there is also a random unconnected line inside the pipe where it curves around at the top, I presume this was a guide line at some point? Finally at the bottom you had doubled up the faces on the bottom. Hopefully this all helps.

I worked through all this and updated the model as described and then I made a ID texture for it, note this is slightly different from a UV map, however sketchup does give problems when exporting textures and I couldn't get it to line up quiet right once it was imported into Sketchup. I then moved onto taking the updated sketchup model into Blender and generating proper UV maps and AO maps. This worked a lot better and I was able to export an ASE from blender with the UV and AO maps. It should be pointed out that even if you generate a UV map using another application you won't be able to just apply it to the ASE file created in sketchup as you need to encode into the ASE file where the UV map is applied to the model in order for the layout sections within the UV map to line up.

There is a lot to take in here, I may try to find time to make hints and tips videos covering these points in a easier, more digestible way. In the meantime I hope this helps you and I'd be happy to send you the updated sketchup model, ASE files, UV and AO maps.

Cheers,
Jamie.
2011/9/15 10:29:39
Ambient Occlusion and UV Maps I thought I'd post slightly related video I made just before this thread took off. I use a similar method to toonarama for exporting models from Sketchup although, I tend to go to http://www.cgtextures.com/ and find what I want to use and then import them into Sketchup as it means I get the look I want exactly. It does mean that I apply a texture per face though, instead of doing a UV map.

2011/9/8 10:31:17
Feedback on Muvizu - 5th September 2011 (ENG) Dylly wrote:
Got a problem with the sound effects.

I'm running the 32bit version, when ever you work with the sound effects the 'in-muvizu' sound effects come out distorted. When this occurs muvizu stops working and shuts down. Also when playing back the movie either in the timeline editor or on the screen to make movie, even if the sound effects has been ok it will suddenly distort one effect and then muvizu will stop working and then shut down.



Thanks for the feedback Dylly, in the testing before release we did come across this problem but we were only able to reproduce it when a old set file was loaded and new sound effects inserted. Could you give us some details (such as the names of sound effects used, age of the set or if it was created a fresh) and / or email the set file with that this happens in? Thanks.
2011/9/8 10:25:11
Feedback on Muvizu - 5th September 2011 (ENG) ukBerty wrote:
Interestingly as Quoling has already pointed out, you can load the .set once without error and save it, but after that you get "An object's property has been unexpectedly changed....", your imported object just show in pink, and have no colour properties.



Quoling and ukBerty - this is a real problem that we are aware of (now) and looking to fix for the next release. In the short term, this only affects objects that use ID Textures / UV Maps. If you apply the texture directly to each face as needed the object will save and re-save and load fine. Hope this helps until we can get the next update out.
2011/9/7 15:23:15
Problem with creating... I tried these steps myself today. Mainly to see how well CCleaner works, as I never had a problem running Muvizu

The results have been really good, a whole lot of junk has been cleaned out of my system and overall the performance seems to so much better - I'd totally recommend everyone to use CCleaner periodically on their computers!

Cheers,
Jamie.
2011/9/7 11:10:36
Crash when preparing character properties Hi bobbobjones,

Thanks for this bug report, we have investigated it and it turns out that this will happen for all characters if they have no attachments at all.

To avoid this happening with the skeleton or any other character ensure that there is at least 1 attachment (Eyes or belt or tail, or whatever) on the character and it will work fine.

This will be fixed for the next release.

Cheers,
Jamie.
2011/7/11 17:02:29
Animated TV Set Wizaerd wrote:
Thanx for this guys... as it turns out, I wnet a different route on this... If I do need to do this again in the future though, to prevent having to import the AVI, I may just greenscreen it.


Thats what I've done in the past as well, you get a better quality that way
2011/7/11 16:23:08
Imported Objects - Odd Specularity Wizaerd wrote:

Is there a preferred format? Since I cannot export it as a Muvizu object, I assume an ASE is aacceptable? And the user would just color it as they want? (since there's no texture or color cotrol in the ASE model)


As emily said, ASE is fine. It's currently the only object format Muvizu accepts for imported objects. The user can then colour it as they want, like you said.
2011/7/11 10:58:57
Imported Objects - Odd Specularity Hi Wizaerd,

If you want to share objects you've created just go to the Upload link below the search box on here and select "3D Asset" you will need to zip it up and provide a preview image but once you've done that and uploaded it then anyone can download it from here (provided you make it public )

Also the specularity seems to be related to Sketchup objects specifically. I had some ASE files made in 3D max studio that didn't have this problem. I'll take a closer look into it.
2011/7/11 10:48:44
Animated TV Set Hi Wizaerd,

I think ziggy is right. If you convert it to XVid it should work, however you might also want to reduce the size of the video and strip out any audio as imported videos only play as videos. If you reduce the size it should also help to improve the perforamnce of Muvizu if your system is a little slower.

Good luck!
2011/7/11 10:44:51
Uploaded to YouTube, but how do I do so here too? hi Wizaerd -

Nice video, made me chuckle!

To upload to Muvizu.com just login and click on the upload button, on the top left hand side of the page. It's next to your username, and just below the search box. Here you will have a number of options for the type of content you want to upload. Select Video and it will ask you to link your youtube account to your Muvizu account. After that just fill out the name and description then select the file and thats it! Your video will be on youtube in a few minutes and it will show up on muvizu.com as soon as we're moderated the content.

Hope to see more movies from you.
2011/6/28 13:45:15
Meet the Medic freakmoomin wrote:


The meet the medic animation looks 100% custom made.....and if the company says otherwise then im guessing that they are bending the truth (lying).....



I think you're right Kev. Somethings look just too good...
2011/6/28 9:23:09
Cries of the Dead - song video from MCS docca3 wrote:

A quick question - is there any way to get a vid to my profile when it's already on YouTube?

Thanks again - Doc


At the moment, no. We use special tags to identify Muvizu content (either uploaded through the website or the application). There are complications in doing that type of "import" of youtube videos so it's not something we've tackled yet.
edited by Jamie on 28/06/2011
2011/6/27 11:44:59
Meet the Medic http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Meet_the_Team

It seems they use their own animation software called "Source Filmmaker" that runs inside the Source game engine.

2011/6/27 11:38:29
Anchors Away Great sets again. How did you make the rotating spheres on the pyramid at


Looking forward to the next part!
edited by Jamie on 27/06/2011
2011/6/27 11:14:25
Cheap(ish) laptop Thats a nice spec for a cheapish laptop Jim. Thanks for posting!
2011/6/27 11:12:53
The Barmy Buccaneer Really nice script ukBerty! I think the black and white aspect to it works well. I hope to see more of these bits and bobs.
2011/6/27 11:06:01
Cries of the Dead - song video from MCS Nice video. Great song and the way you've combined the live action shots with Muvizu and other animated clips works well.
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Muvizu is easy to use 3D animation software that allows anyone to create high quality animations quickly and easily. Muvizu’s animation engine is ideal for storytellers, animators, teachers and businesses looking to engage, enchant and delight audiences with animated content.