empirebuilder1

Essentially yes, but I made the texture itself curved so you can get that slight hyperbolic curve that every hanging cable has. MI itself can't generate the curve, being Minecraft and all it only deals in straight lines. These cables aren't stretching very far so the low angle is alright, but for longer spans I'd make it a bit steeper. This only works in image editors that can support an alpha channel since it needs to be transparent, so MSpaint is out of the question. (On a side note, do you know how friggin hard it is to generate a good hyperbolic curve in GIMP?!)

I'll make an Idiot's Guide on how to make these cables later, but it basically involves creating a texture in GIMP with the curve, and then just stretching that texture to a flat surface in MI. Proper alignment takes quite a while...

Is... Is this even Mineimator?

Nice texturing! Seems most rigs around here use boring flat colors. It could be a little deeper, though. VR screens aren't totally flat like that.

Um.

Honestly don't remember, it was well over three years ago since I first saw MI I think. I was getting interested in animations and had some ideas for Minecraft animations, but an hour spent on Blender tutorials left me frustrated and annoyed. Somehow or another, a Google search brought me to Mineimator.

Thanks for the positive feedback, everyone! I'm not entirely a newbie to MI, I've just never really been active on the forums (nor have I had the time or motivation to work projects anyway) After four-ish years of working on Linux servers as side projects, sitting down and working through problems logically is easy. Also, google. Lots of google. I also just realized I'm running version 1.0.4 for some reason. Huh.

Having just decided to spend some actual time on animations lately, I've run into brick walls more times than I can count with visual glitches that I thought were bugs in the program. Blocks not showing up through glass, water getting lit when it should be dark, etc. They're not bugs, though. They're simply a victim of the Render Depth setting. Render Depth is a simple numeric value that tells Mineimator which objects to render first. By default, Mineimator sets all imported objects to Depth 0, which is probably fine for basic animations, but I quickly got into projects that couldn't just have everything rendered in one path. Otherwise stuff like this happens: Render Depth acts like a sorted list, so an object with render depth 0 is going to render first. The next object with render depth 1 goes next, applying whatever scene changes the first render pass created. Then objects with depth 2, 3, 4 and so on. The result is a stacking render that can be used for some interesting effects (or brain-bending glitches!) The glitch above happened when a fully enclosed structure (with a canal through the center) and the water were imported as separate objects. The water (which defaulted to Depth 0) was rendering first, where it was open to the sky and thus illuminated. The overarching structure (which I somehow managed to fumble into Depth 5) was then rendering around it, causing the water to be illuminated within an otherwise dark scene. So before you go running off to the help forums (or the bug report page) to complain about situations like above, check your render depth settings. As a general rule, you want your scenery to render first, then blocks, then items/players, then particles. However, some situations (generally involving colored glass from my experience) may require that the scenery be rendered last. You'll just have to figure it out on a case-by-case basis. [I may come back and edit this later with some more details and image examples, but I haven't the time right now.]

WMV is probably worse honestly. It's functional, yes, but it's really just a Microsoft version of MPEG-4 and not always universally supported (because licensing).

Seriously. I understand the reasoning behind wanting to create a unified render base, and it probably makes things easier on David in terms of maintenance. But I used to always render into Lagarith, which was both lossless and not too CPU heavy. Being forced to render into MPEG2 like the 1.0.0 version does nets me this wonderful screen in Adobe Premiere CS6. Now I've got to transcode every render I make, and even then that borks every other try since Handbrake really doesn't like these files. For the majority of users a basic mpeg is fine. It's not fine when whatever it spits out seems half broken and can't be imported by a professional editing program. So why can't we have the VFW/DirectShow menu back, even as an "Advanced" option that has to be specifically selected?

OMFG IT'S FINALLY HERE No external video codecs and no torch light? I'm disappointed all of a sudden...

Not for me. Hm, try this: Le Link of Awesomeness

Threw this together in about 15 min, tell me what you guys think

I might use this, but do you mind if i... erm, remove the bust? It just looks really creepy and non-minecraft to me o-O

Thanks, will keep it in mind. I had a hard time finding good intro music, that didn't have copyright issues with youtube, and would fit the theme I was going for. Once I found good music I built the intro to fit that, but maybe I need a bit more forethought and planning.