moniker

I don't understand the workflow of adding folders as you need them. Right now im animating a character, and I added an aditional folder but this folder is set to 0.0.0 which is far from the current location of the actual character. The only good use I make of folders is to have additional control on the Y axis, since I just manually add the Y value in there, but the rest of the axis, I don't understand how to use them.

How many folders do you use for the Camera movements? Do you also use folders for the car movements? like when drifting and so on. Do you have any example project willing to share to see how you manage folders? To me is one of these things where this program becomes annoying to use, I really need to learn the new camera transition stuff and the path movement option and see if it's more decent like that. Animating with folders was always annoying to me.

This was amazing. I have some questions -how much time did it take to finish this? -how much render time did it take? -what kind of hardware do you use? -how did you manage these smooth camera movements? im assuming you use a subtle camera effect a lot, but camera transitions movements look smooth too. Im assuming you are using custom transitions from 2.0, as well as IK, I still don't know how to use these. This would be Blender level if Mineimator didn't have problems rendering depth of field throught transparent alpha. A lot of scenes would look more cinematic with proper DOF. As of right now you get these glitches: And also there's little control of DOF when you want to have an object being blurry really close to the camera. You have to compromise by removing the fadeoff effect, so you cannot have far dof since it looks weird. @Nimi would be it be posible to have this improved? im not sure if being clear. I can post some pics.

Could this be added on the next update? @david

But if you want to use say a walking keyframe preset, where do you place the sword-IK thing so the keyframe preset works?

Could you add .construction support next? this is the new .schematic format. .schematic is deprecated as it ignores any blocks newer than 1.12.

A suggestion would be to add "Reflections" as a switcheable box on stuff, same way as we have "Glow", we should have "Reflections", and then tweak the amount of reflection and so on. Right now you just depend on the hardcoded settings on whatever was decided that it should have reflections as far as I know.

Could you upload an example? I don't get it. I thought this was going to make this easier without having to resort to more hackery with folders and stuff.

If I want to make a limb that has 2 bending points, how could this be achieved? I have the arm divided in 3 blocks, but I don't see a way to do this.

I don't understand at all how this works. So you use a cube that is not parented to the character to move the arm using IK. Well what happens when the character walks? the arm will move because the cube is static.

I think you are stuck with the new version now. This is why im going to wait until they polish it.

Im going to test around before I decide if I really miss the old GUI enough to keep using the old version.

@Nimi The Samples was set at 64 on these screenshots. So im assuming we are stuck with the DOF+alpha problem not being solved. What was the previous "Samples" value on the former versions where you couldn't choose it? 24 is still pretty slow, even with no reflections and ambient lightning disabled. Im assuming things will be slower now because shadows are more accurate? Also, with removing sunlight range, how far is the range now then? is it "infinite"? Like I said, if I want shadows on a really far away object like a spaceship or something, I used the highest sunlight range possible, now im not sure how far into the scene shadows are casted. Did you look at these 2 bugs? The first one seems to be fixed now, clips seem to be at 30fps again, but the second one is still happening. And another bug i've just realized is that if you set the Environment ground as the water texture it's fixed, lacks the animation.

Here's my observations on this release:

-Removing "follow camera" and "sunlight range" breaks backwards compatibility. I used that a lot. Sometimes you use a schematic really far away from the initial point (sun point) and the shadows are casted in a way you don't like. Sometimes you just don't care if the shadows aren't accurate in relation to where the sun is at, what matters is that the scene looks good. Maybe give us an option to mvoe where the sun is at or something. But follow camera was good enough for me. Also, we don't have now control over sunlight range, so it's now some unknown value and distant shadows are not rendered. Sometimes it's worth the decrease in quality to get distant shadows rendered because the objects on the scene are far enough that it doesn't matter. For instance, a flying spaceship, or something far away from the Camera, that looks better when wasting a shadow, but now it doesn't. Bring back these options. -Cameras attached to surfaces are not loading. I loaded my previous project, which used a surface that used a Camera as a texture to simulate a screen on a computer, it's now just white because the Camera is not there. -Loops removed. Not sure why? If I want to quickly make an object do 12 spins, you would just add 12 instead of having to calculate 360x12. I didn't use this much but again, why remove control and options from animators? -There's some sort of bug where textures show a grid and skins are blurred out: Sometimes it disappears, you move around, it disapears, but it shows up again and then disappears and so on. -Changes on the new render makes everything too bright, im trying to adjust things to make it look as it was before but something looks off. -The alpha remains a problem throught the depth of field blur. I've tried default, hashed and blended, this is how it looks: -I noticed that the new "Brightness" setting now called "Emisive" which goes from 0 to infinite%?? does not just add brightness to the texture, it modifies it and it's screwing up my light textures. For instance, I have this light .png file, first thing I do is always set brightness to 100%. This is how it looked like: Now this is how it looks like if I open the project on the new version: -"Subsurface scattering" is confusing. I used to place a point light inside something that I wanted to be a source of light, like a block of glowstone, and then I just would click on "bleed light", now im not sure what im doing. I've moved the radius and color option but im not sure what it's doing. I see improvements on the GUI, being able to search by name on the timeline is really useful, but some stuff is confusing, I have to look around to find what I was able to find easily before. Also, having to double click to select all keyframes is annoying. Not sure why the button was deleted. Same for reseting values on GUI boxes, right click was useful to quickly do this. It's things you do often. We need fast buttons or at least shortcuts. And im trying to find the grid size for stuff, it's gone. Why did you move this from being next to what you are trying to modify? It's like, I want to move in increments of 16, then why not leave this where it was? I have to find this now somewhere else named "Viewport"? according to the changelog, which I cannot find. The "Snap to XYZ values to a grid" button was useful being next to what you want to move. And as far as bugs and visual glitches beside the ones I described: There's also some missing features, which would be insanely useful, such as this: And finally i've noticed render times are now slower. And this is just a piece of wool with a point light and Steve. 8 minutes? it took seconds with the previous version. Rendering a 20 minute animation will probably be like rendering a Disney Pixar movie at this rate. Im assuming it's slower due increase shadow accuracy and whatnot but there's nothing to speed it up? It's probably going to take days to render a full animation now. I've disabled Indirect Lightning, Reflections, Gamma Control, and it goes a bit faster, but still 4 minutes vs what took seconds. Someone mentioned "Samples" being lowered,makes it go faster and it does, but im wondering, what was the previous amount of Samples used in the previous versions where you wouldn't be able to choose? Those are my settings for previous version: Which settings do I select on the new one to make it go as fast the previous one but with the same quality? Or it's always going to be slower now no matter what?

Here's something that I think has been going on forever, but becomes more evident when there's subtle movements, it shows up when using the camera shake at subtle settings: I've added a project with a rendered video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kxguzj5y3i5db5v/New Project lines glitch.7z?dl=0 Will this be fixed for 2.0?

Found a big bug: And here's the lines glitch I was talking about above:

Alright so after testing around i've found this problem started with the 2.0 pre-releases. What happens is, the render is not exporting at exactly at 30, but at 30,something, some random extra amount. I've compared here 2 empty projects, one from pre-release 4 and another from 1.2.9: This is a huge problem since it screws up with the whole project when you start working on a video editor. The extra amount of fps makes the clips unconsistent. The clips wouldn't properly snap, there are repeating frames. Im reporting this so the next version has it fixed @Nimi@david

In addition to the above: There's also something wrong with the way blocks are rendered. If you enable came shake at a very subtle movement, you will see how there's some staight lines that happen in between blocks. It's like you import a world, but it's not a solid piece, something is going on where these lines pop. I'll post pics later.

Upon further research the frames seem to be actually there since it looks smooth when I play it with a video player, but Mineimator uses some codec that messes up with Vegas, but like I said before this used to work fine before so not sure what's up.

Any idea what's going on with this? i've also noticed it duplicates frames when I go frame by frame on Sony vegas, sometimes the same frame is rendered again next to it, I think it's when there is a lot of stuff going on at once (particles and so on). But the extra tiny amount of time on clips screwing up with Sony Vega's snapping always happens now for some reason. Any ideas what is going on? @david I will post pics laters to see how the clips have this small extra time.

Will the alpha improvements also had alpha in the shadows? For instance if you use the huge smoke particle with decreasing alpha until the smoke disapears as it behaves in Minecraft, the problem beside the alpha not working with dof etc it's that it also generates a shadow that does not disappear along with the smoke, so the shadows pop out all of a sudden when alpha of the particle hits 0%. SSAO also pops in and out of the screen generating glitches. The SSAO should be expanded a bit beyond the actual FOV so it's rendered before you see it as an idea to solve this.

I see, but the problem stands: when I replace Minecraft_unzip textures it goes back to normal at some point. Not sure if when I restart the computer or something else happens, but it goes back to default 1.18 ones.

For some reason the clips im getting now aren't at 30fps, but 30,263 or 30,484, or some other extra small amount, this creates a problem when editing on a video editor. For instance, in Sony Vegas, the clip doesn't match within the frame snap thing, so it's not snappy, it's a mess when you put the clips together, since it overlaps a bit. I don't know when this started happening. My other clips are really 30 fps, so they match nicely within the frames so things don't overlap when you put the clips together. Im using 2.0 pr4. Edit: I have found this problem started with the 2.0 pre-releases, works fine on 1.2.9:

What i've noticed is there's 2 folders: \AppData\Local\Temp\Mine-imator_tmp\Minecraft_unzip\1.18\assets \AppData\Local\Temp\Mine-imator_tmp\unzip\assets\minecraft Should I replace the textures on both? On the second folder the textures are from some texture pack that I use on the project, they are not the default ones. It just keeps going back to normal when I replace them on "\AppData\Local\Temp\Mine-imator_tmp\Minecraft_unzip\1.18\assets" which I assume it's the place to put them @david