I am working with EIAS 5.5 on a project that involves a very simple MrBlobby instance. Camera reports a memory erroreven though I have enough memory and the project is a simple one.

This problem is described in this 2005 thread on the Postforum mailing list. The solution given is to use Camera 5.5.4 for which you have to ask Matt Hoffman. I emailed Matt but he doesn’t have Camera 5.5.4.

http://ftp.postforum.com/forums/read.php?f=9&i=34986&t=34986

I know it’s been a while since 5.5 but does anyone remember running into this issue and solving it? If someone can email me a copy of Camera 5.5.4 I would be very grateful. Matt said this would be ok.

Thanks very much.

Well then. The sound of crickets gave me an idea

If I select the MrBlobby Group (it has a Particle.plm child, I lost a lot of time at the beginning of this project because I could not get power particles basic, bundled with my EIAS 5.5 to work at all with MrBlobby) and export it as fact, with children, it will export a nice Mrblobby mesh. Not very practical but it’ll work. This project has been so frustrating that I am actually looking forward to exporting and reimporting fact files frame by frame.

Hi Dan,

You can range export fact files, so with one click will make a fact for every frame export, take a look at the EI 8 video tutorial on Fact cycling (it’s one of the bonus ones). I’m pretty sure this feature is also in 5.5.

Hope it helps,
Ian

Hi Ian, thanks for the tip. I’ve tested a portion of the animation and it works great for exporting a range of facts. Then I select all and drop them into animator and they’re just sitting there, all at frame 0. There is no cycling tab in the group info window in 5.5. I remember reading about the cycling feature from many years ago but never used it. Is there some way to distribute them in time now? Thanks again. Big time saver.

Before the cycling tab there was a naming convention trick.
First you parented the FACTs to the frame#1 fact, then named this parent with ##factname ... Or something like that.
This turns on the child cycling feature.
Maybe some one remembers this old trick?

I found a quote from Matt Hoffman in the old forum on how the old system worked.
See below:

***
You can replace a model frame-by-frame in Animator/Camera. It’s called “Group Cycling”.

Sequential replacement of groups (group cycling) can be initiated in Electric Image by placing two tildes “~~” in front of the name of a parent group. When the scene is rendered, the parent group will be invisable, but one of its child groups will be rendered at each frame. The first child group will be rendered on the first frame, the second will be rendered on the second frame and so on. When there are more frames than child groups, they will cycle back to the first group.

All objects will receive the material properties of the parent (diffuse, transparency, textures, shaders, etc).
***

Thanks for the replies and help.

I tested group cycling on my Mrblobby exported frames and it doesn’t work. I think the problem is that the exported facts are two groups: a mr blobby and a child Particle group and on reimport that hierarchy is lost. I’ll make a short project with a ball or something and follow step by step. The V8 Tutorial with the ball doesnt work for me either, instead of one model per frame i get model at random time for each frame… Again, I have to test it with more time, but thanks again.

Hello Danford,

Email me and I will send you the Mr Blobby I received which is supposed to work better with v8.  I’m not sure this will solve your current problem, but at least you will have the latest Mr Blobby.
My email is

Best Regards,
Phil Martin

Sorry, I just re-read the posts and I see you are in v5.5 of EIAS, so this MrBlobby will not make a difference.

Phil