itsjustme

Very cool, Eric!

Thanks, Robert! His stubbiness is just how I saw him as a character...it is tougher to do the CP Weighting on a character like him though. He started off as a redneck gymnast that let himself go, I still want to do some animation of him doing gymnastics too. Initially, his gut was a lot bigger, but it would make it difficult for him to do things like sit at a desk. This is the third version of him that I've made, so he's gotten a lot of back-story since the first concept. I've rigged him more times than I can count and textured him three or four times...each version gets better as I get better at A:M. I used him when I was first learning rigging and building the first version of the face rig. Thanks adam&oliver! The first version of Bertram was made in 1998, so he's not based on Mr. Incredible, but there are similarities. As soon as the modeling is finalized, I'll start rigging him while making the updated Squetch Rig installation tutorial.

I think you're right, Nancy. The visuals helped a lot. Thanks! I'll do some more tweaking on him tonight. Eventually I'll get it nailed down.

Try these tutorials: Basic Splinemanship Continuity explained Understanding Gammas Hope those help.

You could try here or here. Hope that helps.

I did some modifying to Bertram's face and torso...I'm not sure if I went far enough or not, so I figured it would be good to get an opinion. I made his face less flat, added some slight "love handles" and brought some of the chest muscle under his arms. I'm presently working on his hands...I think one of the things Mark was seeing in the hands is that the knuckles needed to be on more of a slant. I put a simple hand rig in to check, and adjusting the middle and pinky knuckles made a big difference. While I've got the simple setup in the hand, I've got an experiment with the fingers that I'm going to try...hopefully, I'll be able to post the results in a couple of days.

Yves has a tutorial that starts here. Hope that helps, Sam.

Nice character so far, Sam! The only crit I have is that there are quite a few edges that look like they need beveling.

Nice so far, Mark! I did a little messing with it and didn't find any problems...it seems to handle very well. I'll do some more testing over the next couple of days. Top notch additions! Thank you for all of your hard work!

Controlling an arm (or any other limb) using "FK" (forward kinematic), the controls work from the top down...bicep to forearm to hand. Meaning that if you move the bicep, everything below it in the chain moves and if you move the hand, it doesn't affect anything higher in the chain (forearm and bicep). If you use "IK" (inverse kinematic) controls, moving the hand will move the entire arm. "IK" limbs generally use the "kinematic" constraint on the end bone of a chain of bones, that will make the chain attempt to reach the IK target (which is generally another hand controller in the case of an arm). To keep the chain from twisting in ways that an arm or leg aren't supposed to move, the IK setup will use a few other constraints as well. In A:M (after v13), you can set up the FK and IK constraints in a way where they will make the switch without the arm or leg moving. In FK, you make the IK controls move like the FK controls. Then, in IK, you make the FK controls move like the IK controls. I have attached a ZIP containing cut-down versions of the arm and leg setup from the Squetch Rig as examples. Hope that helps, Muster. v13_IK_FK_switch_examples.zip

As Mark said, if we haven't purchased Barry's tutorials, we wouldn't be familiar with the rig you are installing. Without an example of the rig and your attempt at installing it, most of us would have trouble helping you, Jason. I'm not sure of the percentages, but I think most people install a standard rig...there are also people that roll their own though. The three most common rigs are the 2001 rig, TSM and the Squetch Rig.

That's one of the things I want to do with him...the way he's dressed now is for a series that I want to do with him working in an office environment. I've got a lot of things I want to do, but I'm not sure how many will actually happen yet.

Thanks Mark! I was going for stumpy fingers on sort of "ham hands"...having only three fingers might make it look too extreme. I haven't done any experiments to make sure he can grip things well yet, just some quick guess-work. The hair has a couple of maps, several length maps just to define the hairline and a density map for the stubble so that it fades in as it gets to the main section of hair. Thanks, Ken! He is harsher than the avatar...I wanted a little frown built into his relaxed face. I'll be doing some tests with the fingers before I consider them final, but I wanted "ham hands", so that's the way I'm leaning. His face may be a little flat, I was going for sort of a "bulldog" type appearance...I'll do some double-checking, maybe I went a little too extreme. He'll get a little more color once he's textured. LOL! I think you're right, Nancy...he could probably use some "love handles". Thanks for the constructive criticism! When you're looking at the small stuff a lot, it helps to have a few other sets of eyes. I'll give him another going-over tonight and see what happens.

Here are some stills and a turnaround Quicktime (H264 encoded video) of Bertram. The only texturing at this point is the iris' and hair...everything else will be done after he's rigged. Modeling isn't really finished until the character is rigged, and any modeling changes would affect decals. I've had previous versions of Bertram, but my modeling wasn't as good when I made them...the last version was made about four years ago. I started over and free-handed most of it, used the previous version of Bertram to get the facial proportions similar and used a rotoscope from an online catalog for the boots. One thing to remember if you use a catalog picture of a boot as a rotoscope...the toes will be flatter if there is a character/person with weight in them. When I initially modeled the boots, I made them like the catalog picture...which had Bertram's toes way too curled. Bertram_turnaround_07_04_2008_H264.mov

The "Project Bertram" area is where I'll post all things related to the character "Bertram" (I've been using an old version of him as my avatar, I'll update that soon)...he's the main character in several small animations that I want to try to get done. Bertram is a chain-smoking, beer drinking Texas redneck (if you're familiar with the comedy of Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, Bill Engvall or Larry the Cable Guy...that's what I mean). I think of him as being like Yosemite Sam, in that he's always the same guy no matter what the setting or costume. This project, actually it's several small projects with a common main character, is what I'm going to use to try to push what I know and try a lot of things that I've never done...I'm not sure I'll be able to do all of them, but I'm going to try. Questions, comments and suggestions/critiques are always welcome. As the project progresses, I'll be releasing things that might be helpful to other members of the community...tutorials, models, examples, etc. The first tutorial will be an update to the Squetch Rig installation tutorial...which I'm thinking will be posted in the "Rigging" section of the main forum. Thanks to Martin for providing this sandbox...I'll try to keep the area clean.

I'm really liking the style, Mark!

Sorry but don't know what is meant by 'geometry' as opposed to 'model' but whatever - it's not important. I just thought someone may have encountered the same problem and had a quick fix. I'll rip it out again and see what happens. Is there a reason you can't attach the actual model to a post in this thread, Paul? If we could open the model in A:M, it would be very helpful in finding the problem.

Post the actual model. If you don't want to post the model with geometry, make a copy with that deleted and post it. It will take some actual messing with the rig to find out what's wrong, Paul.

It's hard to tell without seeing the model. You could post it without the geometry so that it can be tracked down.

Yessir, I'm thinking the same thing. Not a bad bit of exploring though, I've learned a few things.

that's a lot of nulls. A dedicated textprocessing app is the most likely solution. We just need to find someone with some free time to write it. I can't get to it for a couple months Another problem I had with jEdit was that I got an out of memory error if I tried to do all of them at once in a macro. I gave the program as much memory as I could and still had the problem...from the reading I did, I think there's a memory leak in jEdit (related to Java) that shows up when you do that much at a time. I have thought about doing a purely macro solution (which is possible), but it would be even more events than the Diff/Merge I was trying, there would have to be a different version for each type of Squetch Rig installation and contain no extra or fewer bones. Which also means, in jEdit, it would have to be several macros so that the memory leak problem is avoided. Another text editor that can record a macro could be used if it is cross-platform. What's the moving of bones for? At the end of the process, I have the original positioned Squetch Rig and the same model without Nulls that has extra bones that TSM adds for the compensates. Comparing the two, I can either copy the Nulls into the TSM result or copy the extra bones into the original model. At this point, either way presents merging problems using the Diff/Merge method. ----------------------------- EDIT ----------------------------- I just snapped...it's actually 311 Nulls (I was counting tags, two for each), it is 76 bones though (I was counting the characters "->", which is in each compensate bone).

Well, I've hit a wall. The problem comes in when trying to automate converting bones back to the Nulls in the Squetch Rig. I can do it manually (there are 622 nulls), but using a macro and a Diff/Merge program is proving to be problematic. I can also manually move the compensate bones created by TSM (there are 76 of those), but getting the Diff/Merge to do it correctly would take some manual editing on each of them. The problem is that Diff/Merge programs assume that you want all of the things that have changed in a file to be transferred and I just need parts...it would take splitting up differences manually in quite a few instances because things get lumped together. One direction would be to transfer the Nulls to the model with the compensate bones and the other direction would be to transfer the compensate bones to the model with the Nulls. I don't think an XML editor will do the job because the names of the bones/nulls are inside the tags and the tags are either ", " or ", ". I haven't come up with a way to automate the process where it will work without some kind of error in the final model yet (without extensive manual editing)...I'll have to do some more thinking.

The one example of an "advanced Property" I see enabled in TSM2 is "with lag". I guess you tried "with apply before action" and got nothing? It probably isn't in there if they didn't need it for TSM2. I don't remember all the different ways I tried to do it, but I think I did all the variations of "with apply before action"...I could be wrong though. I tried adding it as a separate line and in the constraint line like the "no roll" option...several hours worth of attempts. I'll try some more tonight.

I got a little side-tracked trying to see if I could script turning on "Apply Before Action" in a constraint using scripting...it doesn't appear to be possible. I checked the included TSM rigged characters and didn't find any constraint with that turned on, so I'm guessing it's not scriptable...it may be, but nothing I've tried so far has done the job. I'll just include in the instructions to turn that on where necessary...I think it's nine times in the Poses that need their compensates reset. If I'm lucky, I might have an example late tonight/early tomorrow.

It can make the bones (the nulls would have to be converted though), but the built-in limitations make things more difficult to build a complete Squetch Rig. I've outlined them in previous posts. Most of them can be worked around, there are a couple of them in what I'm doing to just reset the compenates, but for the face rig I can't see TSM handling that any easier. I would have to put in markers that I'm not sure yet if they would be rejected by TSM, and the Pose installation makes it pretty easy. There are a couple of other hurdles that I haven't tried to work around yet...at the moment, I'm just trying to get the first thing accomplished.