itsjustme

Thanks, David. As you can see, I tend to respond to the slightest bit of encouragement. Here's the "Poster". Good things should be encouraged. Very nice work!

He looks great, Hutch!

Another update on where things stand at the moment. The tail rig is being looked at by Mark Skodacek to see if he can see what I'm not seeing on the problem I've been having. A video showing the present controls is here...of course, some things will probably change. I'll be looking at it over the next couple of days as well...as soon as I can clear my head from the lack of sleep. To get my mind off of the tail temporarily, I've been working on an arm/leg rig that will have soft IK and at least one more trick to it...still a couple of things to do on that. If I can get enough time, I'll make a tutorial to keep the eye modeling tutorial company.

Very cool, Myron! That is poster material.

Now that's cool, Robert!

I didn't have a problem with the Squetch Rig either...do you have two keys set in your on/off Pose that are the same? Like having IK arms turned off at both the "off" and "on" setting in the Pose? If I did that, the baking (which allows for FK/IK seamless switching) would keep the arms in their original position in an Action/Choreography. Hope that helps.

A search for clouds, maybe? Or smoke?

Looks great, Ken!

He looks really good. The only places I see that I would think about adding a spline would be the wrist area, (which has been mentioned) that would be better if it had three spline rings, the forearm could probably use another spline ring between the upper forearm and wrist and possibly one more spline ring around the mid-section at the height of the navel. Hope that helps.

Looks cool so far, Eric! Moving that fast in the water, a path of spray would help sell it.

"Orient like" constraints set to "50%" have been all I've needed, the rest is in how it gets weighted and the location of the second fan bone...I have its' origin at 1/4 the length of the bicep bone from the elbow. Hope that helps.

That's the latest Squetchy Sam's arm (with the unreleased version of the Squetch Rig), so there are several things going on in there. A simple version without any flexing is in an example file I posted here. The latest Squetchy Sam is here.

In order for it to make a better bend, you would need to add a spline to the center of the forearm and the center of the bicep...I've been using two fan bones for elbows for a while as well. As has been mentioned, Smartskin can also fix it. Here's a quick clip showing the two fan bones in the elbow. elbow_fan_bones_example.mov

Looks great, Robert!

I'll put your book on my to-buy list, Robert! Excellent test.

Nice!

Well, the rig made a liar out of me. First, I found that problem where you have to add a bracket to Expressions in v15, I corrected that and then found out that the latest fix only partially did the job. The bases for the roll targets are rock-solid and follow the path fine, but the actual targets aren't moving with them enough...it's the ease on the path for the targets. I've been thinking that a gimbal could be set up on the roll target bases for the targets themselves that would work better. Once again, I ran out of time...I'll have to clean up the mess I've made working on it and package it up for you tomorrow, Mark.

Does this one work? There was a snake included in the project this time. Every bone in the snake has its' roll handle pointing in different directions...that's probably what is causing your problem. Hope that helps.

Looks great, Robert!

I can't say 100%, but I had no problems with the targeting at all this evening...it really looked good. I thought I would be able to finish a video explanation, but I ran out of time. I should be able to get it finished tomorrow night and then shoot the rig your way, Mark. There's a lot of room for improvement, I'm sure.

Very economical use of splines, Robert. I'm thinking the front limbs might need another spline ring or two...depending on how much they will bend.

I think I've got it solved...there were a couple of times I thought about raising a white flag though. The problem is/was roll targeting issues caused by the way the quaternion math solves for the rotation of everything...including the path. Another part of the issue is that two paths side by side (when twisted up with all the ways a tail can move) were not always the same length...which meant controlling the placement of the targets on the second path would require different ease settings (making an adaptive ease for everything was one attempted solution). The present setup attempts to solve the problem using a couple of methods. First, the target ease is controlled by a base that is on the same path as the bone that needs a roll target (making the ease the same), then the base of the actual target is tied to that bone using Expressions excluding the 'Z' rotation (that gets the placement along the length of the tail and avoids flipping) and then the target bone is a child of that with a path constraint on it tied to the second path (which gets the rotation on the 'Z' axis). I'm pretty sure there are some things that could be improved by another set of eyes, so it will definitely be headed your way, Mark. I'll see if I can get things tied up into a neat package late tonight.

Yessir, it's like doing a crossword puzzle sometimes. The solution I'm dealing with at the moment makes me think I've solved the problem, but I need to do more testing late tonight to confirm it...I'm more confident this time than I have been though.

Another quick update...still working through a problem, actually the same one that has been there for quite a while. I have been at "almost" using several different solutions. Once again, I'm at another almost that might pan out...we'll see. I added the additional settings and they work fine if I can solve my one problem. It comes down to hanging something on nothing, sort of. I keep bumping my head on things, but it gets a little better with each knock on my noggin...I've learned quite a few things up to this point and I think I've still got a couple of things to learn before I'm finished with the tail rig.

Looks good!