itsjustme

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!

I found a few things that needed fixing in the standalone FACE installation...the mouth fan bones and orient bones were affected. Here is a fixed update for the standalone FACE installation. If anyone has an installation that used the previous version, I can outline how to correct the problem...let me know if you need it. Thanks to Steve Shelton for getting me to look into this. 13s_Standalone_Posable_FACE_installation_02_18_2010.zip

Looks like a good character to me!

The snake was not included in the second project either.

Looks great so far, Robert!

Nice job, guys!

It seems like when one of the spikes is mostly obscured by another spike is when the popping happens...I wonder if the calculations clash somehow when that happens. This is a great test, Robert!

Happy B-Day, Holmes!

The fan bone you put in does a very good job, Tim!

I think that the origin of the chest bone would be lower (to the bottom of the rib cage) and the origin of the hips should be higher (around the height of the navel). You can get reasonably good results by making sure the spine is toward the back of the torso and doing some CP Weighting. Depending on what you're after, there are some other options like Smartskin and building a gut rig, but this character doesn't appear to need more than the weighting. Hope that helps, Tim.

Very cool stuff, Mark!

I'm probably not understanding the question, but I'll give a couple of options. If the arrow is one that will not be pulled out of the quiver, you can make it part of the quiver model and either not rig each arrow (they wouldn't move other than with the quiver that way) or add a bone to each arrow that is a child of the quiver so that they can be animated easily inside the quiver (you could animate them without bones using muscle movement, but the bones would make it easier). If the arrow is going to be pulled from the quiver, you are better off making it a separate model and adding it in the Choreography. If it were part of the character or quiver, it would be affected when the model bone for either is moved and you would have to do some counter-animating to compensate. You can use a "translate to" and "orient like" constraint to keep the arrow in the quiver until you want to use it, then you can set those constraints to "0". The easiest way would be to have the quiver always on the character. If the quiver was part of the character, the belt could just be CP Weighted so that it moves with the character, then the quiver could be a single bone so that it can be adjusted when the character is moving around. If the belt and quiver need to be adjusted by the character, you could make a chain of bones for the belt that are children of a bone that is the quiver. If you need automatic movement on the belt, you could put a dynamic constraint on the chain of bones or you could use cloth. Shoot it at me.

The easiest thing for the strap would be for the character to just have it on all the time...you could make the quiver the parent of a chain of bones that are the strap or use cloth. With the character always wearing the quiver, I would probably use cloth. If the quiver isn't going to be on the character all the time, I would a separate model and use "translate to" and "orient like" constraints with the chest bone as the target with an offset. The strap could be a chain of bones with a dynamic constraint applied to them...which is the direction I would lean if the character doesn't always wear the quiver. For the arrows, I would make a single arrow and then add them to the quiver with multiple instances in the Choreography using "translate to" and "orient like" constraints with the quiver as the target. Then, you could turn off the constraints on an arrow that you want to use with the bow. Hope that helps, Steve.

Looks great, Matt!

Great stuff, Eric!

Same problem on my end.

Looks great, Hutch!