itsjustme

I don't think so, Andy...I'm pretty sure a G5 is faster than my laptop (aren't they 64bit processors?). I'm using an AMD 2500 processor, which isn't a 64bit processor and is about three or four years old. What bones are you trying to move and resize? Does your character have a lot of patches? For realtime response, you might have to make a proxy version of your character that cuts down the patch count. Do you have hair turned off? Have you compared the handling of Squetchy Sam to the character you are having problems with? If you can give me a set-by-step of what you are using, we might be able to narrow down the problem.

Very cool so far, Holmes! Good luck with your deadline!

Nice! Looks great, Mark.

Okay, now I see what's going on...it's not broken, I was just thinking about it wrong. When the leg is put into FK, it turns it into a bent toe instead of a raised heel. When the IK foot control is put into the right position for that to happen, it repositions the other controls accordingly. Since that's the way it needs to behave in order for the FK/IK switching to work correctly, it's the way it should be, I'm thinking. Sorry about the false alarm, Mark....as far as I can tell, it's solid. Very nice work!

I'm probably not being very clear. Here's a quick video to illustrate. In the video, I put the right foot on its' toes using the "Right Heel Controller", set the "Right Knee Follow Ball Controller" Pose to 100%, rotated the foot like its' grinding something into the ground, turned off and on the "Right IK Leg" Pose and then selected the "Right Ball Controller" to show its' position. The "Right Ball Controller" will return to the correct position if the "Right Heel Controller" is put back to its' default and the "Right IK Leg" Pose is turned off and on. However, if you don't do that, you can't do the same movement of grinding the foot using that control...at least I wasn't able to do it. I checked the Squetch Rig and it has a similar problem...I never noticed it. I'll do some tinkering on that tonight and see if I can clear it up. foot_thing_07_17_2008.mov

I'd better restate that...it's not perpendicular to the floor, it's perpendicular to the bottom of the foot where the toes bend. If that makes sense.

One last thing, I think. When the "Right/Left Heel Controller" is rotated, then the leg is put into FK and then back into IK, the "Right/Left Ball Controller" is rotated and stays that way. I'm thinking it needs to stay perpendicular to the floor. Other than that, I haven't found any other problems...very nice work, Mark!

Here's where I'm at with the hands. In order for me to determine what I needed to change, I put in a simple set of bones so that I could see how things moved...it helped a lot. The biggest change is in the knuckle area. I rendered a Quicktime of the test I was running to check finger movement and included it in this post. There are some minor CP Weighting tweaks and a few other obsessive things I will go back in and do, but it will give you an idea of the progress. When I'm finished with the modeling, I'll strip out the test hand setup and save a version so that I can refer to it when I'm at the rigging/CP Weighting stage...it should speed things up a little. I've still got a test I want to run that will affect some things later in the process...I'll post the results when I get them. Thanks Mark! I think you pointed me in the right direction. Bertram_hand_test_07_17_2008_Sorenson3.mov

I found a couple of things with the FK/IK switch for the legs, Mark. When using the "Right/Left Foot Controller" and "Right/Left Foot_Geom", everything works fine when switching. When using the "Right/Left Heel Controller" or "Right/Left Ball Controller", the "Right/Left Foot Controller" doesn't jump to the right position when switching, so the controls get out of place (especially if you move the "Right/Left Foot_Geom" in FK). The solution would probably involve some compensates, but I know you're trying to keep those to a minimum. I'll do some more looking.

Cool, I got the current version now. Thanks, Mark!

I may be wrong, but is that an older version that was uploaded last, Mark?

Cool, I'll do some double-checking on the latest update tonight, Mark.

Sounds good to me, Mark. I'll do some more looking tonight. Very nice work on this, as usual.

I found a couple of things, Mark. The first one is that when you rotate the foot using the "Right/Left Ball Controller", the knee didn't follow the rotation. I re-parented the "Right/Left Leg Hinge Roll Target" bones as children of the "Right/Left Ball Controller" bones to fix it. The second one I didn't come up with a solution yet. When you rotate the head on the 'Z' axis and turn off and on the "Head_Controller" Pose, the "Neck_geom" bone does some unwanted rotating on the 'Z' axis. Maybe some roll targets and a couple of extra bones would get it to bake things in place. I'll do some more looking and see if I can find anything else.

Sorry, that was tongue in cheek - even I installed it once a long time ago to try it out. I was trying to give an idea of the huge complexity of it. I should have put a in there...it's hard to read tone in a text message. Sorry if I came off wrong, it wasn't my intention, Caroline. The biggest job in installing the Squetch Rig is CP Weighting, the second biggest is resetting compensates (hopefully, that will eventually be automated).

Mark hasn't made an installer yet, Caroline...once he gets everything ironed out, that will follow. A character without any constraints at all could be animated. You wouldn't have IK, which would make some things more difficult, but it could be done. Using just euler constraints would give you problems when the limits are reached in a lot of instances. It can be done, but you might end up fighting the rig sometimes. The goal is to give the animator a system that doesn't work against them and is easy to use. Too much automation or too little can both cause extra work. Where there is something automated, there should be a way to turn it off if the animator would rather not use it. I've got plenty of damaged brain cells, believe me. Once I get the update for the installation tutorial done, I think it will be a lot clearer. I'm not far from starting to put that together, once Bertram's modeling is finished I'll be using him for the tutorial.

I'm probably not understanding what you're thinking, Robert. I do know that a "roll like" wouldn't need a compensate since its' position and present rotation doesn't matter.

Thanks, Mark! You were right about the fingers...hopefully, I'll have something to show on those in a day or two.

Looks good...perfect. Thanks for your help, Nancy!

When I first read your post Eric, I think I misunderstood. Now that I read it again, I think you mean that the updated face should be more like the version that is my present avatar? If that's the case, is it that the updated version looks less friendly? My present avatar image is from a frame that wasn't the default pose for the face...he's sort of smirking. Or is it something else?

Here's an update that should fix Bertram's torso and face. The five point patches on the corners of the mouth are moved to a better place, I eliminated the hooks under the nose, added some chubbiness to the cheeks, put a little more pout on the lower lip, added to the "love handles" and pulled the stomach in some. I'm still working on the hands, so ignore them on these.

I think I agree, Eric...if I'm understanding "Mayberryish" to mean like a character from the "Andy Griffith Show"? I unintentionally took some of that out of him in rounding up the head, but I think I've gotten it back in the next version I'll post late tonight. Bertram is a personal project that I've been wanting to do for a long time. It started as a single animation that I wanted to do of an overweight redneck gymnast that smokes and drinks heavily and has evolved into a series of animations that I'd like to do with him in several situations (I think I've got seven or eight at the moment...we'll see how many will actually get done). I think of him as sort of a "Yosemite Sam", in that he is always the same person no matter the setting or costume. This is sort of a push for myself to actually get some of the Bertram stuff finished and an attempt to improve in the areas that I need to work on (there are quite a few of them).

I should be posting some images late tonight, Mark. I think he lost a little personality in his face when I made it less flat, so I added back some chubbiness to his cheeks, moved a five-pointer that was at the corners of the mouth, got rid of a couple of hooks under the nose, increased the density of the splineage on the torso, increased the "love handles" pulled the gut in a little and am still in the process of tweaking the hands. You're probably right about the fingers, I'll add that to my checking tonight, thanks!

The good news is that there shouldn't be any difference between an older version of the InstallRig plugin and the most recently posted version, Sebastian. So, using the old one you have would be fine. I don't have a Mac, so I can't check that version of the plugin...if someone else on a Mac could confirm the problem, and one that we know works gets posted, I'll replace the one in the released version of the rig. I hope that made sense.

I had to look for it, but I found an emoticon for "scary"....you are a very scary man, Eric!