Reikster

I only watched perspective2, but the biggest faux pas I see is that his back needs to arch the other way once he has the weight picked up, with the transition arched forward to back being a little quicker than the pickup or setdown portion. With the spine arched backwards you will really visually feel the weight he is carrying. eric

Very nice! Perl is an awesome language. Once I get more organized, I'm going to write some perl scripts for managing versions of models and materials and creating libraries (which I don't use now cause they're too much work) Ken, http://www.perl.org and this is probably the easiest for windows http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/ eric

I didn't really know what type of motion you were looking for so I whipped up this little thing. Is this similar to what you'd want the pelican's neck to do? This is just a chain of bones with orient like constraints to the larger controlling bones. First 9 little bones 20% bottom big bone, second nine 20% top bone. You'd probably have to add something more if you put a head on top and wanted it to stay steady. eric p.s. hmmm...you might wanna right click and play that attachment in Window Media Player...with quicktime in browser it has lots of jumpiness for me that isn't there otherwise. neck.mpg

That's a false on the first one. What happenned is that your roll handle was probably 180 degrees out from what the orient like constraint did. Simply open up the model in a model window (not relationship/action) and go into bones mode and put the bone that got twisted to more like the orient like position. I haven't figured out what method AM uses to place its roll handles, but it seems like I can place a chain of bones and some will end up with roll facing out, some with roll facing in. I'm sure it's just a subtlety in how I drew the bone, though. For my limited experience with rigging (mostly this past weekend), I always go back and check/set the bone orientation before I move on to constaining them in a pose. My experience with fan bones is too limited to give a good answer to the second question. eric

Vash, I don't have alot to add that's why I wasn't commenting. My personal thought is that a rabbit may be one of the hardest animals to model realistically. This is not based on your model, it's based on what I know about rabbits. They have their skeleton and muscles, but then their skin and fur with the exception of the few small places it attaches like feet and face is just a bag. It's hard to model the skeleton and bones without taking the skin off...and that would surely displease the rabbit most severely. Even if that was real accurate and mechanically correct, doing the fluid/cloth simulation of their baggy skin would be a horrendous difficulty. Butter bunny had a touch of GI stasis a few years back and they gave him fluids to keep him from de-hydrating...the vet simply put them in under his skin. It was real funny, but sad at the same time because he had this bag of fluid right on his chest under his skin. I was afraid he was going to trip on his own skin. That being said, I think your rabbit models look good. You'll probably want to tweak them and improve them as time goes on and you get more advanced. Once you get some motion on the model and compare it with the real thing, you'll probably come up with other ways to improve. Hopefully someone else has something specific they can add eric

I always tell people that it's a good thing they're not all that smart, although a rabbit suppossedly "memorizes" its territory, but I'm getitng off track... I always say that 1-2 dozen rabbits could take down a big cat.....if they were smart enough to work together and not attack it head on. It's kinda like ants lifting, what is it? 6 times their body weight? Rabbits can be very quick and very ferocious, although they do fatigue fairly quickly. Their downfall is that they're afraid of almost everything except another rabbit. Both of my rabbits are slightly bigger than a Shih Tzu, can run twice as fast and jump higher. Probably alot quicker and more agile.....but guess who's scared of whom? eric

Vash, I don't know if bunny skeletons will bug you, but I dug these up with google: http://www.fsinet.or.jp/~sokaisha/rabbit/teeth/teeth.htm I think that's actually from Oolong's old site....not sure if you know about the "pancake bunny"...but that was Oolong...sadly passed away. I don't think that's him in the picture just a skeleton his owner found. Actually made me learn something by doing so....I didn't think bunny's had any teeth but the front 4/6 (depending on if you count the little ones right behind the top teeth). Well, obviously from the pictures they have some molars in back, but I would definitely not spend time modelling those, nor the ones behind the top teeth. I went and picked up the bunny that was loose downstairs at the time and I couldn't open his mouth enough (without being mean) to see his back molar teeth. I just succeeded in making him upset With my rabbits, I can lay them on their back and finesse their lips open enough to see their front teeth, but if If I gently push on the side of their mouth to get them to open their mouth, they will only do it a little before they get real cranky and squirm. The vet has some kind of metal loop that they can stick in and prop open their mouth, but that's probably expensive. Your bunny model is coming along nicely eric

EEp! what kind of bunny has those type of teeth? Or are you going for an Anthropomorphic look (i.e. humanizing him/her)? eric BTW, they do look like good teeth, just more human than bunny

OM, If I'm reading you right, a combo FK/IK rig like what I described in your other thread is what you're asking for. I played with it the other night, but my rigging skills quite literally suck. I'm pretty sure this is the tutorial of the guy from Cg-char that talked about this: http://www.dirtyoldtoon.com/tutorials/IKFKTutorial_01.htm The only problem is that you need to speak maya to understand it. My experiment partly worked. I have two sets of two bones for each limb. The two bones with the geometry also have a null at the end with an IK constraint. Next you have two other bones in exactly the same location (hide the first two). These are the FK bones(lock IK on). Then you constrain the null to the tip of the FK bones. When you move the FK bones around, the null moves and the geometry moves (almost) like if you were strictly FK. That's the part I haven't worked out exactly yet. I think there's a few roll like or aim at constraints, and maybe a relationship that I haven't got my head wrapped around yet. The whole idea is that you can do wonderful arcs and gestures with the FK parts and then when you actually need IK for grabbing something or for planting of the feet then you constrain the null to something besides the end of the FK bones....this becomes your IK/FK switch. One of the "nice" things is that you simply move the FK bones back to where they'd "pick up" the null when you switch back to FK. 'Theoretically' removing any jumps or hiccups. I don't know how much time I'll spend fiddling with this tonight, but the mathematical side of my brain intuitively tells me that there is enough information in the 2 FK bones to 'tell' the IK bones where to be simply through correct manipulation of the null and one other bone to bone constraint. I might not get it figured out until this weekend, though eric

One of the guys on CG-char was talking about his IK/FK combo rig that he uses. I might get around to trying this tonight on a mega simple model I built at lunch. It's pretty simple in principle. Normal IK with nulls and IK constraint at the end, but then hide the IK bones and put in normal FK bones. When you want FK, constrain null to tip of FK bone, when you do your arc and the hand rests or feet hit the ground, constrain the null to that object (or a ground null.) This way (theoretically) you get IK and FK benefits without having to "switch". eric

yeah, bunnies always kinda frown....but sometimes its a happy frown the only comment I'd have is that it looks like the back part is getting a little on the wide side...maybe...I dunno how big your bunny is, but there's alot of fluff on the head...if you've ever seen them wet, you know what size their head really is, which might only be important if you're going to add fur. you kinda inspired me to "finish", although it's far from done, the model I started ages ago. It's drawn freehand from memory and there are alot of serious spline issues around the mouth/nose, but...well, it's something to look at anyways. eric

I've not done much rotoscoping or modelling that was successful. I think the idea is to have a side view and a front view at least, maybe a top view and a back or bottom view as well. If you have an isometric view then you're always kinda guessin about proportions. Hopefully that helps a little and maybe someone else can add something. Mostly I wanted to share some pictures of my bunnies too :-D Butter(white bunny) is fat too, but he has slimmed down some since being put on a diet. Mocha(brown bunny) has always had good appetite control. The bunnies in the car aren't mine. bunny pix eric

Does this work for anyone in v11.1? I can get it to go in 10.5r and 11.0t, but not 11.1b wonder what changed? eric

Ever since AM hair, probably yes. It's a wonderful way to add leaves to a tree! A lot less labor intensive than making your own! hmmm....so can you put a sprite emitter on the end of a hair or something? I tried using a sprite emitter with a leaf image, but the leafs are so poorly organized that it looks horrid, they look like somebody just superglued leaves to a stick. I guess I'll fiddle with it a little bit more... eric

Okay, this is gonna probably sound like a dumb question, but are most peoples leaves the "sprite" emitter? I started making a rough tree a while back and couldn't figure that part out right away so I started puting leaves in manually, copy paste...copy paste...etc. It got a little cumbersome. I haven't downloaded the "tree building" kit....looked for that earlier (thought I did a search of the forums first ) anyways, guess I'll DL that this evening after work and try taking it apart. thanks, eric