markw

Good news, the replacement models are all capable of completing the exercises as given them in TAoAM. But note; Thom still has Balance and Balance Ridged turned on by default and Shaggy has some geometry bones that should be hidden showing in his left hand as well as the eyelid bones. I also copied the new models into my data set and they show up just fine in the Library and load.

I have some results for you. Where should I post them? Here, to you or AM Report6203?

I don't mind having a play with them this week. When do you need answers by?

Neat, the true meaning of the phrase "self assembly"! Can I ask; 1, what is it? 2, the black hose connectors? Are they really counter threaded? Looks a little odd them turning counter clockwise as they go in, instead of clockwise.

Oh its true, its true, its much faster than 15j! A few odd Mac bugs but Steffen is squishing them even now. Actually I'm using 17beta5 but rendering with 17.0 to get around the bugs. I have great hopes for 17.a when it comes.

Reported. Another bug for Steffen to squish!

No scroll-bar Fuchur (not that there should be, there never was before) The icons are there in all the previous 17betas. I'm on a Mac and I've tried a reset and a reinstall but still getting nothing showing up

Is anyone else missing the little icons from the right hand side of the PWS in the new v17? As you can see the relevant boxes have been tick as always but I'm still getting non of the relevant icons.

I believe Keekat uses a trick to have non-spherical eyes that can still rotate the pupil in different directions. Basically, it's modeled and rigged as a sphere but then the eyeball and bone are scaled in one axis to flatten the whole structure. The pose that does that can only be active in a Chor or Action. Ahh, interesting. Can't say that fully makes sense to me right now. But I'm sure once I'm more familiar with Choreography and Action, it will. Will be a cool "a ha!" moment when it clicks. If you have the Extras DVD and are curious, there's a tutorial on how those types of eyes are done in there; Extras DVD > Tutorials > Bootcamp > Eye Tut.html If you don't have a copy, its well worth getting one as its a veritable goldmine of info and will repay the time spent in exploring its hidden ways and secrets.

Great stuff all round there! Hated having to chose just one though!

Yes Robert, that's about the same on Mac's. Any actual changes to the time line display are more accidental than planed! Yep, that's what we'r talking about Mark. But its when you switch out of the curve editor and are looking just at the Keyframes that it can be a bit tricky to see.

Sadly Simon, I don't think we can change the colour or the contrast of the greyed out areas in the time line. I have often wanted to give it more contrast as its often near impossible to see. I would also like little slidey markers up there that you can grab and move similar to setting the In and Out points in a film editors timeline. For me it would be quicker than typing in numbers. Humm… that's maybe a feature request.

Hey good to see you back thumperness Can't say I'v ever had this problem but it sounds like A:M can't write the MasterPrefs.ini file to the A:M v17 folder. So it may be a permissions thing with the folder. Use; 'Get Info' for the A:M v17 folder and set all the permissions at the bottom of the Info window for the folder to 'Read & Write'. See if that dose it.

Uh...he?...Ruzzle...ahem...is...um..ah...a She. And she's supposed to be a raccoony-ish type. A master gardener, opera star and flamenco dancer on the side. The middle character Nummi (a he), is supposed to be a hedgehoggy doofus. Smitten by Ruzzle. Anyhow that lets me know that Ruzzle needs more work to make it obvious that she is a raccoonette. She's still in progress. Thanks for the feedback, it's good to have fresh eyes... Well, if I might make a suggestion Nancy about Ruzzlezini too. As she is an opera star and flamenco dancer, I think maybe she needs a bit more "décolletage" like the Peacocks in your last post. That would definitely solve any uncertainty's about gender!

Try this;

That's an interesting idea there John! I'm about to have another go at this Dynamics thing soon, so that's a timely suggestion, thanks

Well, I'm at the seemingly endless 'tweaking' of things stage, before trying out some final renders...

That's frustrating Gerry! Is this happening when you save the Particle Systems inside of Projects and/or Chor's? Just a thought but have you tried saving the Particle systems as separate Material files on their own outside of any AM .prj or .cho. After swapping computers and starting up the project/chor on the other computer, reimport the Particle Systems from those separate files. Do they still revert back to defaults then?

I only knew him through his posts here. But as you can see Josh, Paul touched the lives of many people across the world. He will be greatly missed.

There's a 'smoother wizard'? Pray, tell us more. I noticed some odd artifacting (is that a word?) with porcelain in 17beta's around some hooks in the mesh and also when I used it in conjunction with another material I used for the skin colour. But as yet I'v not looked deeper into it.

Welcome to the joyful world of rigging Simon! I'm always so grateful to the likes of Mark, Nancy and others here for their help and patients with us lesser mortals in this field!

Hi Simon, I'm not a fan of animating with 2001 rig either. Sadly TSM2 is not an option for us Mac people though so I can't say what its like to use. But when they're correctly installed the Literig and 2008 rig are good to animate with. There are some things I would change in both, just for my own preferences in animating, if only I had more skill with rigging but sadly I don't. It's still my least favorite task.

And to Nancy, "No, No, No…" Thanks for the clarification Nancy. That was a disaster narrowly avoided there! "For the 2nd case: If 1) you are scrubbing thru the timeline, AND 2) you have NOT baked your dynamic systems then you will definitely see different results depending on how fast or slow you are scrubbing. See for yourself. Try scrubbing back and forth with your mouse very slowly thru a range of frames, and then very rapidly through the same range - and yes you will get widely different dynamic motion (if unbaked)." Yes, this is definitely what I see too. "…repeat ad nauseum." Aptly put, I'm about to embark on that now. I like your idea of a master bone for each chain too. As I said in reply to Robert I'm afraid the only project I have at the moment that I could post for what I think is happening for dissection by more learned minds on the forum is my bit for the community project so it may be a little while before I can see if its replicable in another project. But I will be coming back to this to prod and poke it some more.

Well thats interesting Robert. I just tried your baking test and A:M runs through it, baking as it goes, at more or less the same speed as just hitting the play button. And you would have to be super picky after baking to try and find a fault. In my Rear Window chore when you bake, it runs through it baking at maybe half speed at best, possibly less. This could be because there's more information going on for A:M process? And there's a noticeable difference between pre and post baked DC's. This is why I want to try and make a more complex version of your test with lots of other things for A:M to keep track of as it runs through the chore baking. And yes, normally putting together an example .prj for others to try out is the first step with these things. Sadly I don't have one just yet. Its a question of available time for me at the moment to experiment with this. I still have much else to do on my bit for the Community Project and at the moment thats the only project I have using DC's that I could post as an example. But I would rather not make that readily available for general downloading on the forum just yet.

Yes, I remember there used to be a substantial difference. markw, what version are you using? I set the Dynamic Constraints and started this animation in 16b but all the Dynamics baking has been done in the 17beta's. I want to try and replicate your test there Robert at some point, maybe in a more complex set of motions as I still think I'm seeing something different. It seems to me that A:M is doing more than as you say Robert "… does the simulation calculations to get the object from the last frame to the current one, throws a picture up on the display and then waits until it has to do that again." and that it is somehow applying the rate at which the next frame has to be shown to the degree of motion applied to the bones. And because it bakes at a slower speed than normal play, a lesser degree of motion is what is captured. Another possibility, which has just occurred to me writing here and possibly more likely?, is that when working in the Chor maybe the Dynamic Constraints that we think are at work in fact are not! Or at least not fully in that the % values are not being applied. But it is only when we go to bake that the various settings we made for the constraints when rigging are actually getting applied. Thus giving the illusion that its the baking that's wrong in making things appear too slow and stiff. When time permits me I think this will need some more looking at. The motion we see in the Chor should be the same as we see when baked and finally rendered otherwise we are left with trying to second guess when animating what the software is going to do to all our hard work later. This is definitely one of those times that I wish we were all in the same room with our computers and could actually see whats happening on each others screens! As to my current animation, are you all saying that I should go to each of the Dynamics keyframes and reposition the bones by hand? Thats a lot of keyframes! As that's going to be a long job even on this short animation I think first I might try Johns idea of dropping the stiffness etc... of the Dynamics settings and see what that renders like (Humm... this might actually tie in with my earlier idea above).