falibu

yeah my primary editing machine is a mac but i model on my pc. i started fiddling with TSM2 today after i got my unit rigged with the 2001 skeleton to hold an axe which is one of the things i wanted hands clenched for. in TSM2, i got a basic rig to work without fan bones and cog. i'm reading caroline's rigging gala with TSM pdf though and hope to work through it. it looks like it would definitely be worth the change over.

Great stuff, i have been rummaging through everything i could find to try and learn the fundamentals of poses and you nailed it right on the head. I'm pretty sure if i ever ran into a problem like this again, i have a really good jumping platform to try and fix the problem instead of band-aiding it by using properties from other projects haha.

Thank you so much. Watching this felt like watching a long lost TAOAM chapter video. Poses didn't really get too much attention in the book. I never knew I could use rotate like that on the bones! Seems so trivial but some how I just never picked that up. I used this video to fix my 2001 skeleton rig's default hand clench poses and finished a superman body pose.

i vaguely remember reading something a long those lines but was hoping for the best haha. i hear that, i finished reading the TSM manual and it looks really good for a lot of things i want to do. especially with quadrapeds and insects. thanks for that tid bit of info. based on that i've come to a temporary solution: i just grabbed lady goodbody's hand relationships and dropped them into my model haha. all of the stock models that i have come with that 2001 rig and all of their hand clenches seem to work but on the 2001 rig itself it was jacked up. the only thing i really know about poses are lips, do you know of any resources on how to pose a clenched hand or poses in general? it seems like posing is a very key ability. i'm guessing i bone the fingers to my finger geometry and then go to an action with and new pose>percentage. not sure from there. i'm going to toy around with it. test_hand_clench.mov

i've been reading a bit about the TSM2 setup so i DL'd it and opened up some of the rigged characters that come with the TSM2 install. one thing i noticed was they didn't seem to work well with AM's preset actions unless i missed something. it seemed to twist the body of the character and swap left/right hands/feet positions. TSM2 seems pretty cool but i think if i started using it now i'd have to redo all my actions and AM's preset actions unless there's a way around that? seems like a lot to get a hand to close around a hilt hehe and may be a job for another day. So far my rigging experience is limited to what is taught in TAOAM book under ch13 add some backbone which uses the 2001 rig, but doesn't cover boning fingers. thanks for the point in the right direction, i had been meaning to find out what the acronym TSM stood for lol. i kept thinking to myself, "are they talking about The Skeleton Model?" and even tried using the eugene_2001rig thinking that's what you guys were talking about.

i'm trying to add the 2001 skeleton rig to my model in AM v15 and everything seems to work till i start messing with the hands. i've never messed with the hand bones outside of the TAOAM tutorials but from what i gather after going through the forums and examining lady_goodbody.mdl, i have unhid all the hand bones including X finger bone 1, 2, 3 and started assigning the bones of finger to control points rather than assigning them to the general finger. my problem is that when i try to use the right or left hand clench in an action the fingers distort wildly into a mashed up ball at 1% and doesn't change at all between 1-100%. i've tried opening up the 2001 skeleton.mdl from the rig's folder that installed with my version of AM and i started an action for the skeleton to test his clench and by default the mashed up hand bones happens. is there something i don't understand about hands or have i managed to mess up my copy of my 2001 skeleton and does anyone know where i can download a clean set of default models that come with AM without completely reinstalling my software? i tried looking for posts with similar problems but came up empty.

yeah i know what you mean, the sides of the rib cage area have been looking funny to me also. the gold armor was created all free-hand. the chest piece on the green armor was modeled using thom as a guide and i think i like that one better. i'm more or less just modeling in ways that make initial obvious sense to me and trying to pick up good techniques as i go a long. thanks very much for the input.

no prob, thanks for the suggestion. i'm still getting the hang of AM's compression methods and general out put settings.

just an update, have my new armor running along side my old armor chor_test_2_armors_sm.mov

working on some art for an iphone game i'm building and here's my 2nd attempt at armor. v3 will probably be my keeper. this armor set is what all my units will wear primarily with different textures for each race and the few unique armors that actually change the graphic of a unit on the battle screen, will be additional shoulder pads and helmets to this basic armor model. for instance 6 different armors all have this model for their base armor set but differ from each other by shoulder/head graphic. did it in about 5 hours and the video took about 2 hours to render haha. i'm considering trying a v2.5 with a more cartoony, Mii style character model with bubblier armor. here's a link to the youtube video i made of the armor

i attend a community college in South Texas that is trying to push more video game industry classes into the curriculum. the name of the school is Coastal Bend College-Kingsville Campus and the class is called ARTV 1341 3-D Animation I. the videos i was referring to were the reference tutorial videos on the main hash website that go over all the content in just about every chapter of the TAOAM book. i spent a lot of time just working through the book while i was in class. i vaguely remember the teacher showing us a dvd case that the school had received when they ordered AM for their computers but i had no idea how useful the videos on that dvd (and hosted in the main Hash site) would be. i'm just glad that i watched them later rather than never haha. i actually have about 10 or so short videos (3-20seconds) of projects i've done recently of a mock armored unit doing various stock actions with different textures and such. since i got out of class this is the first project i've tried on my own and so far i've modeled armor around Thom, re-rigged Thom (deleted a wrong copy on accident), rigged armor pieces to the newly rigged thom, and i've begun making him custom animations. Again all with the help of these forums. The most surprising piece of help i found was in an archive from 2005 on v12 that talks about all the properties of AM:cloth (strech/spring/shear/ etc etc). Oh yeah, i'm diggin deep! haha i'm going to go read about posting videos/pics to the forums and i'll begin a new thread. i really have been inspired by a lot of these threads and am having the time of my life playing around AM again. as a quick edit: i just looked at the names of some the names of repliers to this thread and ya'll have posted a great majority of the threads i've found invaluable. Seriously, much gratitude and i enjoy ya'lls works very much.

Hello there everyone. i just thought i'd introduce myself. i took a 3d animation class in college a year ago or so (v15) and now i'm starting to put it to work for a video game i'm working on and possible webisodes. i'm off to a good start in my post-class era and have learned much since then just fiddling with the easy to use software and as of recently i am beginning to discover the stretches of these forums. i'd just like to say that i've been able to find a lot of help in these forums already even dating back in articles from 2005, with such topics as clothing (i managed to get a cape flowing and leaves draping down from a shoulder pad), figure modeling, lighting. my only regret at this point is that i never utilized the video tutorials while i was actually in the class! i swear i learned more and faster from those videos and watching the directors make mistakes and then fix their own mistakes than i did trying work my way through the book alone the first time. i look forward to utilizing and contributing to this community here are a few videos and pics i've been working on Thom in mock nature armor walking around Thom in mock nature armor doing a boogy First video i made after my mock nature armor was completed Thom in a skirt, i'm still practicing with the SimCloth Feature. it's pretty out there compared to anything else i've tried to do in AM