Pitcher

I tried rendering a chor. file in the bitmap format, and the sky became black on the rendered picture. When I rendered as an avi, the sky was light blue as usual. I would like the sky to be light blue in the bitmap. Any ideas?

Thanks for responding. I had stopped looking here for a response and thought that I would get a return message. I was not aware of the keys you spoke of or how to analyze them. I will have to look into that. At the peak of the boomerang motion, there were about 30% of the bubbles trying to return, but I kept fighting with them, and by the time I sent the file to you, I thought I had gathered every bubble I could find and sent it out of sight. I didn't understand how you planned to analyze what had happened and thought you just needed to know what I was trying to do. I guess part of the difficulty with analyzing the file is that it is like repairing a car. The car has to be having the problem and making the noise when the mechanic looks at it, and the file has to be doing its thing when you are analyzing. Unfortunately, in this case I kept messing with the file and trying to overcome the problem and obscured the extent of the difficulty. That's a major fault of mine. I never ask for help until I have done everything I can think of myself to solve the problem. By then, a post mortem is much more difficult. Thanks again for looking at it.

robcat2075, I sent you the version that has the bubbles. I'm not sure what happened the first time. I also played the file with the bubbles emitter you made available. As I said in our messages, the file was a real eye opener. You and Rodney are 100% right! I should be using particles (spriticles). When I did Exercise 16 the first time in the book, I got through it finally, but it was very frustrating for me. I missed the whole point and thought, "Now I have a fire and smoke. This could be handy." Thanks for showing me how important particles and sprites can be.

Well, no mistake about it--I'm a train wreck! I have had two or three issues in the last week or two, and another occurred last night. This time, however, I had the answer, because of the help I received previously. Here's what happened. I use version 15i. It is what I've used since I started in November 2011 when I started into this. I have been working on the same project since then and was afraid to change because I want it all to look consistent. Yesterday, I was updating a file I did about two years ago trying to make it better. It is a scene that is so large that I can only look at it occasionally in shaded or shaded and wireframe. It will not go from frame to frame in real time in either of those. I also frequently have to click on something and wait for computer dynamics to calculate for a minute or two (or however long) before I can move a bone or a control point. Frequently, it won't show me where it moved it to until after it computes dynamics again for a minute or three. In other words, it is horrendous to work on this file. There are 21 participants in the scene that has a background with various buildings. I rendered the file to get a look at it, so I could go back and fix various problems. During the next six or eight hours, I fixed as many as I could. I backed up frequently to keep from losing my work. It became late, and I decided to render again while I slept. Then, to my horror, I found that the file would not render. It would load, and it was viewable on a frame by frame basis in wireframe, shaded, and shaded and wireframe, but it would not do a final render or a temporary render. I noticed then that Windows had updated and that Java wanted to update. I let Java update because I worried that somehow the old Java had gone bad. It didn't help. I did a System Restore to an earlier happier time, but that didn't help. I tried to render another file to see if it was just this file or every choreography. The other choreography rendered just fine. Horrors! A corrupted file! Would it ever render? Then, I remembered an earlier difficulty I had yesterday (or last week) when a choreography would view fine, except that front view was upside down. Fuchur had given a wonderful piece of advice there about importing the choreography into another choreography. I tried that on this file, and it worked! The file would render! There were a few problems, however, that I should mention. There were a new camera, a new rim, a new ground, a new fill light, and a new key light. My old ones were there also and were called 2 (e.g., Camera2). The new versions were causing me to lose my camera and light settings. I could have looked them up on my records or in the file itself and reinserted them, but one-by-one, I moved the old ones above the new ones and omitted the new ones. (As I did this, I kept checking to see if the file would still render and if I could still save it under a new name. One time, before I moved the old ones above the new ones, I omitted the new ones, and the file would not save. That's why hierarchy is important here.Maybe, it's always important.) Now, I basically have the old choreography file, but it will render. It took an hour or so to go through all of the recovery attempts, but it would have been much more difficult to start again on the changes I had made. I wanted to throw this out there to thank Fuchur again for the earlier information and to show how this Forum really helps. I also thought someone might someday have a choreography file that won't render or that might have lost part of its functionality in another way. Here is another thing to try. I want to thank every else who has offered advice and support also. I highlighted Fuchur here, because his advice directly led to this solution.

It arrived and I responded. You did not get the response? My response was, "I hope you get this response." As directed, I did not send the file as an attachment.

Runs With Scissors, I think you might have the answer as to why they are trying to come back to the diver if that is a characteristic of all action objects. It would be nice to have action objects that could depart in a prescribed way and never show up again until they magically reappear on the inside of the diver as the action begins again in the chor. I thought that was possible. As I said above, I am not sure where the limitations are in the program. Thanks for the input!

Thanks, Rodney, for the suggestion of starting with the ends and filling in the middle. I do this frequently with familiar types of animation, but when I am trying something new, I often forget. Usually, I don't know exactly where I plan to end up and how many steps it will take to get there. I try to feel my way along and see what it looks like as I go. I'm really going to have to investigate these particles (spriticles) you and robcat have mentioned. I will checkout the zip file robcat sent asap. I agree that the Forum holds lots of promise. It is lonely and frustrating, howling in the wilderness.

robcat2075, I attempted to send you the embed all project file again, this time with the bubble action project, and once again when I sent the message, I got an error message that said you were not receiving any more messages and that the message could not be sent. Maybe, I'm going to the wrong place to send my message. This time, I looked in the members area and found you. I clicked under the send me a message area. I wrote a message and clicked to use the full editor so I could attach the project file. I browsed and attached. Then I sent and received the error message that the message was not sent because you are not receiving any more messages. Is there something I am doing wrong here?

Probably, I should do something other than what I am doing to make my bubbles emit from the divers and go where I want them to go. I don't know much about features like particle sprites, and probably I need to learn more about them. Maybe there is a tutorial on that. Simon also had an interesting approach, and when I have enough patience to work with bubbles again, I'll have to try that. I mainly have done lessons from the little book that comes with the program. I also have read quite a bit from the book by David Rogers. Probably, if I had taken a course or several and had progressed through a sequence of lessons designed to teach not only the basics, but some of the fine points, I would not even have gone down the many deadends I have explored. I spent three frustrating days trying to shepherd the bubbles across the screen, and that worked to a point, but about twenty or thirty frames after their departure from the diver about a third of them on their own decided to high tail it back to the diver. I then had to pick them up one by one, frame by frame and try to force them to go away from the diver until the end of the action file. (The action file was really created to animate the diver. The bubbles were an afterthought. I had tried the same procedure with tears coming out of eyes in a different scene, and I had no problem with this, but the tears just rolled down the cheeks and fell into another character. They did not have to travel far from the crying character.) What I keep running into, it seems to me (in all my ignorance), is that there are limits or programming that expects we will use the program in certain ways. I keep trying to use my very limited knowledge to do things in ways that I probably shouldn't. I either need to learn how to use these other techniques or learn how to turn off the limits that keep forcing characters to act in certain ways. Here, I'm referring to limits in the skeleton on the elbows, forearms, etc. that keep characters from doing simple things like raising their hand from a position hanging at the side with the palm facing the rear of the body to a position above the head facing away from the body. The arm twists all sorts of ways to keep from doing that. I had to turn off the limits to even approach it. When I wanted an airplane to do a loop-t-loop on a path I moved into the sky and turned sideways, I discovered that the plane would only go to a certain degree of turn, and then would not go the rest of the way. I finally got it to do something like a loop-t-loop, but it was a huge fight. There seems to be an angle limit on how much a character can turn. Someone suggested that I pivot the plane, but that is not a loop-t-loop. Perhaps, I need to place a bone in the middle of the loop and pivot the plane at a distance or something like that. Thanks, Robert, for responding. I will try to learn more about particle sprites using a bubble image and how they can be guided. I just need to learn more about the program. If you want to see "kind of" what I was trying to do, you might look at the clip at: http://www.screencast.com/users/Pitcher123/folders/My%20Library/media/149fc9d6-a1bb-4e7d-9f53-0e3fd423d50c The divers are on a path. There is a diver action file. The bubbles are in the divers in the action file, and every 10 frames or so, I was going to have the bubble come out of the divers at their regulators and then move in groups up, to the rear and right of each diver. I had not thought of having a path for the bubbles and constraining the bubbles to the path and constraining the path to the moving diver, which seems to be close to what Simon is suggesting. I'm not sure what the interpolation method is. I'll have to research that.

Thanks, Simon. Your suggestion sounds like a good one, and you seem to know quite a bit about this program. I will have to try your idea.

Recently, I was trying to animate bubbles coming from my scuba divers' regulators. I constructed about 50 bubbles and put them inside my diver in an action file. I then tried to move different sized bubbles from inside the diver to just outside the regulator in groups of 12 or so bubbles that I would arrange in some sort of random formation. I then would try to move the group (mixing them up and changing the arrangement) every 10 frames further away from the diver. When I got them about two steps away, they started trying to come back to the diver. I would advance 1 frame and about 1/3 of the bubbles started shooting great distances back toward the diver. I had to chase those bubbles down and move them pretty much frame by frame away from the diver because they kept trying to return. What causes this? Is there some limit in play? Is there some way to press a button and let the bubbles go where I want them to go? Also, in the action file, I tried to make the bubbles leave away from the diver to the right and rear and toward the surface of the water. When I put the action in the choreography file, the bubbles went to the front and left toward the surface. I fought the battle of the bubbles for about two or three days and never won. I have some bubbles, but they do not always go where I want them. Does anyone know why this happens and how to solve the problem? This is not a life or death issue with me, but I thought someone else might have problems with action objects like this also.

Thank you, Robert, for your suggestions. I guess the chor file got corrupted some way when I was working on it. Importing the content into a new chor file restored the functionality. I'm not sure why I wasn't able to send you the "embed all" file. The error message said that you were not receiving messages. I noticed you were not online at the time, but it surprises me that the message wasn't just put on a server like an email or something. I don't know how the forum software functions. It was a surprise to me that I could even send you a personal message with an attachment, and it took a minute or two to find it. I guess with as many questions as I seem to have, I will know all about the forum in a short time. Fucher, I'm not sure what a control-turn tool is. I tried control and arrow keys, but that doesn't seem to be it. What's the other key? Thanks.

All I did with Fucher's instructions was to save the file as usual (not the "embed all" instruction) and then import the file into a new choreography opened in a new project. I think what made the file so big I was sending to you was the "embed all" instruction. I was making a movie poster with almost all of my characters and a couple of major sets from the movie. I think there were about 80 characters. The regular chor file is 433 KB.

Robert, I tried to send you the project file about five minutes ago, but I received an error message that it could not be sent because you were not receiving any messages. The project file is about 41 MB long. Gerald Zum Gahr, I tried saving the chor file and importing it into another chor file, and that corrected the problem. Thanks!!!

Thanks, Robert! The new blank project is not upside down in front view, but I don't want to toss away the old project because I have quite a few hours invested in it. Isn't there some control for making front view (number pad 2) go back to right side up?

Front view is upside down. All other views and shortcut to camera display correctly. I don't know what I pushed. I cannot find a way to turn the front view right side up. This is not a camera issue as far as I can see. I've done two searches in the forum and did not find this question answered. This is probably something simple, but it hasn't happened to me before. I did not save. I closed out the project and started the file up again in a different project, but the front view still displays upside down, while all other views display correctly.

The pose sliders sound like a great idea! Thanks!

I was going to have a five minute conversation between two characters interrupted by flashbacks, scenes that illustrate a point being made, etc. Then I was going to put my cameras at three different positions and render. Finally, I was going to cut and edit the whole thing into a conversation with intervening scenes fading in and out. It seems from various experiments that the lip sync part of the program starts breaking down after about two sentences. Phonemes stop appearing on the lips of the speakers. Eventually, the lips of the speakers start tying themselves into knots. Is there a limit on the lip sync part of the program? Is the limit in syllables, phonemes, or what? Is there another way to shoot a long conversation, or do I have to make a hundred or more action files?