wwoelbel

Hey David, Have you done any more work on this model? I was hoping to see how it came out. Bill

Hi Gustavo; I like the mesh alot but there is something about the biceps that is catching my eye. While I am not a muscle guy, I went and looked at myself in the mirror (posed as the mesh) and my biceps appear to be rounder toward the center of the upper arm with less narrowing top to bottom (in that pose) toward the joints than your mesh is showing. Just my own little 2 cents. Bill

Hi FMB; I have attached a screen capture that should look similar to somthing you may see. If you right click on the file and select "Send to" and then "Compressed (zipped) folder", Windows will create a zip file for you. Of course, there may be a few little steps to take care of before it will finish. There are other ways to do the same thing like using a program called WinZip or WinRAR but they cost $. If windows asks you questions as you are trying the way I described, relax, read the question twice, and then make a good choice in your answer. If you chicken out (just kidding) on a question it asks, write down the question and repost it here. We'll try and help you out. Make sure that you write down the question so that we know exactly what was asked. Have a great weekend! Bill

David; Mad at you? You must be an uber-team player! Your doing some really great work and putting in a lot of hours in the process. The work that you are doing will ripple well beyond the glory that is TWO. Do you have kids? Have you seen how jumpy they get as Christmas morning approaches? Well, Santa-Simmons - we kids already know whats in the box under the tree. Try telling a kid to be patient Is it ready yet is it ready yet is it ready yet is it ready yet??????? Sleep? How can you sleep when there are thousands of eyes watching your every move? Executive summary - THANKS FOR EVERYTHING YOUR DOING!!

Hi Marc; Sorry to hear that your having trouble. Unfortunately, we have two problems: The first and easiest to fix is that not many folks frequent this part of the forum. I am not an administrator and don't know how to move a topic but you could try reposting your question is either the AnimationMaster forum or the New Users forum. That gets us to the second problem - I have never copied my data over frfom the CD in whole so I can't really be of much help. Repost and you'll get the answers to your questions. Bill

David (and Crew); My comment are only intended to show that complexity can be accounted for in many ways. You can choose to combat complexity in a product (your rig) through education. You don't have to make something simple for simple people to use it - just raise the audience's understanding. Thanks folks for the exceptional work your doing. Bill

A comment on the ease of installation issue (in my opionion of course) - You need to have a uber-good tutorial. Have a zero-level newbie (at the determined level of pre-req) try your tutorial and note the sticking spots. Once someone moves beyond this zero-level, they start to quickly put things from conscious to unconscious. An example of this is driving a car. When your folks took you out for your first try at driving, you actually were told "look left, look right, clear, go". After a couple of weeks your head just swings around without thought. AM and cars are similar in this aspect - you do alot of things unconsciously when using AM. My point? Some of the tasks that you lay out as simple steps in your installation guide/tutorial may be too big for a zero-level moron like myself. Step 17 - Assign geometry to geometry bones. You experienced riggers instinctively assign points based on experience. Perhaps you could break this down a bit and help us to learn the "how" and the "why". The tech talk video series is excellently produced. Perhaps the Hash staff could produce an extended "Installing the 2005 Rig" video and perhaps one on "Animating with the 2005 Rig". I/we have also found, and this is no crack on David, that programmers/technicians often are not the best authors for documentation and seldom good on tutorials. This kind of author understands the technical aspects of the system but is capable of seeing the system through the eyes of a moron.

Curtis; Glad that you got things spiffed out. I am really sorry about the mis-information about the 5 point patches (not allowed to be adjacent). I hope that that was actually true of some aged version of AM and that my wandering mind didn't just invent it! Bill

Thanks David. I look forward to test driving your installation. Rigging can be a bit daunting but fun at the same time. Bill

I am curious about the 5-pointers as well. I have been operating under the premise that 5 point patches were not allowed to be adjacent. Bill

Hi David; I'm getting back to being very interested in rigging as I have some of that to do. My question is this (after reading some of the commentary on your rig) - How would I go about installing your rig in my model? Is it as simple (chuckle chuckle) scaling certain bones and reassigning geometry? Essentially, I know squat and am looking for a primer. Bill

Hey Avi; Thats looking pretty sweet. I like that you made sure that you had the right colors of crayons in the box to match what you had done the drawing in. One picky bit that you might want to consider - the crayons in the box are standing up pretty straight. Maybe have one or two leaning a bit? The drawing itself has great character - it feels right.

I really know absolutely nothing about boolean dodads except that they are tricky to use. What *I* would do is just take your modeled bolt and place it where it goes and forget about the hole itself. Give it a try and see if it meets your vision. I think that you'll be pleasantly surprised. [EDIT] You said "wrench hole". Arrgh. I misread your post. I thought that you were talking about the hole in the frame for the axel to go through!! Please disregard completely. I'm obviously going blind [/EDIT] I took a quick shot at the frame for you. The difference between what you did and what I did is that I added some additional CPs as needed so that I would have nice square-ish 4 point patches and a few 5 point patches that did not share any geometry. The problem you have is very similar to modeling a pelvis (one wiast hole with two leg holes). I added some geometry so that I could get 4 five pointers seperated by a nice set of four pointers. The model that I am attaching is in no way complete. I have roughly set the bias on the left-hand side and mostly ignored the right. I selected the entire model, peaked it, and then began tweaking those biases and the cp positions. Take a peak at what I did and see if it makes sense. Of course, if something looks stupid, let me know so that I can learn as well. Bill p.s. It will probably crab about the rotoscope. Just hit cancel to bypass it. Skate1.prj

About the axel bolts - why bother with the boolean cutter? If you wanted to be uber detailed, you could model the hole and then put the tiny bevels on it or you could just put the axel bolts in place. No bevel, no hole, no cutter, just two overlaping meshes.

Hey Curtis; I am sooo sorry. I forgot to check back on this thread. I'll pull the rotoscopes this evening and give it a shot (even though you may already have it fixed). Bill