Paul Forwood

It seems that you have fallen into the same trap that I did when I first bought A:M back at version 8. Purchasing A:M at the end of the year was a disappointing experience when I discovered that I had just missed out on a new version and a year of updates. Hash have now addressed this problem with their new subscription system. With the subscription you will get a year of updates from the day that you unlock A:M, no matter when you first unlock it. When your annual subscription runs out A:M will lock up again until you renew the subscription and gain entitlement to another year of updates. That's the way I believe it works.

This appears to be the last update for A:M 11: A:M 11.0t

Just tweak those bias handles so that they are laying as flat as possible along the curve and not extended further than is neccessary. That should get rid of most of the creasing. You could also try the porcelain material, that you will find in the data folder on the A:M cd.

Happy New Year to you too, Dusan. Chicory and Coffee looks amazing and the card is a perfect way of passing on your good wishes and showing everyone that there are some outstanding things to look forward to in 2008.

Nice work, Lazzlo! I agree with the comments that Xtaz and Nino have made. Three splines on each joint is usually required but it does depend on the character and just how you intend it to bend. I think that you could lose one spline from around the mouth. And also try to avoid having hooks in places that will be animated, such as the brows. At the moment I think you will see some unnatural creasing when he frowns. Great start.

Good work, Jirard! I also thought, "Peanuts", when I saw these characters. Though the size and shape of a character is always a consideration that must not be overlooked I don't see any real problems with your gang of kids, but then again it all depends on what you have in mind, the type of stories that you intend to tell and how you use the camera. I am sure that if you develop distinctly unique personalities for each of these characters that they will work together very well. How about a group shot so that we can see the differences in height? Have you rigged any of these guys yet?

Nice work, Marcos!

Ha, ha! Well done, Mark, and Merry Christmas.

I loved it, Ben. Ernie is a superstar.

I think that I have discovered what was causing the jittering. Capturing BVH data into an action will not neccessarily overwrite every frame. The only frames that are overwritten are the frames that come in with the new BVH file. So if every second frame is filtered out the overwriting will only occur on every second frame, leaving the old data in place on ever other frame. This creates the jitter. I have been using a template action so that I don't have to keep constraining my head rig to the BVH rig every time that I want to capture data. The setup template has several frames of animation so that I can instantly see that all the constraints are working. Recently the BVH data that I have been exporting from Zign Track has been coming out on twos, (every second frame has a key frame). Because the animation in the setup action is on ones, (key on every frame), the new captured BVH data does not obliterate all the old data. Solution: Use a template action that only uses frame 0 for transforming any bones and setting constraints. This will ensure that all frames are clean and ready to capture any filtered BVH data. Well, it sounds logical to me.

Well the nice thing about baking the action is that once it is done you can forget about the BVH. You can then treat it like any other sequence that you animate in an action. Much tidier and easier to manage. I will gather some more results from baking sessions and if I don't find a way to prevent the jitter I will make a report.

Here you go, Luuk: Note that the jitter is occuring every second frame. Hmmm. I think I used the default value. I know that I did try using a value of 0 at one point but I didn't get the results that I was looking for. I'd better check that again. Thanks!

Careful where you plug that guitar in! This example is to show a couple of problems that I have been experiencing since I started baking the action. The face weighting isn't complete but the lips are weighted and that is one of the areas that I am having problems with. 1) The jitter seems to be coming from the neck bone because if I remove it's influence from the weighting of just a few CPs the jitter stops. Bizarre! Notice that it suddenly disappears, of it's own accord, at about halfway through this test movie. 2) The data for the Lip Upper L bone seems to get corrupted when I export the BVH data from Zign Track. For some strange reason it is always that one bone. I have checked the rotation handles and the weighting on the lips and it is all balanced. I have checked the tracking in Zign Track and there are no signs of this issue before exporting. Any ideas, folks?

I think Ramon might be trying to import movie files, (avi, mov), instead of TGA sequences.

Ah, yes! Thanks, Luuk. Any clues as to what is happening here? : This was a test where a BVH file was baked to an action from the choeography. The action was then applied to this model, (which uses a copy of the rig that I constrained the BVH data to before baking). This jitter was not apparent before baking, as can be seen here:

Thanks, Ben. I have been creating a few baked actions, from the BVH data in a choreography, and this is what the timeline looks like for the new action: I notice that there is some kind of filtering going on as some of the frames are no longer keye frames. That is cool! Is that part of Zign Track's operation or does it happen during the baking? (I guess I should check that myself). Can someone explain what RotateW is? I'm also quite puzzled by the feedback that I get from A:M when I click on any of those transform channels for the "jaw" bone. If I click on any one, from Transform Scale X to Transform Translate Z the jaw bone is highlighted in yellow. But if I click on Transform Rotate X to Transform Rotate W a finger bone is highlighted.

Yes. The action was almost three minutes long so I am trying a shorter one. I have just managed to bake a 16 second action from a choreography and bring it in to a new project as an action without the bvh rig and it works well. The captured data is now associated directly with the facial bones in my rig. This allows the whole rig to work correctly so that it can be animated without distorting the model. All good! But is there some way to filter out all of the keys on all the other bones in my rig other than deleting them in the new action? I realize that I could just create a head rig for capturing the head only but I just wondered if there is a way to filter out the unwanted data at the source if I capture using a fully rigged character. Thanks again, guys, for the info on baking. I hope that I can get around the restriction on the length of the action.

Thanks, Luuk and Ben. I am attempting to bake the BVH action in a choreography but it just takes forever and I haven't completed a baking session yet. I'm wondering if it is because this character has dynamic hair, even though it is hidden. Does anyone know if hair data is baked into the action along with all the bones, even if it is hidden? Also does baking create keys for just the bones that have active channels or does it create keys for all the hidden bones in the rig too? Maybe that is what is going on here?

Beautiful, Stian!

Thanks for the feedback, ernesttx. I 'll try the choreography method. Luuk, I tried baking actions from the action object and it failed in every version of A:M from 12 up to 15. Maybe the "Bake all actions" option just needs to be removed from the action object's menu.

Has anyone had any success baking actions in A:M14c? I just keep getting exception 001 followed by a crash. Any suggestions?

That is really cool stuff, Mike! So, do you use an expression to convert the Y rotation of a bone into a displacement percentage?

Because Zign Track doesn't handle DV yet I always capure my video in Premiere, at the camera rate of 25 fps, (PAL), and then export it as an AVI at 24 fps. This lets Premiere handle the conversion along with any cropping and image editing that is needed. After that everything is syncronised for 24 fps so no real problems arise. Don't forget to setup A:M's motion capture settings in Options, (Ctrl-P). I have had subframes show up once or twice and I put it down to capturing the BVH data into a BVH action object that had previously contained BVH data, thus overwriting. I haven't checked this out though. It's good to see your bug back in action, Ben. Did you use your own tracking for the eyelids?

Amazing work, Mark! I love that monkey, he's got tons of character in his profile.

That's beautiful! I think that I will have to run through that a few times before I really appreciate what is happening but it certainly sounds like what I am looking for. Thank you, Ben!