Paul Forwood

Amazing stuff, David! Next you'll be modelling the wires running through the walls!

Congratulations, Mark! I'm looking forward to seeing the results of all of your hard work and dedication soon.

Wowzers, Matt!!! That is great! Did you bevel?

Thanks, Myron and David! Just testing Bobby's 'Gif from Gimp' process: Pretty fast and economical so far.

Sorry the parcel is late. I hope you had a good one. Parcel_small.mov It's only a sketch.

I hope you had a Happy Birthday, Gerald!

Still ironing out some issues with my simple rig. Haven't been able to get anything out of the Dir X exporter that is useful in Unity yet. I may try a geometry rig without any hierarchy for that. This is just some more playing around: LiftAndWalkAway02.mov

I have been using my own simple rig for all of my recent tests. I have created two versions of the same model. One has a geometry rig, control rig, constraints and poses. The second is a copy of the first but with all constraints, control bones and poses removed. I create three Actions with the fully rigged model and place them in sequence on the fully rigged model in a Choreography. I then bake any dynamics, bake all actions and save the choreography as a new Action. The new Action is imported and assigned to the simple geometry rigged model in a new choreography. The results are disappointing as the legs are distorted and the eyes roll up into the head. This seems to indicate that the geometry bones are not assigned all of the transformation data when baking. (I did make a screen cap video to demonstrate but the file size is too large to post at about 18MB)

No. I am using my own very light rig, (about 60 bones including a face rig and control rig). My rig does use IK but I was intending to bake my Actions and then delete all but geometry bones. Unfortunately the only option to bake in an Action that I can see is for dynamic bones. Baking Actions from within a Choreography doesn't create a key on every frame for every bone.

I tried it on another PC and received an error message about no vertex weighting on the eyeballs of my model. I haven't used any smartskin and I have baked all dynamic motion and I have turned off any SSS that was enabled. I do have some "mutation" poses that I will remove, on a new version of the model, and see if that was the problem. Thanks.

What version of A:M did you use, Fuchur? I have not been able to export from A:M16. It just crashes when I try to export an Action. I'll go back to A:M 14 and see if that works.

Excellent, Gerald! Thank you very much!

Robert,David, Steve and Mark, thanks! Yes the hair strand uses a short dynamic chain.

Newton should do it for you. Edit: Oops! You beat me to it, Mark.

Just a bit of fun while rigging: FaceTest_A00c.mov

Happy Birthday, Luuk! I hope you are well. Did you ever get your dragonfly off the ground? Have a great day!

Hmm. Perhaps "daisy chaining" is not the correct term. Unity allows you to import animation sequences as separate files, one for each action, or as one file containing all of the actions for your character. So far I have only had success importing a single sequence per character but that is okay as you can then assign the start and end frame numbers to the correct action in Unity.

I'll try it again and see what I get.

...and A:M (X file) > Softimage XSI (FBX) > Unity This works though I haven't managed to get decals to transfer and daisy chained animations don't seem to work.

Och aye the noo Happy Birthday to you

I see what you mean. C4D can write X files but cannot read them.

It is along time since I tried Cinema 4D but checking the Unity website confirms that it still supported, though C4D 10 has a problematic exporter. See the bottom of this page for file compatibility and a link to a work around for C4D 10: http://unity3d.com/unity/editor/importing

The Tinkering Gnomes are busy working on Christmas effects all year round.

Jake, you can already export BVH files from an Action in A:M. The only routes that I have found for getting a model and animation from A:M to Unity requires using 3DS Max, Softimage or Cinema 4D to convert the X file into FBX. Hoping Blender might work one day but would prefer an FBX exporter from A:M. I think that the FBX format is owned by Autodesk now so there are probably legal hurdles involved in writing an FBX exporter.

Congratulations, Tore!