pwknox

I love the laugh. You nailed it. Great job!

Ravager, This will not help you get your data back. I sincerely hope that you find it. A similar thing happened to me a few years ago so I programmed up a backup program that creates a new copy of your project every time you save it. It automatically creates the backup for you. You can find it here. http://home.earthlink.net/~pwknox/Saver.htm Good luck, Phil PS: PC only, sorry mac folks.

Roger, Robcat's hunch was right (he usually is). The place were you see the creasing is due to more than 2 splines crossing at a Control Point. In fact, you have a spline entering a CP without exiting. This almost always creases. I have included a possible solution. Take heart, though. Shoulders are hard. Happy splining! Phil

This happens all the time. Use 'hooks'! First you need a set of splines to connect. The easiest way to do this is to extrude the last spline ring on the hand and then delete the ring . This will leave the 12 control points dangling (nothing attached). With your hand of 12 splines and wrist of 8 splines, you should connect all of the 8 wrist splines to 8 of the dangling hand splines where they are most natural. You will have 4 splines that are left over. Grab one of the dangling control points and make it hook to the 'stump' on the wrist. On the PC you do this by dragging the CP and right-clicking it to make the hook. Take a look at the online help and search for HOOKS the example there is exactly what you are describing. Phil

Right at the end of the animation both vehicles seem to 'bounce' back to normal. You can see this on the front suspension of the green car, passenger side. The truck moves at the end slightly as well.

David, This is getting better and better. Very nice. You are just amazing. I can 'feel' the impact. The apparent weight of the vehicles is very well done. I can see very well what happened. I would like to know when the brakes were applied. When do the brake lights come on? Phil Edit: Steve beat me to it. :-P

Nicely done. My only critique was that it was hard to read the statistics while the birds were flying over them.

I have watched parts 1 and 2 and am eagerly awaiting parts 3, 4, 5 and 6 There is a lot of detail here which is great; however, it is a little overwhelming. I am a little lost in the details. What I would really like is a high level overview of the rig installation process. David is taking a bunch of time to move bones and groups of bones, but why? He seems to be working toward a fully rigged character, but where is he currently in the process? What does he have left to do?

I have used the Duplicator wizard for copying when patch counts get very high. It can be found by right clicking on your selected model in the modeling window and going to "Plugins | Wizards | Duplicator". The copy times goes from minutes to seconds. Somehow it gets around having to recompute all of the patches. BTW, very nice model. A few years ago Carl Albrecht-Buehler made a really cool IK rig for spider legs. It was complete with fot targets and everything. You might want to look him up for some pointers on the rig.

After watching that loop for 15 minutes straight, I now know Kung-Fo. Phil 'not Vern' Knox

The Chicago AM group meets the first Saturday of the month. They use a yahoo group to communicate. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/chicago-masters/ I have not been to the meetings is a few months because of a whole comedy of conflicts on Saturday mornings. But they are quite active. If you join the yahoo group, I am sure they will be able to answer your questions. Or you can ask me :-) I live in northeast Eglin. So, I am almost between you two.

Here is one I had laying around.

I just looked at the design. Very sweet. I like the way that you constrained the links to a spline in the model rather than in a path in the chor. Makes a lot of sense that way. I also like the slight bow in the chain path. I really adds to the realism. How did you figure out the Ease percentages? Did you guess/nudge/guess/nudge or figure them mathematically?

First off, you are a lot farther along than I was a AM+ 4 months. You have completed a bunch of steps and I applaud you for it. You asked for constructive criticism. Here is mine. The green sky with green with the green ground in the forth shot was a little hard on the eyes and was almost too bright. The sky sort of blended together with the ground, there was nothing to look at. Tone down the colors and put something interesting in the scene (mountains, building, ships, strange trees). You are off to a great start. Good luck.

The animation looks great. I'll be peeking at the project file soon. Thanks for sharing.

Eugene, I have never attempted to animate a chain, but I do have an answer for the path in an action question. A path is just a spline that you then constrain bones to. I have a model where I needed to constrain bones to a spline so I just added the spline to the model. The bones are constrained to this spline (rather than a path) in a relationship or action. The spline follows the model and does not render. So, you have all the benefits of the path in the action. The only downside is that the spline is now part of the model not part of the action. The action would not then be re reusable without a matching spline in all models. Oh, well. You only get half of what you asked for. Phil PS: I remember reading about someone animating a tank tread. A bike chain would be similar I think.

The Chicago User's group has been meeting for a few years now. We are always looking for more interested parties. Generally, we meet on the first Saturday of the month at 10:00 AM. Check out our yahoo group for more details. Chicago-Masters