mtpeak2

Well, I could tie the density, cull hairs, position, direction, kinkiness, kinkiness scale, bow, face camera or brightness to it or whatever else that can be animated.

Ok, I spent too much time on this. Smartskin hair guides, tied length of hair to the Z scale of the same bone. Constrained that bone to a null with an aim at constraint, with scale to reach turned on. Then added a relationship to the Z rotation of the null to drive the thickness of the hair and finally, a relationship on the Y translation of the null to drive the color of the hair. So the null controls the whole animation. hair2.mov

Thanks Nancy. I knew you could groom hair in a pose, but not smartskin relationship.

I ran a little test, did you know you can smartskin a bone to control HAIR? I added a new smartskin to the bone, turned grooming mode on and groomed the hair at different angles. hair.mov

Nice gallery Julian.

But found time for everyone else's posts, for the most part. Don't sweat it Rusty, I'm just not interested in helping anymore. You seem to have things under control.

Since you didn't respond to any of my posts, other than a reply to Paul I made, you didn't seem interested at all. You've only responded to my replys to the hijacking of the thread. The non response to my posts is more the reason for me deleting my posts, than the hijacking comment. That's what I find insulting, more than anything else. So I'll just take my toys and go play somewhere else.

So, to answer your original question, you are better off going back to the installation action. Trying to go into bones mode and adjusting the bones manually can be very time consuming and errors could be made. BTW, the hijacking on my part was coming up with a way to adjust the geometry bones only and to run an installation action with the control rig installer, to help you and others out who have assigned cps already. Since you don't seem to be interested in this process and you consider this hijacking, I will no longer pursue it. I don't have the time to waste, since I don't need this process.

Sorry Rusty. I removed my posts, as to not to hijack your thread any further.

You tell me, if that's it.

You should. Did you delete the installation poses? Did you try saving and reopening the model? It's hard to tell what's wrong without seeing the model.

Is this a TWO model?

If you read my post, I gave you the answer. You have to use the rig to rotate the geometry bones, then unhide the geometry bones using the pose that David provided, then select the geometry bone that you want to smartskin by right clicking and choosing new smartskin. So use the control rig ,in an action, to put the geometry bone in position.

Still need smartskin with weighting and fan bones? I haven't smartskinned a model yet. The geom bones, unhide them using the pose. You will not be able to directly smartskin the bone, you will have to animate the rig in an action, unhide the geom bones and right click the geom bone to add smartskin. I believe this is how you need to do it, David will be able to tell you for sure.

Paul, check the options menu under actions, make sure the dynamic options is on to see it realtime. Also, check the constraint to see if "simulate on the fly" is on for realtime. Is the dynamics not rendering in final?

You may need to turn collision on in the material.

I just did a quick test with constraining to a path in a pose and it works fine. Did the path constraint work when you created the ON/OFF pose?

Thanks David, this will be a big help. I would try to do something myself, but I wouldn't know where to start.

If all the poses, that need editing, were located in one folder, that would also make it easier. For instance, you have a main setup pose folder, that pose folder contains a folder with all the poses that need editing first. Then the next folder, in the main pose folder, would be the poses that need editing next and then poses that use other pose. That way you know where all the poses are. You basicly have them already with the ud and lr poses, you don't have to use them to the extremes (100%), with the next wave of poses to edit.

The big problem with setting it up is, what poses to edit and in which order to do them in.

Set the "mouth_ud and "mouth_lr" to less extremes and have basic poses setup so the face interface works without having to set it up. As for me, I would lean more towards a muscle pose setup, than having to setup all those poses to get the face interface to work. Since I have to setup the interface poses anyway, I don't want to have to create/edit more poses to do that. If the poses are already there, it makes it easier to edit, since the relationship tells you what poses were used to set it up. If you have a blank pose, you don't know which poses or bones to used. I have no doubts about how well the rig works, I don't think you need to modify the rig, as I said, premade poses already setup. The rig isn't that hard to install, it's the setup.

I don't know about any shortcuts, but I usually group weight, not single cps if I can help it. That does sound very complicated, never setup the face poses yet (not even muscle poses), only rigged it. David, how about a set of generic poses (not extremes), that are already built into the rig? Then those poses can be edited to suit the model, or left as is. This way the face interface automaticly works, to a point.

The nulls already drive the poses, the poses just needs to be setup. Use the lip poses in the face underlying controls folder (individual poses) to create your mouth shapes.

David has poses for the face rig for the most part (mostly lip poses for creating the mouth shapes). These poses are used to create the face interface poses (instead of using muscle motion). Once you edit the interface poses, the interface nulls will work. The brow poses are created using the geometry bones, these bones can be unhidden in the user properties (not sure where at the moment) The cheek/jowl/ear bones are tied into the face rig and work automaticly. The forearm bones are suppose to be like that, this is to allow you to direct the limb bowing. The biceps, thighs and calves are also setup this way. This is part of the FK arms and legs only.

Green Monkey actually was a pretty quick install. I start will the 3 main bones in the spine (stomach_geom, mid_section_geom and the chest_geom) and assign cps to the bones in the area. I then go into an action and test the cp assignments. If something doesn't look right I go into muscle mode and select the spline ring that looks out of adjustment and add weighting. Once I get the torso flexibility looking good I'll then add the weighting to the "stomach & chest_IO_geom" bones. These bones are for the chest_IO and the stomach_IO poses located in the Animation_Controls>Torso folder of the pose sliders. These poses scale the bones on the Z axis, for example breathing (chest in/out). I weight to only the front side of the model. I usually don't add too much weighting to these bones, but that's up to you on how much you want to weight them.