John Bigboote

Cute. I am in the middle of a MAJOR remodeling job on my house that started by having a 'cute' cat piss all over the place.Grrrrrrrrr!

HA! Why do I hear the music from 'the crying game'... or 'Rocky Horror Picture Show"...

That happens to me too. Probably needs to be reported. It is looking at your actions and automatically adjusting the chor to hold them all, even tho that is not wanted. You really need to remember to set it down when you are doing a cloth sim or simulate spring systems or particle-bake operation which are time intensive and can go on WAY too long if the chor range is set too high...

I assume you are in a choreography...? You can turn OFF all the lights and set either the camera or choreography's global ambiance to 100 for a quick-render flat shaded look. You can even go further and set the model in the chor to be flat-shaded under 'options'... what else...

Had fun the other day modeling... trying some stuff I've finally learned from you guys... came out pretty nice for how little time I spent on it. cartoon_head.mov

Great looking dragon!

Skydrive is another cool free service that may be helpful in getting your sequence to Robcat. It is part of the Microsoft-Google-Hotmail umbrella, so Apple folk could be alienated...but with a 25 GB limit... free... http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive We would need an email address from Rob that we could direct to...

Very interesting... how did you do all that with only 2 bones?

Wanna trade lives for a week?

I can compress it like crazy and email it... what email address should I send it to? OR- Rob, do you use Dropbox? It's free and easy... tell em I sent you (matt@campbellanimation.com) you can give us the link and we can write to it...

Is there an email address or FTP or Dropbox account that we can use to get our submissions to you?

I'd suppose an action... assemble everything together in various actions... one action would be 'ALL PARTS' another would be 'PARTS A, B, C..." If you did it in a pose, you would turn the transparency for a group to zero... which works well but has drawbacks- one being if you render with ambient occlusion the transparent items cause full occlusion.

I just breezed thru this whole thread and missed the info I need... Rob- what is the preferred method of delivering our contributions to you... do we upload it to the forum?

Ah! I was gonna do an umbrella gag... changed my mind... how did you do the water on the ground? Awesome!

GEDDUP THERE, TOM!

FUNNY!

Could be a Quicktime issue...try a sequence.

I see what you are saying, Holmes... that's like 'cross-dissolving' between the 2 actions using blend. THRU MY TESTS... I discovered that MY problem is just that...MY problem. As Rob said...SOMEWHERE I am turning the same pose on multiple times, my challenge is to find out where- as i have spun quite a messy little web here... THE GOOD NEWS is that this A:M method of 'action-blending' works as advertised, and as Martin once proclaimed... it is a powerful and robust feature -which needs be further implemented, by me. I've always approached my CGI animation in a bit of a straight-ahead manner... this tool can help me to compartmentalize actions... and IMPROVEMENT hopes to follow!

Sure and begorra (is that how it goes?) I made a new pose...left my special 'does-all' pose alone... turned ON TSM2 constraints and stayed in FK...made my 2 actions... blended perfectly. NOW I'll redo it all again and try IK without the pose.

It's probably got something to do with a little bad-habit I taught myself... For each character I make and TSM2 rig- I make an ON/OFF master pose I call 'ANIMATE READY' and in this pose I do all the stuff I want done... turn ON TSM constraints, MY constraints, and set the nuances I have come to be familiar with... IK arms... knee pointers... eyes aim at null... the list goes on. Somehow it must be additively negating some constraint setup or other... Good suggestions, I've tried them...no go.

Okay... I'm stuck again. Using a character which was rigged with TSM2--- so I am using the IK arms and feet controllers... My first action is a walk-cycle... looped 3 times... transition to next turned on. 2nd action is just a standing action, meaning I want my character to walk and then come to a stop. What keeps happening is when I turn ON the 'transition to' and offset my 2nd action to get that neat little 'ramp' to happen on the walk cycle the character seems to lose his rigging in the ramping from action to action... so he slowly returns to the 'T' pose he was modeled in, and then SNAPS to the 2nd action. The meld from action to action is not a pure meld. All 3 actions (including the choreography action) are set to replace. I suspect it is the IK that is the culprit, I'll try a test in FK. Anyone know what I am doing wrong?

Was having trouble action-blending... found this tutorial very helpful... THANKS ROB!

SO--- the thing to remember... when you want/need TSM2 for A:M- don't search for it at Anzovin.com... search for it here on the A:Mforum! ANYONE try using it with V16 yet???

DETAIL! Love the belt-buckle... great work! Please continue!

Thanks... I'll tell you what I learned in that last video... getting DOF to work is a bit tricky... I had to set the near and far controllers very close to the focal plane to get the effect the way I wanted it.