Bendytoons

Options panel:Rendering tab:Render sprite:on That would be my first guess.

I did drop the folder onto the model name. Nothing happens. Can it be because there's already a Relationships folder there? [which I cannot delete] In comparing the contents of the two Relationships folders, I see that while the bones in the [newly imported model] 2001 Rig have question marks before the bone name, the Bucky Bugg bones have a 'bone and folder' icon before the bone names. Is this because the Bugg bones have CP's attached to them? I installed TSM2. It seemed to go well. But when I right-clik the model to get to Plug-Ins, TSM2 does not appear in the list like it used to. [i did do a re-start] Any ideas on how to shake it loose? check that all tsm2 files are in the hxt directory for v15. Than check that A:M is pointing at the correct hxt folder.

Thanks for the clarification, Robert. PNG is fine, but you'll still need to go through the steps Robert mentioned, unless you are painting the alpha by hand.

You can directly create an alpha channel in photoshop without any plugins. In the channel/layer window choose the channel tab. Click the triangle on the right side and choose add new channel. By default it will be called alpha1 and will be an alpha channel. select the alpha channel to paint on it. White is opaque, black is transparent, grey is translucent. Save as a 32 bit TGA or other format that supports more than three channels.

30 frames equals one second, approximately NTSC standard (29.97). You can use the edit options to change the frame rate, and you can change the frame rate of a project in the project properties.

My recommended method would be all three. First, build fan bones. Second, weight control points to skeleton and fans. Third, use smartskin to fix anything that needs it. This approach gives you the most versatility, and uses each of these tools to their best advantage.

Short answer- no. But it's easy to get an object to center by changing its translate coordinates to 0,0,0. Select the object, open the transforms in the properties dialog, and change them all to zero. I cannot see how that works. In the modeling mode, when you selected the CPs or even the whole model, where ever it is, its position in Transform, under translate reads X0,Y0,Z0. Changing it to 0,0,0 when its already set at that, would make no difference. In Model mode, it does not read the current location of the selected center of the CPs. Sorry, you hadn't specified a modeling window. I'm not sure what the solution there will be.

Short answer- no. But it's easy to get an object to center by changing its translate coordinates to 0,0,0. Select the object, open the transforms in the properties dialog, and change them all to zero.

That is pure American pop from 1920.

oops, double post

Thanks, that is just the look I was going for.

Thanks Luuk. I've been thinking about trying something like that too. Kind of a guided roto-capture.

Here is the latest from Ernie. It is a 1920's music video. This is an exciting cartoon for a couple of reasons. First, I got blink tracking working in ZignTrack. This gives the eyes a lot more expressiveness. It was pretty simple, I put tiny loops of blue masking tape on my top lashes and tracked them with the second eyebrow feature (which I wasn't using). Second, everything after tracking in ZT was done in A:M. I rendered the animation at 18fps. I created dust and scratch mattes using particles. I composited the dust and scratches and tinted it B&W. Finally I rerendered at 30fps with sound. (the scratches mostly got compressed out by Youtube) I hope you all like it.

I have never encountered these particular issues. Perhaps someone else has. In the mean time, I recommend trying to narrow things down. It looks like your problems might be with mapping or with lighting. Have you eliminated the lights in your scene one by one to see if the problem is tied to any specific light? What about textures? Or models, does the same thing happen if you remove other models from the scene? The more you can tell us about where the problem lies, the more likely we can help.

try the toonnation cellular material from the plug-in materials. You can apply it to a sphere or whatever and animate its properties.

Chris, You can key the start and end time of the animated decal in the properties panel.

Okay I must have been pretty tired when I wrote that. It is actually the smile/frown pose that is exhibiting that behavior.

For example, at 17 sec, on the word "drinking", there's no Oooo mouth shape for the R sound. Looks odd. And generally, at times it looks like he's either mumbling or shouting the lines....but you're not from the sound in the dialog. Ken, Actually, there is no oo shape at all. What you see are calibration issues. In my haste to get the piece out I did not take the time to re-adjust calibration from the last performance. I often find it necessary to adjust the calibration slightly for a performance. The differences in my face and Ernie's face make different facial animation require slightly different calibration. In the pose based version I just posted, I had to remap the wide/purse pose to emphasize the movement.

Can you tell me where it didn't work for you, Ken? I'm pretty close to the material, so I don't always see what others do. I'm mostly seeing the need for more brow expression. What I notice is that if the mouth opens, the upper lip moves as far up as the lower lip moves down. Normally the lower lip would go down further then the upper lip. That can easily be corrected by adjusting the mouth-open pose. Can you tell how your lip poses work? For the A:M pose export that I have written for Zign Track the poses are based on as much properties as possible to detect the shape of the lips. I wonder how you have it set up for your poses because you create them in A:M. Maybe you should give the Zign Track pose control a try? You can add a few poses that drive the existing poses. I was done adjusting Squetchy Sam in 10 minutes. Luuk, Here is a test using poses out of Zign. I had to do a bit of remapping. tiger2_.mov How are determining upper and lower limits for the poses? Some of them used their full range, while others only half of it. Does Zign compute upper and lower limits on each capture, or do you use a fixed scale? Also it seems like the brow pose is clamping at 0, even though the manual says it goes to -100. It looks like the keys below zero are being clamped out, as opposed to having 50 be the midpoint. But it could just be my capture I'm not sure yet, just something you might check. My system used secondary bones that measured the width and height of the mouth by scaling on the z axis. And I got the antennae bouncing!

Can you tell me where it didn't work for you, Ken? I'm pretty close to the material, so I don't always see what others do. I'm mostly seeing the need for more brow expression.

No I haven't tried the pose export yet, as it will require re-rigging the face poses to be driven by other poses, and I'm lazy.

Here's the link to the newest Ernie cartoon: The good news is that this was created in record time. I wrote it last night, captured this morning, exported and rendered this afternoon, and tonight it is posted. This is partly due to the direct A:M action export Luuk has added to Zign Track, and partly because I'm getting the hang of it. The bad news is his antennae still do not bounce. At Matt's suggestion I did not solve the spring system but let it solve as it went, but I forgot to change the threshold to zero. Result, wooden antenna syndrome. Next time, I promise.

Directions have not changed.

That is actually a good idea. The reason I made the smile reduce the wide pose is because it is harder to 'model' the smile in the the pose when the mouth isn't wide. But that could be solved by applying the wide pose while creating the smile, and when the smile is done remove the link the 'wide' from the pose. Is that how you do it? In a nutshell, yes. When I create a pose, I apply all the poses that will interact, one by one, and then delete them from the pws. Gives the most performance from the fewest poses, and builds in limits that prevent any kind of overshoot.

Hey Luuk, You might make adjustments like this optional. The way I build poses, the widening of the smile is driven by the wide/purse pose. the smile pose drives only the corners of the mouth. I never let any pose overlap action with another pose, that way they can all combine together but never create unnatural action.