John Keates

I haven't tried using it yet but the results certainly look good! I think this is some of the best animation that I have seen from you. I would like to see more!

This could be a shadow bias thing. Try raising the bias value.

That is a really nice looking car. Having done a little car modelling I can vouch for how hard it is. You have tempered the tendency of splines very well but I think you are asking a little much of the 5p patch to the side of the headlight there. I would be tempted to add another radial round there to smooth things out and get more control.

The Fan bones are something that I plan to re-do at some point. I am not at all happy with the deformation around that area. You don't need to use them. There are also some other bones around the back. Some are kinda simulating the movement of the scapula (but only on the left hand side). Sorry that the rig has this mess in it. You can just delete it if you want.

Great to see it finally out there for the public to marvel at. Nice to see my name on the credits too... though what I did is nothing next to your massive achievement. Now get back to animating you lazy bastard

Really great modelling texturing and rendering. I can't wait to see you try rigging and animating!

Hi Josh, Glad you like the rig! There is a trick to putting the rig in that you might like to try. 1. Open My model 2. Select all its geometry and move it off to the side (not the bones) 3. Copy and paste tom into the model and arrange him around the rig. 4. Now you can go into bones mode and to select the bone for a bicep (for example), just select the bicep on my model. Then you can select the corresponding geometry on thom. This prevents you from having to know which are the geometry bones (something which is probably not at all obvious - particularly for the arms). Hope that helps John

I journey into London now and then and there have been meetings on occasion. They fizzled out recently but we will see... I like your work by the way (looked at your website).

Update: The attachment for my rig broke so here it is again slightly updated so the right bones are hidden JohnRig_21c.zip

Make a null at the root of the bone whose speed is to be measured. Have it translate to the moving bone with a lag of 1 frame. Make a bone that is at the position of the moving bone and aims at the null with scale to reach on. Now you can make a relationship from the z scale of the streatchy bone to whatever you want to be governed by the speed of the bone. Bish bash bosh, Bob's your unkle.

You should be able to access the chanel type widget in the pws if you crack open the model. HTH

Wow! I had no idea that you were such a high achieving animator.

I solved this problem with my rig. In my experience though, the clavical doesn't have to move, but some other stuff does. I don't know what is going on in anatomical terms but my rig follows what happens to my shoulder pretty closely and you should be able to adapt it to your own enterpretation pretty easily. The shoulder follows the bicep to a degree which is dependant on the angle of the bicep - so when the bicep is up, the sholder follows it more. When it is down, it follows it just a bit. This can be controlled precicely with a relationship curve. The shoulder can shrug by translating the bone which is also used to rotate the arm and I have FK/IK blending. It is pretty comprehensive and simple to control. I would be glad to hear what you have to say on it on the apropriate thread here: My rig thread The most up-to date rig version is at the bottom of the first page.

Nice character and I like the dismount. Maybe you could find a way to get some secondary motion on the hair? The run is a little odd in the way that the legs suddenly pop backwards once they have left the ground. Also, the amount that the body bobs up and down is kinda between a run an a jog. In a jog, the body bobs up and down a fair bit, but in a fast sprint (I guess this is what you are going for here) the body doesn't really bob so much.

It is a really nice peice of work. Quite professional and I like the modelling and facial expressions. The animation was a bit "pose to pose" for my liking... if you see what I mean. Maybe break the motion up a bit.

Woohooo!!! That weight flipper is going to save me a whole bunch of time units - especially since I have some really heavy use of weights here and there. Particularly here.

It is really nice to have some appreciatoin of my rig sinse I speant so much time on it and I really look forward to seeing what people to with it. Hey Mark, What is the "PHP Weight Flipper"? I did a search but couldn't find anything. It sounds really handy.

Thanks to Mark Strohbehn for Doing some spade work on flipping the model across!!! There are still a few things to do. The deformation of the elbow isn't the same. For the righ elbow, I used a relationship wich controlls a pose. I find this to be by far the best method for this kind of 1d squish. Thanks Mark (and sorry I didn't post it earlier - I am just a scatty scatty man). JohnRig_21c.zip

Hi Vern, Thanks HUGELY for your effort and I'm glade you like the rig. I wonder what could be causing the problem? The only thing I can suggest is the old save, close reload thing but I'm sure you will have done that already. Or maybe change the name to right2 instead?... perhaps. Very strange. I wish now more than ever before for that magic "flip everything across" button.

Mulitpass is faster if you only use 1 or two passes - in most situations.

Good tips Vern. Also, use dark grey and never black. Black....... BLACK... .... A fly....... TRAPPED!! ... in the dark. A cold cave.... lost... can't breathe.... etc etc.

Yeah, Sorry, I am busy and havn't gotten around to it. Here is the process: >Make sure that everything on the left side of the model has "left" in the name (that is the characters left - or our right as we look at him/her) >Destroy everything on their right hand side (making sure that there arn't any splines filling in the centre seem >Save out as a seperate model >Make a bone which is a master bone - into which all other bones go. This should be exactly on the centre and not at an odd angle (use the bone position properties to set this). >Use this bone to flip everything else using the manipulator box thing (with the icon at the top of the screen). If the master bone is pointing up then you will have to enter x=-100 to flip it across the x axis (depending on how the roll handle is pointing). Do this whilst holding "Ctrl" to make it move the geometry at the same time. >Load the old model into a text editor and find-replace "left" to "right" > Import the old (unflipped) model into the new (flipped) one. > Drag the "right" bones that are childeren of the centre bones into the corresponding centre bones from the "left" model (eg the legs should be attached to the same pelvis) >Delete the extra centre bones (spine etc.). >Assign the control points of the centre geometry to the centre bones - taking into account cp weighting. (this could take a while as some cps have three bones). >hand stitch the two sides of the model together (to do this, you will first have to delete one of the centre seems). ..... phew! .... I think that is it... and I hope you can follow it. It would be great if people did this - it would be a nice contribution to peace and hamony

That was really heartwarming to watch!!! What a good community this is. And there is some nice work in there too.

Hey Garard, Thanks for the comments. Feel free to back-engineer my rig as much as you like, I don't have any copyright either would you believe. I would be interested to see if you can improve the way that legs work in extreem positions. At the moment, her leg flips out when the foot is high and close to the body. This can be fixed with the knee control but still, it should be improved. Hi Rodney, I'm not really a fan of angle limits. I prefer to be able to make any kind of movment I like in animation and then worry about deformation at the extreems later on.

Hey Mike, That is an impressive shoulder you have there. Can it hav movment which is independant of the arm? Also, what happens when the arm is right down?