Eric2575

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...;hl=tank+treads http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...;hl=tank+treads http://www.patchwork3d.de/html/englisch/wh...eating_tank.htm http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...;hl=tank+treads One of these a gotta help? The main problem that you have is that your tread sections are too long. Either increase the diameter of your driving wheel or decrease the length of your tread sections. This is all assuming you are going to animate the treads. If you are not going to animate them, then just make two circle splines, one inside the other separated by the thickness of your treads. Place these spline rings centered on the front drive wheel. The inner circle should be the same diameter as the drive wheel. The outer circle should be larger by the thickness of the treads. Now lock these rings and use them as a guide to line up the tracks. I believe that might be what Robert was saying. Show us your trials. If you are still having trouble, then you might have to give us more specifics. Hope that helps. Eric

Chris, your modeling skills are really improving. Eric

Spherical effector with a double gradient? Is there a tutorial for this somewhere or did you think this up yourself? Talk about thinking outside the box, wow! Eric

Depth map? How, what, where, when? How'd you do that?

Is that Cap'n Kirk?

Happy Birthday Robert.

I was using orient like and translate to.

It only took me a few minutes to make that clip and mos of the time was spent on timing and not really knowing what I was doing. The manipulation of the tentacle was pretty easy. Once I tweaked it a bit more, I'll post the simple tentacle with bones and constraints. While we're on the subject, whenever I tried to constrain a null to the last bone in the chain and then I move the null, the constrained bone breaks from it's parent. Why is that? Is there a way to keep it attached to it's parent and still constrain it o the null?

Well I tested it first with fewer bones and didn't like the way the tentacles moved and bent, but the results were encouraging. Next I did a version with more bones in the last third of the tentacle and it looked much better with more motion control in the end as you can see in the clip. It was pretty easy to manipulate, and with a bit more practice controlling the tentacle could be second hand. I am going to modify a few things like more twisting constraints and I want to see if adding maybe three nulls will help with the overall ease of use, but so far so good. Eric

Octopus Rig Test

Thanks for the comments everyone. I posted the last image on CGTalk and could use your guys support

I agree, amazing. I can barely get goop out of materials and you create artwork with brush strokes! Wow! Eric

Some PS post work.

I was wondering about that. So a pose is basically only to set up constraints? What about the animate button? I just went through a tutorial that mentioned turning off the animate button so it doesn't set any keyframes? I have absorbed so much in a very short time and am just waiting for it all to click. Not quite there yet.

Ok, I've still got the flu and am working on my laptop in bed (AMV.13t) instead of my desktop (AMV15.) So I'm trying different scenarios for rigging my tentacle and starting with the basics. I start a new project and open a new model. Without any splines or cps, I switch to bones mode and lay down a chain of 6 bones, parent, child, etc. Then I make sure I'm back at the root of the hierarchy and I make two nulls and one more bone to be the daddy of them all. Now I go back to the spline view and create a new pose. Once in the pose, I manipulate the chain to make sure the bones are all connected and parented right. So far so good. Then I create a dynamic constraint at the end of the chain to one of the nulls also positioned at the end of the chain. I select the constraint to have the null as target. But, when I move the null, the chain only does a little jerk and nothing else. I move the null all around but the chain does nothing. Now I click simulate dynamics and still nothing happens except that simulate on the fly is now unchecked in the dynamic constraints options. When I try to enable simulate on the fly again, I get the dreaded #001 shut down error. This is repeatable, I've done it three times in a row. I don't really care about the 001 error, I just want to know what I'm doing wrong in the process, why the manipulation of the null does not affect the chain? I'll try this on my desktop and see what happens. Eric

Nancy: First off, thank you for the input and the project file you graciously provided. You have some good points here. I really like the fact that the rig stretches, but it can only stretch so far before the decals on the skin will get too deformed. Please take everything I say with a gain of salt because this is all so new to me. My reasons for doing things, ie, the number of bones, is because right now I only see things as I learn them. I'm sure there are many ways to crack the nut, but I just haven't seen them all yet. One of the reasons I believe I need a relatively large number of splines is the fact that there are modeled suction cups under the tentacle that are not modeled into the mesh but rather lie on top of the mesh. If I don't have enough sections, I believe the suction cups will show too much "float" when the tentacle bends. If I model the cups into the mesh, I might avoid the float and need less bones, but then I would have a pretty heavy mesh too. I don't know and was trying to avoid splining the cups into the skin. But just to be thorough, I might just do that for comparison. Oh, and I'm a long way off from a good working solution. But I know a heck of a lot more about bones and rigging than I did a week ago Eric

I've got so many projects going right now...hmmm, I sound like an AM forum member that I haven't worked on the Falcon since the last post. Trust me, I've put in too much work to put this one on the shelf. Just learning some new stuff about bones and rigging right now. I'll get back to the Falcon soon. Eric

I like it Nancy and have been thinking along the same lines. Here's the thing though: I'd like to build a rig that has null controls like you have, but it should be set up so that one null controls several tentacle bones with control fall off radiating away from the null along the tentacle. A long tentacle may have 20 or more bones in it, that would be an awful lot of nulls to control.

Maybe they're tiles like the space shuttle? I don't know enough about it

Bryan: couple of things. Robert mentioned something about 19 levels of fallof on either side of a displacement map in AM leading to some banding. He said EXR will give smoother fallof. Robert, please put it in your own words when you read this. I'll make another window map and use exr as the output. That should hopefully take care of the last artifacts. Another thing: the saucer shape looks out of proportion from that last shot angle. It looks too thick vs diameter? Maybe the perspective, but maybe that;s the way it;s supposed to be? And yes, the displacement maps are turned up too high, not because of distortion, but they (the windows) just look too inset for the scale. Eric

Hmmm, I don't know... Robert, let me give you some advice: people want to get rid of wrinkles, especially women, not add them Eric

I hate it when I do that...out of frustration, I post a question, and then my tenacity puts me back in front of the computer to finally figure it out. Don't touch compensate when setting this up. Now the question is, unless someone has a thorough understanding of bones, constraints, and rigging, is there an easy way to figure out or see when compensate is used and when not? Also, I had a bit of a time figuring out what ease does in this case and how to set it....Maybe I should ask when your book is coming out? Will you cover rigging and bones basics such as ease, compensate, etc? Sign me up

Robert, I'm trying to adapt your path rig to my tentacle. I've got most of it figured out, but when I manipulate the tentacle in an action, the tentacle mesh twists at the path contraint points. When I applied the "Roll like" constraints in the pose, I clicked the "compensate" button before applying. It was wrong to do that for the constrain to path, is it also wrong to do it for the "Roll like?" Eric

No problem, looking forward to more renders

Amazing William, I can't believe you splined all the sucker cups to the tentacles. Mine are just sitting on the tentacle mesh. Trying to keep it somewhat manageable as far as spline count. Nancy, thanks for posting the comparison between fan bones and weighting. That's exactly what I was talking about, but it wasn't that same post. Since we have your great example now, I don't need to look for the other one anymore. Eric