mouseman

Here is some useful information on the design of stairs. The house is fantastic.

Choreography length: 1:34:00 Play range: 00:00:00 to 01:34:00 Options: 30 fps It's funny, the second the render window comes up, the "Frames Rendered" and the "Frames Left" add up to 2400. If I create a new choreography of length 01:34:00, it goes to 2820. Hmmm ... Aha! Choreography -> Shortcut to Camera1, properties Output Options -> Range -> End = 1:20:00 Looks like that was it! I changed it to 1:34:00 and all was well in the world. Thanks for the ideas!

It is 30 frames. I've never used 24.

I am working on an animation for the Mini-Movie Contest. I have a single choreography. It's length was about 01:18:00 (almost 80 seconds) for the longest time. Then I added another 15 or so seconds, so it's length is 01:34:00 (94 seconds). Now when I go to render the choreography, I enter 01:34:00 for the end of the range, then click render. Immediately I notice that the start and end frames add up to 2400. Divide by 30 for frames/second, and I get only 80 seconds. I am unable to figure out how to render the last 14 seconds into the movie. I've switched it between QuickTime and AVI, with no improvement. Is this something I'm doing wrong, or something that should be reported?

You mentioned editing out mouse clicks. However, I was wondering where things were edited out and where they weren't. You seemed to copy data from some places to others very quickly. I think one example is where you put the end of a bone on the exact location of a CP, and it looked like you copied the CP location and then pasted it to the End part of the bone. Was this some magical keystroke combination, or just an editing trick? Thanks!

And I'm back from vacation. Hands jumping: Yay! Thigh orient: Yeah, I'd probably keep it turned off most of the time. Fan thing #1: From my perspective, fanning is part of rigging, not so much part of control. The reason I keep asking about this is that I'm assuming that the purpose of the rig is to aid in controlling and animating the character, not in doing further rigging. I think this is the philisophical difference that led to questions dealing with the first point. So then the resolution is where you stand philisophically (since you're the one putting the rig together) based on the input you've gotten, and does it make sense to enforce that philosophy for everyone. (The answer may be yes!) Fan thing #2: Fan bones don't work without some other pose to set them to 50% enforced? This is an area I don't understand very well yet how A:M works. I'll play with it and then see if I have any intelligent suggestions after that. Catch you later!

Clarification on the fan bones -- it sounds like you're saying that if the fans are visible then the constraints are OFF, if they're not visible then the constraints are ON. That sounds cool, except that I can't imagine a case where someone would actually want to modify the fan bones (or animate them explicitly). That is, I can't imagine when the default fan constraints would do something unreasonable, and therefore it doesn't make sense to me why you'd ever want to make the fan bones visible/animatable. Maybe my brain isn't big enough. :> My experience in playing with the fan bones was "oh, look, I've made the model's hands look totally wrong in 2 seconds flat". The thigh orient thing -- I still can't imagine why someone would want the adjustment, but maybe that's just my limited experience. It sure lets you do lots of bad things easily. :> For the jump, here is a ZIP with 3 images. One with Left Hand Lock at 0%, one at 1%, and one at 100%. Note that I moved both the Left Hand Target Lock bone (while at 100%) and the Left Hand Target bone (while at 0%). The jump between 0 and 1 is kind of extreme. I also put an action in the ZIP that demonstrates exactly that. Hope this helps. lhlock.zip

Q1&2: So why would you want to do fan bones manually? I don't see where it is useful. One of those "you can do it and it's neat, but why do you need it?" kind of things. It has the feeling of being needed for 1% of cases. Q5 is pretty much the same. The basic question is how much support should be provided for fringe cases. Q4: It's good that it moves, but bad that it jumps. A smooth move would be better. Looking forward to the next version. I'm on vacation all next week (until the 28th). "See you on the other side, Ray."

Feedback on the Tarzan rig (NEWRIGTARZAN2): 1. Under hands, do you need to display the finger fans? When would you ever want to? 2. Same as #1 for "Fan Bones On". 3. By turning "Hide Fingers" off, there is a lot of flexibility to controlling the fingers; however, it's a lot of work. It would be nice if there were a one-bone-per-finger control for quick everyday movement. But I think you said you had a different setup that you had not yet uploaded, so I'll have to look at the next version. 4. Left Hand IK Lock going from 0% to 1% has a jump if things have been moved. I think it happens when the Left Hand Target Lock has moved to be different than the Left Hand Target, when switching control totally over to the Left Hand Target it jumps. 5. The Left/Right Thigh Orient bones have a lot of flexibility to do weird things. Perhaps more constraints on it would be good. 6. What does the Head Controller Lock do? Just makes the head stay straight up (even when the torso moves)? It would be nice to have it stick to the position it is in instead of just straight up. 7. The Body Orient seems interesting, though I don't really understand it. Is there more information on it? Maybe you could start a howto document similar to the ones linked from: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11507 (Although the eggington site seems to not be working right now.) Overall summary -- I like the rig a lot. 1.2MB is pretty big, though. Just sayin'.

mtpeak2 -- yep, you're right. F2's translation is used to change the orientation of F1. F2's roll is used for F2 and F3's roll. See the attached rig (42KB zipped). Left hand is the new scheme. Right hand is the original 2001 rig. testfingers_2001rig.zip

I wrote: (This is all with the AM2001 rig.) Okay, I tried this out. Here's what I changed: F1 (model) made the bone invisible, moved it to the side of the finger F1 (Basic Setup Relationships) removed the ORIENT LIKE constraint, added some other constraints to make it behave well -- limit translate to none, and set some reasonable spherical limits. F2 (model) "Attach to parent"=ON, made it span the width of the knuckle. F2 (Basic Setup Relationships) got rid of the ROLL LIKE constraint, added SPHERICAL LIMITS constraints to reasonable values. F3 (Basic Setup Relationships) changed ROLL LIKE target to be F2. And ... IT WORKS! It seems to be usable. I'm going to do it on all the fingers. If you're really interested, I'll email you a copy of my model so you can play with it, just let me know. mtpeak2 wrote: I'll be curious to see what you came up with, though I'm going on vacation soon for a week; feel free to post the latest and I'll actually have a look at it this time instead of being a lame-o ("lame-o", can you tell I grew up in the 80s?) and just reading posts.

Mark Skodacek (mtpeak2) wrote: I started looking into it again. So the problem with the AM2001 rig is that: 1. a single control bone is used 2. that bone's ORIENT and ROLL properties are used for two different purposes -- ORIENT is the orientation of F1 (and children F2 and F3), and ROLL is the roll of F2 and F3. 3. however, ORIENT and ROLL are both stored in one set of values, ROTATION. They interact in undesirable ways. The two possible solutions I can think of are: 1. Use two bones. I tried this. I got rid of the finger control bone, and just used the ORIENT of the F1 bone and the roll of the F2 bone. It worked, but it's a little awkward to control. 2. Use one bone, TRANSLATE and ROLL. TRANSLATE and ROLL do not interact badly. They are stored in two separate sets of settings. But which bone? I'm looking into using the F2 bone. With constraints on the F1 bone, this might allow relatively easy movement and rotation with a single bone. I'll let you know if I come up with something. Lots of people complain about IK arms, but I use them a lot and like them for interacting with things. (Okay, I'm still a beginner, so a "lot" might be overstating things.) There are two issues I come across with it. First, it is annoying to get a hand exactly where it should be, and then move the torso, and all of a sudden the hand is not where it should be. It would be nice if the hand targets were higher up in the bone hierarchy. This problem exacerbates the second problem. Here's an example of problem 2. I create a key frame at frame 0, go to frame 20, lock the hand target to something (a door handle, as in The Door Is Stuck, with translate to + compensate). I move the time slider back to 19 and lower, and the hand suddenly jumps to its old position. So I go back to frame 20, create a key frame for the transpose channels of the hand target, and I get smooth motion up to the door. I might even tweak it. Then later on, I move the body and everything is off. The key frame I had at 20 is relative to the old body position, so now the hand gets kind of closer to the door handle and then at 20 jumps to the door handle. The principle is that I want to do something once and only once (translate to w/ compensate mode), and have the freedom to adjust other things afterwards. Other issues: the heel thing that other people are mentioning as a desired addition sounds interesting and probably useful, though I haven't tried a rig with it yet.

I'm assuming you are in agreement that it is inherently problematic to use tilting (I'm not sure that's the best word for it, though) and rotation to control bending and rotation, as they interact unappetizingly. Your setup certainly looks cleaner. Of course it will be incompatible with the AM2001 rig, but I think we can agree that that rig is broken for the fingers, anyways. In your model, the bones for the knuckles look the same as the 2001 rig, so the difference must be in the control bone, and it looks like there is an added NULL bone. Care to give a summary of how you did it? (And is anyone from Hash interested in creating a new version of the AM rig to fix this for the next release?)

Life has been busy, but I finally had time to look into this more. It looks like whenever you tilt a bone from 0 degrees in one frame to 90 degrees a second or so later in the timeline, it does so smoothly. Also, if you rotate a bone from 0 degrees to 90 degrees, that works well, too. However, if you both tilt and rotate a bone, the tilting and rotating interact. The tilting is no longer smooth. The attached project demonstrates this phenomena. I believe this means either: 1. It is a huge mistake for the AM2001 rig to use a single bone for both tilting the fingers and using the side effect of rotation to key other bones to rotate, since tilting and rotation affect each other in undesirable ways. 2. There may be some setting to tell the finger bone to always apply the tilting first, then the bone rotation. Anyone have opinions on this? Tilt_Rotate.prj

In looking at the relationships, I'm very confused. When I open "Left Hand Clench Relationships" / "Relationship1", I see bones with channels under them. There seems to be a key in frame 0 and in frame 3000 (SMPTE 01:40:00, which is 100 minutes). If I move the time indicator in the timeline, I do not see the fingers move in the "Relationship1" window that I've opened. I can't figure out how to edit things. None of this sounds like the manual page: http://www.hash.com/htmlHelp/v11.1/CustomH...lationships.htm The basic relationships for the curving of the fingers in another thing I'm looking into. Under "Setup Relationships" -> "Basic Setup Relationships" -> "Relationship1", I see constraints. "Left Middle F 1" has an "Orient Like ..|Left Middle Finger". This shows a key in frame 0 and in frame 3000. What happened to 0 to 100? I notice when I create a blank action, then enable "Show Fingers", then rotate the fingers individually, that I get decent behavior. So I have hope that if I can figure out how to modify the relationships I might be able to get good finger movement. But the interface for modifying the "Left Hand Clench" (and Right Hand Clench) relationships confuses me. Am I totally overlooking something? Have I RTFMed in all the wrong places? Or is the manual lacking? Or do I have something configured wrong? Thanks for any ideas!

I've been looking around the rig, but poses have changed lots since I've last looked at them. Hopefully I'll have more time to poke around this weekend.

You guys are looking at the right problem. Thanks for looking into it. The Kee-Kat hand animation is similar to the behavior I am getting, though the fingers go one way and then the other. My first attempt at modifying the relationships didn't go well, though I wasn't paying close attention to what I was doing. Unfortunately I won't have any time to try the suggestions until Wednesday night. I'll try it then and let you know what I get.

MouseMan, I'm so sorry - Darn it!, could you repost, in my morning stooper I accidentally killed your post. So sorry, Mike Fitz www.3dartz.com

I'd say the words "stand" and "either" are both under expressed given the voicing. Other than that, I think it's incredible.