Dhar

The exercise says Pass the ball, not pass a ball. I think passing one ball would add to the continuity and coherence of the exercise and focuses the animators on building character. I think the ball should at least have one capability of animation principles; squash & stretch. My 2 cents; either way I would like to participate

Make sure the ball has S&S capabilities.

I missed my last chance, I don't want to miss it again. Count me in.

No need to apologize, I was just wondering what's next. Sounds great! A TSM Squetch rig is a win/win situation. I can hardly wait. Take your time, obsess about it, its gonna be awesome.

I guess the only thing left is a video tutorial? Maybe? Any time soon?

That's right huh? never mind then. What do you mean? I was referring to Vern's "malicious entity".

I think Vern is on the right track. You can never be too careful. I like the idea of the file having a permenant DL point here in the forum or somewhere on A:M's main page. Maybe it can be included as part of next year's A:M version???

Maybe its a good idea to attach the release letter with the file.

I bought their rig after they discontinued it - but I'm happy to have contributed to them. I also purchased their training videos. They're a great bunch. I will purchase more of their awesome products down the line. Thanks Anzovin. EDIT: Robcat: what do you have up your sleeve?

Sounds like a nice experiment with Limit Translation, Limit Rotation, and Aim At constraints and Nulls on a front wheel suspension system. I saw a tutorial on that particular setup on YouTube, albeit its for a different software, but the principles are the same and easily applicable in A:M.

The hands look too small proportion wise. If you put your hand in front of your face, and the base of your hand on your chin, your middle finger should reach the edge of the start of your hairline (or more than half of your forehead in the absence of hairline). The hand in your character looks like it can barely reaches the eye line. And to be sure, the proportion of the hand should cover from the heel to the bunion of the foot. I think once you get that done it will be sufficient to cover up any other glaring misproportions.

I always refer to these Video Tutorials

Looks pretty good. The hand follow through needs a little attention. To loop your movies, open in QT and select Loop. QT will prompt you if you want to save it when you close, if you click Yes it will save it as a loop.

Is that your real voice, Dale, or did you digitize it? Both sound really good, but Sebastian's pitched one sounds more convincing.

here is one I made long ago. I hope its good enough for you Bed.zip

Like Mark said; the rig will fit any model. If you follow Zundel's modeling techniques, he likes the thumb at 45 degrees down. I think next time I'll keep the whole hand flat so I don't have to manipulate the rig too much.

That is very well done. Visual illustrations of concepts may not be entertaining but they are invaluable educational tools.

Make sure you are in Action or Chor.

Nice to see the Kamikaze production in business. Keep up the good work Mike.

Your points are valid. But weighting each CP and then changing the weight in trial & error just seems like a lot of work. Inbetweening was a lot of work in the old days of cell animation, which is something the computer can do now. I'm asking if there is a way where the computer can do the weighting than having to do it manually. There obviously is, but to minimize the cleanup, I think a model with splines stitched a certain way can make the job easier. That's what I'm looking for.

What about the weighting?

I think Robert expressed it better what I was talking about. A set of parameters of specifically named group of CPs or splines that the Squetchrig would recognize and assign the CPs to the corresponding bones AFTER the rig has been sized to your model. So, it doesn't have to be Sam or any specific model. What I'm after, I guess, is some form of standardization of modeling - CPs, groups, splines- that will aid in the ease of the rig installation. You see, what we have in the Squetch rig is a standard of bones and actions that are designed to give top notch animation. But if the model (such as Gumbo) was not modeled with the Squetchrig in mind then I have either limited some of the features of the rig, and/or overwhelmed myself with, as lergento mentioned, a sizable project. The model and the rig need to meet somewhere in the middle. Now that we have the rig, I feel there need to be specific way of modeling that will utilize the most out of the rig. Did I confuse the issue further???

OK, the next time I model a character I'll give it to you CP weight it For me, I want to animate, NOW. Which is why I have little patience for modeling and rigging.

Yeah, it does help, however, I was hoping for a more complete install rather than "close" and then having to tweak the tight areas. What I was aiming for is some standard method of modeling that would facilitate the squetchrig in such a way that no further CP weighting would be necessary. Refer to my pic, you'll see how some splines on my model correspond with Sam's (red line). But, because I was following Barry Zubdell's method of modeling, many splines do not correspond anymore, which forced me to individually (painstakingly) assign and weight the CPs to achieve smooth transitions. My thinking is to somehow find a standard number of splines (or way of modeling) that will give the best performance. You told me when I was modeling Gumbo that no less than 8 splines should exist for the eyelids to perform satisfactorily. Now if there was a way that an Auto_assign would exactly assign and weight those 8 splines, that would eliminate the need of tweaking. You see, now that I have some experience with the Squetchrig I am mor inclined to re-model Gumbo in a fashion that will easily accept the Squetchrig without any after-tweaking. Is that possible?

Hmm, that sounds similiar to poly modeling, but its one option.