robcat2075

Welcome back! Is it in this dir? ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/misc/ I haven't tried it, myself.

The animation I've seen so far suggests that the container is a fairly rigid cardboard container. Does it need to change shape as it empties?

Hi Simon, We took a look at your revision tonight. One thing we noted was that the rolling (somersault?) that happens from about frame 260 thru 300 doesn't seem to have traction with the floor. He's rotating faster than the ground is moving under him.

Pretty much. Some people do things like a walk cycle just to do it and never use it in a chor.

If your model has a bone that is parent to everything in the model, move that bone.

If they don't have to stick around on the target then you could keep reusing the same arrow in the model and not have to have the arrow as a separate model.

The CTRL thing is a trick that works only in the model window. Normally in Bones mode you DONT want the bones to carry their mesh around or you'd never be able to get a bone in the right place without destroying your model. The CTRL lets you temporarily move mesh with bones in the model window. In Actions and Chors you don't use CTRL. Bones will always carry their mesh with them.

When you are in a model window and are in Bones Mode, you can move bones and mesh together by choosing a bone and then holding the CTRL key while you move the bone. You have to use the standard Translate, Rotate or Scale manipulators for that. Moving a bone this way moves the bone, its children and their mesh. However, there is no single bone that is parent to everything in your Bow. If you want to move the bow in the Box model it will be easier if you add one bone to be parent of all Bow bones and use that to adjust the mesh.

Dragging an object into an existing action makes it an Action Object IIRC

What happens to the arrows after they hit the target?

That is an odd-sounding problem. And it is exactly the same problem on both computers? Just to try... do Help>reset settings and restart A:M

An action starts with one model and you can add other models as Action Objects.

If you have time for Live Answer Time we could look at this live.

The ` key will do that. (It's the one with the tilde ~ on top)

You were moving the CPs by putting them on the end of a rotating bone. it's hard to not have rotation that way. If what you want is straight motion, moving a bone in a straight line is easier. Yes you can select a CP and see whether the Smooth or Peaked button is on, but it's usually visually apparent anyway. I don't know. They were always peaked for me. Lets say I don't have anything embedded in myproject01.prj and I make a change to a model and a change to an Action and a change to a Chor and then save my PRJ. The PRJ gets saved but even if i gave my new PRJ a new name like myproject02.prj the model and the action and the chor will get overwritten on their old filenames. Now suppose my animation doesn't behave right anymore or it crashes A:M for some reason when i go to render. Is it the model or the action or the chor? The previous versions of those are all gone now and even if I reload the previous myproject01.prj, it's just going to load the new overwritten versions of the model and the action and the chor. There is no way for me to go back to what I had before I made the three changes and try doing just one at a time to see which is the fatal mistake. It's easier to just have everything embedded and save myproject01.prj myproject02.prj myproject03.prj myproject04.prj myproject05.prj and know that each of them is totally independent and has everything* it needs to be like it was when i saved it. This takes up more HD space but HD space is cheap these days and you can delete the old versions you don't need anymore when you finish your project. How often do i need to go back to a previous version? i would say that on e very substantial animation project I've done I've needed to do this at least once to solve a problem. Or sometimes, I just don't like a road I've gone down animation-wise and would like to reset to some thing I had yesterday without having to figure out which keyframes are the bad ones. The only time i haven't worked with fully embedded PRJs is in a situation like "Tin Woodsman" where I made none of the models myself and would never modify any of the models myself and I only animated with models loaded from the TWO repository. Then I just saved incremental Chors for each scene. When someone changed a model on the TWO repository it could have been a problem, but fortunately it never was. It's easier to work in embedded PRJs *Remember that images and video files are never embedded. You need to be conscious of how modifications you make to those may affect previous versions of your work if you ever have to go back.

I see the problem. None of the models are embedded. When doing experimental stuff I think it's always better to save the complete environment with everything embedded at each increment. so that you can always go back exactly to a previous state. try this... Bow Music03.prj

Don't use a rotating Bone. Use a Translating bone instead Drop this version in your AM Project folder and look at the Action... Bow Music02.prj

As i look at it, it seems to be bending right at the "middle" CPS are, which lines up with the notch that I presume the arrow goes through. In that sense its rendering correctly. However, it looks like the string gets shorter when it is pulled and perhaps the bottom half of the bow is bending more than the top. For the amount of flex in the bow, i think the string needs to be drawn farther back so that it is not shorter than it was at rest.

I think those would be worth reposting if the thread can't be found!

While the group is selected, SHIFT-select new points. (You can removed CPS with ALT-select)

The problem is that the spline ring in the middle of the bow... isn't there. There are just four CPs in the middle of four splines, thus there are no patches to render in the string at all. I would also suggest checking the spline rings at the ends of the string. They have a very strange backwards loop to them that you probably don't intend.

If you choose "Programmer" people like me will start pestering you to write plugins.

in MS-DOS, two dots means to go up one level of a directory heirarchy and I think this usage in A:M expression is similar

I think it is easier to make the action if the bow and arrow are in the same model

If you made an action for one arrow-load-and-shoot cycle, you could drop an action onto a model for every note.