robcat2075

Good looking house. Where is the entryway now?

How about... bring the whole thing in on a laptop! Then you can scrub the timeline and show the architect any angle needed.

I would suggest making a render that doesn't have the flying camera so it is clearer what is changing on the house.

Hooray! We'd love to see your project when you're done.

So... For several weeks in Live Answer Time we've been looking at rigging, using Steve Shelton's dragon as our example case. This dragon has a long tail and I figured it would be better to create a tail rig from scratch than to use a generic solution in TSM2. Part of the structure needs a series of constraints on a chain of bones with the aim of making smooth curves like this, controlled by just one target bone. Basically there are "Orient Like" constraints with enforcement percentages less than 100% from the base to the tip to create the gradual curve. You might intuitively think that if you have 10 bones in a chain, you could give each one "Orient Like" with 10% enforcement and that would sum up to 100% of the direction of the target bone by the end of the chain. That doesn't work however... The problem is that each bone figures out the angle it is trying to cover, not from its default position in the model, but from where its parent bone has currently placed it. You can rotate 10% of the remaining angle an infinite number of times and never complete 100% of the bend. Or, you might think, as I did, that you could evenly increase the enforcement percentages along the chain to get the right bend. This gets an approximately right result on very short chains of just four or five bones, but on longer chains a problem becomes obvious. These bones are "Orient Like" enforced 10%, 20%, 30%... on up to 100% on the last bone. Incrementing the enforcement percentage in even amounts puts too much of the bend near the base. By the time it gets to the 50% bone, most of the bend is already done. We could make these numbers work by re-ordering the hierarchy of the chain so that the bones are all siblings and no longer parents and children. This creates a new problem. The bones rotate but no longer behave like a chain... We could fix that by adding a "Translate To" constraint to each bone to re-attach it to its former parent. This way it inherits the translation of its "parent" but none of the rotation. 10-20-30-40... works now... That's a good result but that's extra work that may not be necessary. Can we get that even bend without having to detach and then "translate to" all the bones? It turns out there is an easy-to calculate approximation... If we have a chain of ten bones, we would expect the first bone to do 1/10th of the curve. Give that bone 10% enforcement. Of the nine remaining bones, we would expect the first one to do 1/9th of the remaining curve. That's about 11% Of the eight remaining bones, we would expect the first one to do 1/8th of the remaining curve. That's about 12% Of the seven remaining bones, we would expect the first one to do 1/7th of the remaining curve. That's about 14% See where this is going? The fraction is always 1/x where x is the number of bones remaining. The last bone is the first of one remaining bone. It does 1/1th of the remaining curve or 100% enforcement. This formula will work for any number of bones. This series of enforcements gets us a result very close to the all-siblings and "translate to" version above but with less work.... It only took me 20 years to figure this out!

Very amusing! (Although I'm not quite the target audience )

Would it be OK if I edit the many installation threads to add a note at the top to direct people to the link in your signature?

I'm scanning this forum and I can't figure out where to start and not be reading something that is out of date and superceded by something else.

Movin' on up!

I remember projects in magazines like Popular Mechanics for things like that. I can imagine someone doing that then coming back a half an hour later and finding it had run off down the street.

I've been trying to get the ghosts around here to mow my lawn but they never do.

I just realized I've been computing constraint enforcement percentages all wrong! I'll take a look at this at Live Answer Time

I think that works well!

Hi Simon, In Surface> Toon Lines> you will find "Color Method" Before you expand the properties triangle, click on the value at the right ( initially it says "not set") for the drop down list to choose "Specified" or "Percent of Underlying" Then you can expand the property triangle and set a percent.

They keep saying "update your firmware" but I haven't found if that is even possible on mine. NY Times... Your Wi-Fi Security Is Probably Weak. Here’s How to Fix That.

The second version is much improved! Perhaps there is a way to have the dust settle as it gets farther from the horse, a shape sort of like this...

And I don't know if that is a bug or a feature.

Hooray!

Hi Simon, here is my test in v18p... clip4279ShadowOnly.mp4

That looks like a painful egg to lay.

?? I'm not sure what I said that was a problem. If you don't have time, you don't have time. I completely understand that. You have no obligations in this. It just seemed to me since you were going to figure out how to add it to the Saucy rig, once you knew what the new stuff is you could document that for people who wanted to add it to old characters. If it's not possible, it's not possible.

If there was a process by which one could manually add this to existing Saucy characters that would be a useful thing What bones to add. Where to add them. What constraints to change...

I see, I misread that! Sorry! TSM has it too. However, Steve and Chris wanted to use the Saucy rig for their projects. They have a whole bunch of characters that are already Saucy-rigged. If it's not something practical to add to Saucy rig or you don't have time to do it, I understand that completely, but we wanted to inquire. Maybe it was going to be easy to add, we didn't know.

Something is not being communicated. This is not a problem of the TSM2 rig. This is standard walk animation workflow. You want this leg scaling no matter what rig you are using. I didn't install the Saucy rig in my old eggbot character to try leg scaling because I had already tried it with the sample Saucy characters and didn't see any way to get that result. This is an example of what i got... clip4276SaucyScaling.mp4 I'm not trying to trick you or anything. I don't know what you mean when you say it is there already.

No. I made the Eggbot long ago and pulled it out because I knew it had the leg-scaling which is something I wanted to include in the exercise.