robcat2075

Right above my tut on "Copy/Flip/Attach" are two on fixing dead end splines. i recommend those too. Look on my tuts page for those

Here's a version that will survive CFA with just a few omissions that need to be repaired manually. Basically i made sure that everything that was supposed to be a center spline really was at x=0 and had nothing shooting past it to the other side. HalfCharlie.mdl If you haven't seen my Copy flip Attach Basics video I recommend watching that. In general I think there are WAY more splines to make shapes than are needed which will create unnecessary work when rigging. For example the spline that outlines the shape of the lips doesn't need nearly so many CPs. (I realize that some of this excess splineage is the result of the tut in TAoA:M so it's not like you weren't following directions, but i don't like those directions) There are also many dead end splines where a CP is stuck on the side of a regular four point patch. Those should be ended as hooks. There are many dead end splines that end where two splines are already crossing. Those should be unattached and moved to end as a hook. Dead end splines make bad patches that create unnecessary creases.

While I'm here... the mouth cavity seems to be attached to the outside edge of the lip on the face. typically the mouth cavity would be a continuation from where the inside of the lip is entering the mouth just as in a real person.

I'm finding several cases where the "center" spline isn't very centered or has odd loops where it turns back away from center or has an undesirable loop crossing it. An actual crash shouldn't happen because of these things so it might be useful to send this version in as an A:M report, but there are probably enough odd circumstances to give CFA unexpected trouble.

My initial attempts are that I can select any portion and CFA but not the whole model. I'm still investigating that. On a separate issue I'll note that the hair and eyebrows seems to have been made by selecting a portion of the scalp and extruding outward. This is a less than ideal practice as it creates interior patches between them which you can see by looking between the scalp and hair mesh. Those can create bad render artifacts and the extrusion process makes the splines on teh surface of the hair not continuous. That's why it has that polygon appearance. A better tactic would be to copy a portion of the scalp, scale it outward, then extrude just the outer edge of that new surface back down to the scalp

CFA'd I'm afraid this isn't turning out to be as much of a likeness as I aimed for, but still need to do the hair. I've been following some rotoscopes but, of course, photographs are never perfectly oriented for that and judging the shape of the skull under his big hair is just guesswork.

Still not caught up...

Just in time to hit after the end of Win XP support. Internet Explorer has a serious flaw not yet fixed and the fix is either not available to Win XP users or won't be automatically sent to them. I'm not sure which. U.S. Government Suggests that You Switch from Internet Explorer

Actually it IS possible to do a repeat with Crop and Range but it's not simple. Use "Frame".

It's not possible to do a repeat with the Crop and Range parameters. Leave those unset. The way to do a repeat is to animate values in "Frame" keyframe 0 and 24 on the frames you want them to happen, select the curve that creates, >Curve>Post-Extrapolation Method>Repeat to make that inital curve repeat indefinitely. If you just want three repeats, keyframe 0 to 24 three times manually.

I tried it. It jumps around even when the poses are OFF.

Cool! Are the constraints making more sense now?

"point and click adventure"... what does that mean?

The automatic Lip Synch is an interesting idea but it tends to result in over-animated mouth motion and tuning that is probably about as much work as a more direct approach like Wildsided suggested. You can get a lot of lipsynch done with just an open/close pose.

Now with 100% more cranium.

Yikes I see 3 ears! never converges to 1 - That's how it will look, there's one 3D image in the center with an image flanking it on each side. Shoulda started at 11 like me. It's interesting but it seems a bit too generic when there are specific features I want to shape.

Now crisscrossing the cheek...

And probably in half the time!

Good jeans!

Well..yes that works of course and that's what I've been doing. But I dread that day when new feature in newer version A:M (eg texturing, surface properties) gets wiped out by going back to older version (not always able to go backwards and retain new data). I tend to do my weighting, texturing, surface defs, materials, etc on the pre-rigged character. So the choice is to do all that in 16b (and not have new features available) or to do that in later versions and have it wiped out when go backwards. I don't think there's a case like that yet, but if there were and you still wanted to go back to v16 just for TSM2 I think you could use a text editor to swap v16 bones and constraints into the model file from the later version.

If you have a particular situation that needs answers that might be something to look at.

I do get the odd random unrepeatable crash also but those aren't much help in tracking them down. Save important work frequently and never save over the last version.

32-bit v16 is the last version the TSM2 plugins will work in. You can still use it to rig characters for use in other versions.

I suppose i better catch up on "The Walking Dead" so Mark's show makes sense when i get it. How many seasons do i need to watch to get the jokes?

That looks clever! Were you doing some sort of change while it was running? Can you explain that more?