robcat2075

I can't get Snap to Surface to work in a Pose window? Does it? The cursor occasionally displays the Snap to Surface icon but I'm not getting any snap.

Sorry to hear you've been sick, Rodney! I hope your recovery goes well.

Got 'em.

Send me the file in a private message. Those can have attachments.

My understanding is that zigntrack animates bones but it doesn't do the weighting for you... or does it?

That's quite good. I like that.

Nothing yet. Is it large? You may need to Dropbox it.

All I got were movies. Send me a model with an original mesh and a morphed version.

Yup, I now dimly recall that was your answer last time too. CD, not online. CD, not online.

Not the PDF... there was a fully interactive HTML version.

I asked about this before and Rodney found it but now I can't find it again... there was a version of the Techref, online, that had all the features of the CHM help in previous version of A:M.... search, index, chapter outline Where is that?

Could you post an example of an original and morphed mesh that I could experiment with?

Hey,Kevin... have you been using "Snap to Surface" when making these pose shapes?

The hesitation is unwanted, right?

It's a notion I've had in the back of my head for a while. Ideally we would be able to do what you were trying before, to paste a mesh copied from a model window into a pose window but there's no way for A:M to know how to relate the two different meshes. This is the only path i can think of in the absence of an importer that could fully interpret other programs' rigging and morph target stuff. For this plugin to to be useful, we are presuming the user has access to some polygon program where they can manipulate the original character model they are wanting to remake in A:M and export various versions of it like "smiling", "frowning"... etc.

That's good news, Mark. What Windows did you end up going with? I wonder ... does MacOS have any "compatibility" settings for old programs the way Windows does? In windows you can set a program to run in Windows XP "compatibility mode", for example. That's how i got my 13 year-old version of After Effects to recognize modern Quicktime.

This sounds like a completely separate thing, right? Here's how I think it could be done... -create a plugin that will move a CP in Mesh A to the nearest CP in Mesh B when both are in the same model or pose window. the immediate problem with that is that perhaps Mesh B is so morphed that the "matching" CPs are no longer the nearest to each other. so... -make the plugin restrict its search to only CPs in a Group the user has defined. You might make a group for "Upper Lip A" in the A mesh and "Upper Lip B" in the B mesh. The plugin would only look for nearest neighbors for group A CPs only among the CPs in Group B. You might have to make these groups very specific before the right targets were being consistently found but that would be easier than manually matching every CP individually

I hadn't had a chance to digest it yet. Can you put the pictures back?

Looks good. Suggestion... if you animate the channel for the particle numbers to vary semi-randomly over time it can get you a more natural appearance to the spray.

I'm not playing it in my browser. Here's what the QT Player "Show Movie Inspector" window looks like That "aacl" is different than "AAC" that shows up in other movies...

I forgot you mentioned the stop-mo project. Yes, an exposure sheet would be necessity for that. The clothespins are cool!

I too get the message that more software is needed. I notice that the audio codec is "aacl" which is not one I've heard of before. AFAIK, Quicktime has "AAC" as a standard codec but not "aacl" Perhaps that is why it's not working for everyone.

When you say "use Excel" what do you mean other than reproducing the layout of the paper sheet? My own feeling is that exposure sheets are of less value in CG. They needed them in hand drawn days to create some sort of visible representation of the sound track vs. time for the animator to match since he had no real-time access to it. But now that we can put the audio clip directly in our time line and scrub it in real time to locate important moments, an exposure sheet to do that for us isn't needed.

That looks like if Robert Crumb made a muppet.

I keep using TSM2 because I'm familiar both with installing it and animating with it. I know exactly what to do with it and how to modify it when i need to. In a few minutes i can throw the basic bones in a character, attach the CPs quick and dirty and shazaam!... i've got my character at least movable and posable in some basic fashion. But that's me. The other A:M rigs are not much harder to install and the Squetch rig is a wonderful thing. However, I think the CP attaching and weighting process still baffles most users no matter what rig they choose. I don't feel TAoA:M ever introduced "rigging" properly so we have a large body of users who don't "get it". In my startup video for "rigging" I tried to explain the reasons for why rigging is what it is and make the strategy that goes in to it more clear.