robcat2075

The first problem i see is that you are trying to select bones that appear within the sphere of a rotate manipulator. When the rotate manip (or any other manipulator) is on, A:M is waiting for you to do something with that manipulator and will prevent you from accidentally choosing other bones while you are moving the manipulator. You can go on to shift select another bone you want outside the manipulator which will turn it off and give you access to bones it obscured or you can turn the manipulator off by hitting R or on bones that present the rotate manip automatically upon selection (R won't turn it off) you can manually invoke the Scale or traNslate manipulators which appear smaller on the sceen and may not obscure the bones you want or you can zoom in so that the rotate manipulator is smaller in proportion to the character and no longer obscures the other bones. or if the bones you want are already listed in your chor, you can shift select them there.

Glad you took time to ask!

Sounds appropriate. Easier... You could also do your upper body animation in a copy of the lower body action, then delete all the channels that made the lower body animation and rexave the copy.

Sample PRJs that demonstrate problems will be very helpful in these things to make it easy for other people to test them, and since you'd want to submit a sample PRJ anyway if you do make an AMReport.

If you've found something newly broken in V16, now's the time to ask about it here on the forum and confirm it and then report it to AMReports. Not feature requests, but things that actually worked before and suddenly stopped. I say that because Steffen is starting on V17 already and before long it will be impractical to put fixes into both both v16 updates and the v17 betas. So it's "speak now or hold your peace until v17." There shouldn't be much to find since v16 was in beta for more than a year. No, i don't know when the first v17 beta will surface or what new wonders it will contain.

The washed out color? Is there a light shining on the surface the decal is applied to? I guess there is because you're using AO for the drop shadow? That may be it.

I'd have to see it. I thought the "outer" was the original that you had all closed.

You really mean the orientation, right? The head bone is attached to the neck and spine and has to move with them. you can isolate the rotation of the head (or probably better, the neck) by Orient Like constraining it to something higher in the hierarchy than the spine hones. The first spine bone is a likely target.

You can also just Shift-select all the models and either scale one manually or enter numbers in its scale props.

This is getting to be a seriously detailed production.

the res wont' affect the audio track. Oh, you're on mac. So you get Quicktime as a choice then, right? Use that instead where I said AVI. On PC we dont' get Quicktime in 64-bit A:M (yet).

In Theory... the .sinfo file is used automatically by A:M when you import a TGA sequence that was rendered in A:M, no need to load it separately to get sound in. However, in my brief test, that doesn't work as i expect. It must have worked in V14 since that's when the feature last go a lot of use. If any one has V14 they might check this out. In the meantime... -render to targas if you wish to do so for safety. -render again to AVI in shaded mode (for speed) then in QTPro... -extract the Audio track from the AVI file -"Select ALL" and copy that extracted audio -open the TGA sequence -Select All -CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+V to paste the audio onto the TGA sequence -recompress/export as desired

Studying the side view a bit i think you've got the body continuing down a bit after the first heel strike (the one at the very beginning of the loop) but not so much after the next heel strike. The first one looks better. At AnimationMentor the first five minutes of the lecture on walks was just animators bitching about how hard walks are to do. I think half the problem is that the IK leg is great for when the foot is planted on the ground, but quite awkward for the motion of the leg when it is swinging forward. On TWO (with the Squetch rig's IK/FK switching) I experimented on one stride of a walk with using IK for when the foot was on the ground and switching to FK for when the foot was off the ground and i kind of liked that. I'll probably try that again some day. A good field trip is to go to the mall and walk behind people and watch how their hips move as they walk. Every possible variation is out there. Some have very level hips throughout, some are lifting the passing side, some (women with wide hips especially) drop that side as soon as the other leg is taking the body weight.

I've never seen scale model seagulls before.

.sinfo files do have something to do with attaching sound to renders but I don't know how they are intended to work. I've sent an email to Martin asking him about it since he may be the only person seen successfully using them. No guarantees. I haven't heard directly from him in a year. When I need to render something with sound I render to uncompressed AVI and then recompress that in QT Pro. Of course that's not advisable in situations where you might have VERY long render times per frame, but for modest renders it suffices.

that video doesn't show you doing any of the selecting process that you're having trouble with.

Watch this and make sure you are selecting bones exactly like I am selecting bones. Multiple_Selecting_Bones.mov Update: Note that in the video, the "Key Bone" filter is ON, not the "Key Model" filter.

There's your problem. That's not what you do for the first key.

You can upload anything in a zip.

I would need to see this not work. I'll note that the directions in "It's a Pitch" work as written. You're doing something.

I'd have to see you do it. CTRL also works.

One of our forum members, Mike Sanderson, took me on a tour of DNA when they were working on "Ant Bully" around 2005 or so. Everything the animators worked on was gray, no textures at all, not even flat colors like we might assign to a "group". The texturing was just about the last step in the pipeline before rendering. Probably for the same reasons we have. Procedural textures ("Materials") will survive resplining. All you have to do is add the new splines to the group the material is applied to. Blue Sky's "Robots" was ostensibly made with only procedural materials. It can be done.

I'm pretty sure in that video I never tried dragging a rectangle around anything in the Chor. Did i do that? That won't work. I hold down the shift key while I select the bones.

Simple one-bone example case: Why_You_Need_to_Force_A_KeyFrame.mov good so far Remember, for this step you are in Key Bone mode (we need more icons, Rodney!) and have manually selected all the bones you want to key. We do this so -we don't force keys on bones you'd never want to key ever, like hidden rig bones -we do force complete keys on bones that , for example, may have been translated but not rotated yet in the process of making that first pose. We want to lock down both of those aspects of the bone before we move on. There are many hidden/rig/fan bones you do not want to force keys on. You are forcing a keyframe when you manually move a bone, but if you only translated it or only rotated it then it wont' have both translation and rotation keys created. You need both to make sure interpolation between the previous pose and the next pose isn't contaminating this current pose. After you made that first pose and then forced keyframes>"In all filtered Channels" on all the desired bones, on all subsequent poses you can turn on the "Whole model" filter, select any one bone and Force keyframe>"Only in filtered channels that pre-exist" and all the bones that were keyed in the first pose will get complete keys again, even if you hadn't needed to move them for your new pose and it does it without creating keys on hidden/rig/fan bones (since they have no channels in existence yet). This nuance is something the one-bone case can not show.