robcat2075

It's "THIS" close

Hi Paul, i just caught your note about your back. That's very disappointing news to hear. I hope there's a way to turn that around, for your sake and for us as we all do value seeing your work and your input on the forum.

thanks! That's good ol' TSM2

Me... I'd just keyframe the Dust thingy to be where the foot is when I need it to be there instead of constraining it to the foot. Then it could hang around as long as I wanted after the foot left. In the TAoA:M tut I think they were trying to incorporate the Dust effect into a Walk cycle action.

>Curve>Interpolation Method> ... sets either Spline, Zero Slope, Hold or Linear as the new default behavior for your curve the original default behavior is Spline (but under some circumstances A:M will make a Zero-slope CP. I'm not sure of the rules on that)

To set the default interpolation for a whole channel, select any CPs in it then >Curve>Interpolation Method> your choice If you >Interpolation Method>Your Choice your are setting interpolation for just the selected CPs. These override whatever default you have set. If you want them to observe your new default, select them and >Interpolation Method>Default

I forget if there are dramatic differences. Try a few and render a few frames to see what happens. In the "Eat My Dust" tut in TAoA:M the picture of teh knight with dust at his foot shows some turbulence being used to give it a varied look.

Generally, the object that is selected is the one that gets copied and pasted to/from.

I meant Turbulence. There are choices for Noise for Turbulence. AFAIK, Distortion boxes only work on actual CPs. Use scale. Scale can be keyframed, btw.

I tried your model in V16 and I was able to save OK after making the new pose. But when I tried in V11.1i, which I think you have, I got the error. When I tried in V12 I was able to re save successfully. Ballie_half_bones_05_v12.mdl However, when I do a test model from scratch I can save successfully from any version. There is something unusual or corrupted about your model possibly. I know we were making bone hiding poses back in V11 and it seemed to work fine then. I recommend you upgrade, but if your CD will let you run v12 (you can get the installer on the Hash updates page) you might try that.

And what version are you using? Do Help>About A:M

He looks menacing! I think you've definitely got the drifting dust effect going on the spherical version better. In any event the cone is probably too specific a shape. The sphere is more cloudlike. I guess you're doing like in TAoA:M where they used the same sphere for both feet? If you used a separate one for each foot you could have the dust linger longer and take longer to settle. I think maybe the sphere should be scaled to be bigger and flatter at its largest extent. These volumetric effects are very basic approximations of the look of dust in the air. Adding "Noise" to them helps make them look less uniform. If we wanted to get fancy we'd probably use a particle emmitter to blow out a bunch of particles when the foot stomped down and those could be blown about be a Force. That's a bit deeper end stuff. That's something I've been thinking of toying with but havent' gotten around to it yet.

So far so good. What I would do is continue from there and try to save after every step until you find the one that is the tipping point. If you then could post the model immediately prior to that, then we'd have something to look at. And of course, you're not resaving over the same model name every time. I've never had the this trouble, what you've got is unusual, but perhaps we can narrow the problem down.

It's got a name so you must have something saved. You load that, and start a new pose then do nothing else and save.... what happens?

You've never saved this model in any form before this?

Here's how it works for me: BoneVisibilityPose.mov

OK, you're making a pose for it. Try it with a model with one bone. What happens?

I take that back. There is an Eye icon in the bones properties window so it must be a "property" Is that what you are referring to?

technically a bone doesn't have a "Visibility" property, but you can turn it off by clicking on the eye icon next to it in the PWS. Do you mean something else? Welcome to the forum!

Ah...it's also known as the -100% Y force under dynamics I believe particle emitters also have a "force" which if set to +100% will counteract the -100% of the chor.

Gravity is a global setting in the chor properties

thanks, Mark, those will work well!

Those are great looking characters, Nancy. My "crit" would be that crash cymbals don't have a lip on the edge like a pot lid does. Or maybe those really are pot lids.

A contest with longer form works is not the way to develop character animation skills. That needs to be done in small increments. Why do we need to vote on them? Why does somebody need to win? That's valid. We're kind of doing that already with all the non-contest projects we're doing here. And more of that would be great. I just mentioned voting because "contest" was mentioned.

I think you're close on the fairy dust. Maybe it needs more viscosity or less gravity so it doesn't drop so fast like water or sparks. You just want it to settle like dust. i like the glowing fairy effect!