robcat2075

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!

Now they're lopsided again. it's taking longer to go up than to come back down. I recall Jeff Lew saying on his DVD "You will live in the curve editor". I had one AnimationMentor mentor who didn't mess with curves much, but that's because he was keying everything on every single frame. I really think that's the hard way to do it.

My bouncing ball up there... that took me 36 hours to get there. But that was my first time. Once you "get it", you can do these right in a few minutes. That last one is much better. But consider ... the first and second fall from the peak to the ground are both 10 frames even though they are not falling from the same height. The last hop and the next to the last hop are almost the same duration even though they do not reach nearly the same height. Note that falling from 2X a height does not take 2X the time. Gravity is complicated.

or not

I'd prefer a contest somewhat more focused than "anything". It needs some boundary so that there is some possibility of comparing apples to apples when we vote on them.

Certainly the ball is not slowing down as it approaches the ground and that is an improvement! - how can the ball take the same amount of time for high bounces as low ones? It can't. - your Y channels look like very flat half ovals rather than parabolas which is packing too much motion into the frames around the ground contact. Gravity has a way of adding about the same percentage of drop to every frame and a parabola in the Y channel mimics this well. This is different than lingering at the top and then racing to the ground. The acceleration of gravity is a very particular look that you want to get to recognize. -render these without motion blur so it is easier to see the location of the ball at each frame.

The assignment was to have a rigid ball bounce several times, no squash, no stretch, no personality, so that's what I tried to do first and at first the ball just moved from left to right as it bounced. The assignment required no more than that. It didn't even require that the ball move horizontally, it could bounce in place. I recall a stated time limit of 5 seconds so i was working to fit in that. the contacts and the peaks both. Not that those looked right at first, but fortunately I already knew about what channels did (not very well explained in the AnimationMentor lecture. Their first lecture on Bouncing Ball was easily their most confusing.) so i started tinkering with the shape and size of the vertical channel until the bouncing looked right. This is where i discovered the whole parabola thing and how to make an object accelerate all the way until it hits the ground, like gravity does. (i'm not sure the lecture even mentioned gravity. I got the sense that some of these animators doing the lecturing had never been in a science class. ) I also recall looking at some other students' WIPs and thinking theirs didn't look right, like maybe the ball was dropping faster than it rose up. Then I looked at mine again and realized I had the same problem! That's where I discovered the symmetrical parabola thing and how just a little deviation from that would give a very different feel to the flight of the ball. For example a ball that fell faster than it rose looked like a basketball being dribbled by an invisible hand. At this point I had a keyframe on the horizontal channel for every one on the vertical, but i noticed the result was pretty much a straight line and if i deleted the intermediate Cps I'd get a perfectly straight line. I realized that the horizontal momentum of a ball is rather independent of its vertical motion, so i could leave my up and down bouncing alone and just change the horizontal channel to make the ball bounce in place, or ping pong, or bounce out of the frame, or reverse when it hit the side of the frame like it hit a wall... then I realized how easy it would be to add a few blocks in the scene and have the ball appear to bounce off them. But I made certain to full fill the minimum terms of the assignment and that's why I cut the animation loop to start at the top of the ball's first arc. The ball falls and bounces several times...assignment done... the ball getting hit by the block and deflecting off the wedge, I cut and pasted that onto the end. But all this channel editing stuff is putting the cart before the horse. Bad mechanics is like alcohol, you have to recognize you have a problem before you can fix it. If you look at your bouncing ball and don't see that it's slowing down before it hits the ground, how will you know that that needs fixing in the channels? Teaching that "observation" thing is probably the hardest. Shhh! Don't tell anyone about the parabolas.

that looks wonderful, Jesse! Congratulations on getting that done!