robcat2075

That will work better. I like to put in the major landmarks first, like the eyesockets and the mouth and the profile contour and then stitch in the splines that bridge between them

Check that your hand-drawn rotos agree with each other as much as possible on the placement of details or you'll go nuts trying to model to them.

How about if we didn't have any fart jokes?

I'm not trying to laugh at you, but I'm not sure what you are describing. If you have scaled your keyframes and they don't exactly fall on whole frames, you'll still get something rather similar on the nearest neighboring frame.

This is one of those moments where text is inadequate to convey meaning. I can sort of dimly envision what you are saying but there are many uncertainties that leave me... uncertain.

That looks great! (Idea for next revision... ghost waves as he comes by on the turntable)

In the Pose window or in the Properties window under "User Properties" If you do this while you are looking at the model in the model window and then resave, that will be the default for the model If you do this while the model is selected in a chor or action window, that will be the state only for that chor or action.

One not-quite-related tip... when you are animating anything with this AM2001 rig, turn off the "balance" and "balance steady" sliders. Auto-balance is a bad feature you don't want.

What Spleen said. It looks like there's a small black area on his right leg in that Cp assignment view. That suggests some CPs are still assigned to the model bone. Make sure you have Lock CPs off while you are lassoing CPs

There's a few things I'm not sure about. You have two actions runcycle(which uses stride length) and runcycle16(which doesn't use stride length) The one with stride length has the stride length mis set. The stride length should represent the distance from toe to toe or heel to heel rather than from rear heel to front toe. Heel to toe will be too big a value and will make the feet appear to slip if you use the action in a conventional manner on a path. Is that why in runcycletest you use the one without stride length and are manually advancing the character?

I remember him making his last post. That was a disappointing loss.

In the movie I put up his slipping is small, maybe less than the length of a toe. Is that what you are referring to?

scroll? you mean scrub thru the timeline? In "runcycletest1" he looks to be moving forward.

Here's what i see in the front view. dblhelixruntestH264.mov I'm not saying Pixar will be calling when they see this, but he does appear to be moving forward and his feet appear to be not slipping very much. Tell me what you mean by "skiing". His feet not lifting much?

There are two chors in the one PRJ runcyclebuild has him running in place runcycletest1 has him moving forward.

When i load that and play Runcycletest1 he is moving approximately forward, not sliding in place. What part is not what you expected?

I was impressed that Rodney's worked because I don't know how he got that to stay all lined up without bones and constraints.

Here's a simple bones version SphereandBars.mov Using snap to grid when modeling and boning helps make everything align right. The two bones have "Aim At" constraints to the sphere with "Stretch to Reach, Z-Axis Only" turned on BarAndSphereJoint01.prj

Possibility... Each bar is a separate piece, cylinders that have the same diameter as spheres that are placed at each junction. Each bar is boned along its length and "scale to reach" is used to make each one size itself to reach between the spheres. If the bar ends and spheres are aligned exactly they will appear as continuous. The spheres are animated and the bars follow along with them.

Yes, you can vary the shape and size and distance from 0,0,0 to get different results

Hey, how about some antennae on that snail? Here's an example of using the dup wiz for a shell. Vary the "scale" values for different shapes.

I used to have a tut up somewhere on how to use the dup wizard to spin out a seashell shape but I can't find it .

"patch Image"? create a group, and select apply patch image and choose an image you have loaded already

In the PWS or the "Timeline" window click on the small red,green,blue icon at the bottom of the right pane. This turns on the curve view. If you have "Show bias" (same icon as for modeling mode) turned on you can manually adjust the slope of a selected CP. you can also group select several CPs and set their slope in the menu or by using the 7 8 9 0 keys at the top of the keyboard. You can also use P or O to peak or unpeak CPs, like in modeling mode my Keyframe basics vid covers a bit of this. See the screencam tuts link in my signature.

i won't be able to jump into this on Oct 6 so new deadline October 20 This means if you thought you didn't have enough time to do a segment, you now have 6 weeks to give it a try! Of course you can still turn in your segment on October 6 if you feel you're done.