robcat2075

That black robe could use some sort of an edge texture or backlight to show it's shape a bit more

Remember you can key any bone anywhere it needs to be at any time. Just because a rig doesn't have a heel lifter, you can still pose the character so the heel looks lifted. But if I were going to do much animation with a character I'd re rig it with a more capable rig like TSM2.

hmmm. That's asking for trouble I think.

Yes. In your action you can measure how far forward the character moved. Use that as a basis for eye balling it. Easy to do since youcan scrub the chor in real time to look for jumps. In the main chor action. The marching band scene in TWO did this for all the band members. 2_01_80? (be warned that it takes about an hour to load on my PC. YOu'll need to hide all but a few characters and change them to bounding box mode to scrub anything) You might try dropping one marching band winkie in a chor There were two aspects to the idea. You might have gotten the first, but I'll just repeat/restate that. It could be done but the current copy/paste + thoughtful brain power can get the same result so it's unlikely thei feature will be implemented. As Martin woudl say it's possible like going to Mars is possible. Ultimately the complications of canned walk cycles are good reasons to animate walks directly. At AnimationMentor the lecture on walks began with a clip of every animator they knew saying how much they hated doing walks. So it's not a trivial thing. But the walk cycle is more trouble than it's worth if you need to do things besides walk.

I suppose one way to find the direction of a spline is to attach something to it with a path constraint and see where it goes as you increase the ease from 0% to 100%

You can completely, totally, absolutely, positively save yourself time and trouble by animating your walks directly just like any other character motion. Neither of those characters has many steps to take anyway. Have you watched the vid in my signature on blocking out walks? Watch that. Richard Williams goes thru it all in his book too.... Key frame the heel contact poses first ... then keyframe the passing poses between those...then keyframe the breakdowns between those... once you understand the motion of two steps it's easy to make all the other steps. And if you don't understand the motion of two steps what are the chances your walkcycle is going to be worth repeating anyway?

I'm doubtful but can you show an example of a decal reacting to this? I'm not sure about this either. It seems to be the spline that is closest to the "back" of the model but not always. If you look at the UV map view after you apply a cylindrical decal you can see some strange choices about where the split happens, but somehow it all fits together in the render. Note that the Repeat X value for a Cylindrical or Spherical decal needs to be 3 to wrap the decal once around the model.

For characters, I just place the model bone once at the beginning of the scene to get the character in the right area and leave it. After that everything is posing the character parts There has to be some structure in the model that all else is a child of. In A:M it's the model bone.

Our goal is to use as few keyframes a possible and manage the interpolation inbetween, but a lot of times you just gotta go in and nail something down where it needs to be nailed down.

You certainly may. Or you can keep it top secret, whatever you feel will get you the best result.

I like that bird. Is he new? Or did I see him on the ark?

We have that option... animate the forward moving cycle and jump the model bone forward at the start of every new cycle. This is easy. Set the interpolation of the channel from foot contact to foot lift to be "linear" What do you mean by "wherever you wanted"? I'll disagree with that. There's about 10 basic ways ( and a zillion variations ) for a computer to interpolate motion between two keyframes; in a walk (and in all character animation) the "way" that needs to be used is different for each pair of keyframes. There's no way for A:M ( or Maya or Softimage or 3DS or any other app) to know what choice to make. A:M only knows it's moving bones around. YOU are the one who knows those bones represent human body parts and you need to make those interpolation choices for A:M. In hand drawn animation the "Animator" would draw the key frames and the "inbetweener" would fill in the missing frames. But the Animator had to explain the interpolation in every case to the Inbetweener. Richard Williams spend a lot of pages discussing what would go wrong when an Animator just assumed the Inbetweener would get it right. (He doesn't call it Interpolation, but that's what the Inbetweener is doing) He's not wasting your time with those inbetweener stories, they are absolutely relevant to CG, because... In CG, A:M is your Inbetweener. If you manage it right you get great results. I f you leave it to do the default each time, you won't.

Good question. It's possible the bus may zip by very fast sometimes so not much idle time may be needed. Let's say give your scene about an extra second on each end. Ideally you wont' have your characters frozen but they'll be doing some simple moving hold thing. Consider also that the right side will be the first revealed when the bus departs and first covered when the bus arrives.

Test your render time early and plan ahead for whatever that is!

You've got more power than I do!

It looks too fast partly because your animating 12 frame steps but rendering at 30 fps animate at 24 fps. Almost all animation uses that convention. He's also stepping too far for a casual walk. I know i've said this: And Richard Williams shows it in numerous diagrams. The body should be heading DOWN thru the heel contact. If it's higher on the next frame that is not going down, that is going up. Look at the diagram on pg 102 (my edition), the one labeled "useless fact" at the top. Does the body go down or up after the heel contact? he's showing you exactly what to do... but you gotta do it. you jump the model bone forward if you intend to use this as a cycle. Or... just animate more steps forward.

Rule 11) By submitting your entry you are saying it's ok for us to use it and add it to the pile and put the whole thing on the web. For anyone incorporating sound in their work... a) It's sound you have the rights to. No commercial music or sound tracks. b ) I'll add directions later on how to send your audiotrack so it can be put in synch with your image series

In your options panel set rendering to "use camera settings"

Welcome to the forum! Download or CD version? -If you have the CD version go updates to go get the latest installer for the CD version. The most recent A:M is v15j+ -If you have the download version I presume you've got that already, but check Help>About just in case. -The community window is a rather unused feature, so for the moment close it rather than log in. It's possible that's a firewall problem, but I'm just guessing. I don't have Vista, but I recall they should turn off "Desktop Composition". I think you on the icon for A:M and set that in properties. Try that much and when that doesn't work... come back with more questions. I know lots of people use A:M on Vista.

If it were called "meaningless hip position averaging" most people would think less of it.

I think you have something set wrong. The descriptions dont' make sense. You need to post a screen capture so we can see what you are doing. I'm not sure what you mean by this. are you on a mac or PC?

You're in completely the wrong mode to do what you want to do. You have gone into bone editing mode. It is not for changing things while you animate. That is for setting up the character before you do any animation. This is a mode you almost never use from the chor. Use it in the model window only.

Our 2010 Community Project is "Bus Stop". Everyone can play! 1) Download this zip containing the set 2010_Forum_Project_Update2.zip (Thanks to mtpeak2 for making the fabulous set!) 2) unzip it to your hard drive 3) load the PRJ for your version of A:M. There are versions for v13, v14 and v15. We don't have a version for before v13; not yet anyway. 4) Animate your scene in the Choreography. Every scene begins with a bus pulling away to reveal this view of a bus stop. You animate what is happening at this bus stop after the bus pulls away...until the next bus arrives to cover up the scene again. You don't animate the bus. I'll add that in post. 5) you can use your characters or any stock A:M characters 6) shorter is probably better. 6b) Use your good judgment on content. I reserve the grand power to not use something if it's unsuitable for mass viewing but I'm sure that will not be a problem. 7) leave the camera and lights where they are. 8) you can add sound or leave your scene silent 8) Rendering Update: In your Options Panel set rendering to "use camera Settings". That will load the settings stored with the camera when you go to render. The camera is set to render to a JPG series. An image series was chosen instead of Quicktime so you wouldn't have to render your animation all in one stretch. Resolution: The camera is set to render at 720x405. If you prefer you may up the resolution to 854x480 when you go to render. This is 40% more pixels and will take 40% more time to render. I'll edit the video at the larger size and upscale smaller renders to fit. Either size is acceptable. 9) Get done by: October 20 27 10) I will edit together everyone's segment ask questions below if you have them Have fun! I'm sure we will see some great stuff!

Sometimes an exceedingly bad idea gets a really good name.

You don't need those. Those produce no benefit for animators. They do not make anything steady and they do not make anything balanced. Always turn those off if you have a rig that has them.