robcat2075

It's still in the larval stage, so there's no deadline or even startline yet. I'm sure Thom will be allowed whatever we come up with..

I will be curious to see the finished product!

Sorry, I was doing it all from memory. Choreography = Chor You're right , there is a property called "cycle length" that governs how long the action works in the chor. I was thinking of the actual length of teh action when it was created in the action window. The motion of a walk is about 1 second. I find that the action sets it's "Cycle length" to whatever the blue bar length is when you drop the action on the character. If I adjust the blue bar before I drop the action on the character, the action sets its "cycle length" to the length of the blue bar However, if I adjust the blue bar to be longer after I have dropped the action on the character, the duration of the action in the chor doesn't automatically adjust itself to fit the new time. You can however, set the "cycle length" to whatever that new time is and the action will fill out the new length of time. I prefer to use "ease" in these situations so I can set the duration of the action exactly myself rather than rely on the automatic mechanism of A:M.

Yes, we could make a chor that contains the camera motion so that the motion of the wall leading in matches the motion of the wall leading out and they would cut together exactly. Each animator could slide those keys to make room in the middle for the time they need.

Actions create constraints pretty well once you export the Action as a model. How did you solve the problem of fixing the offsets for the new model?

Welcome to the forum! Looks promising!

Thanks. I was hoping it created constraints in some fashion. If we had a plugin that would create constraints (based on a list given to it), that would pretty much do what TSM2 does.

The cycle length is 5 seconds? do you really mean the animation is 5 seconds? The TAoA:M exercise doesn't direct you to make the walk cycle 5 seconds long. That would be impossibly long for a character to take two steps. But it isn't the length of the walk cycle that needs to change here. It's the length of the choreography animation that needs to be longer so each cycle of the walk has more time. That's a very long path. The character will need to cycle very quickly to cover it all in 5 seconds Open up your Project Workspace Window (ALT 1) Stretch the blue bar of your Choreography out to a longer time and the character will take longer to walk the path. OR... Scroll down to the Chor, then down to the character. Expand that until you see the path constraint and select the path constraint . Then go to the properties window and see the property called "ease" Set your time counter to 0:00 and set ease to 0% Then set the time counter to some large number like 15 seconds and then set ease to 100%. Ease controls how far along the path a character is and you want him to go from 0% to 100% in some time longer than 5 seconds.

Exactly what operations does the riginstaller.hxt plugin do?

How long is the animation? There needs to be enough time in the animation for the character to cover the path at a reasonable speed. Show us a wire frame that shows the path in the scene.

I just made a simple test of a ball constrained to a bone in a character. When I imported that chor into another chor the constraint survived fine. Something else is going wrong in your situation. Why are you importing a chor into another chor?

There's a reason both Maya and XSI ran out of money.

More INs please! We should have at least 10 to make a go of this. options I was thinking of... - a bare room with doors on each side. they can furnish it any way they want. - just doors on each side. No walls! The doors are like portals to another dimension. -

Briefly, these things typically have to do with the "path" to the target being not quite right after the import. You can fix this in a text editor if you can ascertain the correct and replace it over the incorrect path. Compare that path in the file before the import and in the file after. Of course, you saved a new version and reloaded after that import. more detail would be needed about what is new "now".

That's a nice look! My suggestion would be to find a way to make it look faster. If you could build your set so it repeats you could move it faster and not run out.

btw, the "next room" premise isn't decided yet. If we come up with one more people love, that's OK too. But we do have to come up with one.

Happy accidents are how the concepts of good composition developed.

And you can also turn on the scale tool with the S key. TSM2 hint... get the spine bones scaled and in place before you do the arms or legs TSM2 hint... always use the Rotate, Scale and traNslate tools to maneuver your bones. That makes the children of a bone move along with it and stay aligned. Don't just click and drag on a bone. TSM2 hint... keep the two bones straight that make the upper arm. Likewise keep the two bones straight that make the lower arm. And this rule applies to the parts of the leg too.

Last year we got together and did as an everyone-can-join-in A:M forum project and much fun was had. Is there interest in doing another one this year? JohnL3D came up with a great linking premise which I'll call "Next Room": A character enters from door on the left of the screen, does something, then exits thru a door on the right. No other specifics yet, feedback and input below. Interest? EDIT: Proposed plan: 1) Premise: "Next Room" 2) Any character you want. Your own or any stock A:M character 3) I will provide a base CHOR that incorporates the doors and the intro and outro camera motion, between which you can put anything you want. 4) Length: Any length you want as long as it includes the minimal time of the base CHOR. 20 seconds would probably be very, very long! 6) Audio optional 5) you submit your rendered 16:9 footage. Res to be decided. 6) Deadline: end of September 2010 If there aren't immediate objections to this plan I will move forward with it. Proposed plan:[/b] 1) Premise: "Bus Stop" 2) Any character you want. Your own or any stock A:M character 3) Each segment begins with a bus pulling away to reveal a bus stop. Your character does something and the segment ends with another bus pulling up in fron of the bus stop hiding the character. 4) Length: Any length you want. 20 seconds would probably be very, very long! 6) Audio optional 5) you submit your rendered 16:9 footage. Res to be decided. 6) Deadline: end of September 2010 See official project roll out in new thread.

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That looks exciting!

Making the left dragon mostly silhouette is a nice compositional device.

Another fine Spleen production! I like your directing, the choice of shots usually works well. The animation is very basic of course. Upgrading that will take determined study. The single best book in that regard (not that it is a total solution) is Richard Williams' "The Animator's Survival Kit". CG animators tend to dismiss it, but once you get that it is about how to pose your character, not how to draw it, you'll see that it has much good advice for what we do. Probably the surest upgrade for these productions would be the lighting. You're making really nice looking models and lighting them in a more interesting fashion would improve the appearance of them overall.

I should also note that after the cloth was simmed in that test I moved Thom down a bit overall to close the gap between his feet and the mattress that "Collision Tolerance" creates between any cloth and deflector. It might be possible to set that to 0. I've never tried.

Here's a test of the cloth idea. It's not quite the deformation I'd expect from a mattress. matressJump_mp4.mov PRJ. Note the settings on the cloth. High stiffness. matress04simmed.zip Cloth sims need to start out NOT in contact with any deflectors, so the mattress starts out above the ground and Thom is lowered into place after the start so he doesn't start with his feet on the cloth mattress. If you need something more characteristic of a stuffed mattress rigging it or animating the shape may be the way to go.