robcat2075

They are constrained to a spline that goes around the sock rather than along the length. Less stretching I guess. Back to Punch now... I import my roto drawings into A:M and align them in front and side views. I grayed the white background of my rotos in Photoshop so I'd be able to see the white spline lines on them. This is the profile spline down the center of the head. I'm just trying to hit the major peaks and valleys. I might need to stitch more CPs in for detail later, but for now I try to do as few as possible. Some of the shapes, like the top of the head, the nose and the peculiar chin could be made quickly with lathe shapes so what I'll do is copy a portion of the profile spline, lathe it, and move those into place. Here the nose and chin have been lathed, moved into place and bent into shape:

Do you have models or any other assets in the PRJ that are saved external to the PRJ? They may be the location of the odd rotos.

If you can post a sample PRJ that does the problem for you you'll get more testers. I'd have to get out the manual again to make sure I was setting it up right to start with. That's working pretty well! Some drag on those locks of hair would make them look even better. Don't know about the simulating order. Let us know what you find out!

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like some very interesting detective work on your part!

looks good! AO shouldn't be a problem with hooks or AO would be a problem with almost every A:M model. Check your normals and check for weird spline continuity.

back to the sock for a moment, here's my best success so far with tighter cloth. The cloth is riding pretty tight on the hand form without blowing up the simulation. No pass thrus either. sockTighter3DH.mov I was also able to close the mouth a bit more here. When cloth gets caught between two deflectors with no room to spare beyond the collision tolerance, that's when things start flying all over the place But this cloth is working so well it's tempting to think you could make a few rough forms for the body of your character, throw a shirt and pants on him and ... no more CP weighting!

Ding Ding Ding! He played "Citizen Kane" and was the voice of "The Shadow" No, it's not a great caricature, I admit.

that's closer!

Very clever mechanism! I have increased respect for dragon flys after seeing that. We used to have huge dragon flies in Minnesota where I grew up but I don't see many here in Texas.

Nope, nope. Here's a clue: "He was a famous citizen. I thought his identity would be beyond the shadow of a doubt!" moving along... since Nancy blew my cover on the Punch Puppet I guess I'll start making him. Here's my research... (The last guy just about has it modeled for me.) So... next I try to distill those down to side and front rotoscope views:

Show us your screencam movie of it acting differently than the functionality I described.

BTW, Dllb,welcome to the A:M forum! A:M has powers far beyond what its price would suggest; if you find anything else that doesn't seem to make sense, this forum is the place to ask! With enough info someone will have an answer.

Fun Fact: A:M was the very first 3D program to run on Windows. Notice that every button (except the file buttons) will be greyed out when you close the Customize window (because there's nothing to do with them) and that when you open a Chor window the Modeling tools and most other non-pertinent tools will rehide themselves.

Aha! This is quite different than not being able to add a menu at all as originally stated. A:M menus are "context aware", meaning they only appear when they are usable. The Modeling Tools can only be visible when actual model editing can be done: When a model window is the currently selected window (most common) OR when you have selected a model in a chor window and have turned on Modeling Mode (rarer). This reduces visual clutter in the interface and prevents trying to invoke, say, the Lathe Tool while animating character bones in the chor. Similar circumstances for other toolsets such as Bones which are only available when editing a model in Bones Mode. Some Toolbars such as "Views" make sense in almost any context and can be visible in almost any context. Also A toolbar may be visible but certain buttons grayed out if they are not usable inteh current circumstances. Bottom line, not a bug. This is standard Windows interface functionality.

That looks wonderful. I hope everyone you send it to appreciates that they got a new work made just for them!

That's actually the concept! Mr.Caricature would be the puppeteer in the middle. I've been looking into modeling a "Punch" puppet with the two arms Bzzzt! No, not Art Carney. I'll add that to the list

If you haven't already, make sure you set the "Balance" and "Balance Rigid" pose sliders to 0 before you start keyframing any AM2001 rig character (like Thom). And leave them off. Nice looking character. The side to side swaying looks odd. I think if you posed out the walk better you'd be way ahead. And I just happen to have made some videos on that. Look in the tuts link in my sig and there are 3 vids that talk about posing out a walk. It's about a generic walk the mechanics and workflow are similar And if you're not sure about setting Keyframes right, there's also the Keyframing Opti0ons video that introduces that.

Now in cross-eyed stereoscopic vision! sock3DH.mov That's possible. The shot is so brief (11 seconds!) that I'm not inclined to do cuts or close ups. The actual animation (if it happens) wont' have a view quite like this test.

ya know... in the time since you first asked you could have animated those things. Like I said before, post some WIPs and people will give you pointers...

Well, this is just NOT the case! I just reproduced the exact same problem on two other partitions on the same (multiboot) PC: That doesn't sound like a different computer. In four years on this forum this is the first I recall this coming up. It's probably not "many" people. All those different versions over four years... it would have come up. But since you can repeat it on your PC, I'd suggest making a screencam movie of it happening and submit it as an AMReport. I can't guarantee it will get fixed since they implemented that feature a long time ago and it's been working for them and us and all that ever since. When they get the bug report and try the new menu thing and it works fine... what is the next step from there? How do you fix a bug you can't make happen? Another thing you might try is to in the gray between buttons and use this menu to turn on a toollbar menu This dockable menus stuff is really a functionality of Windows' bag of tricks. A:M is one of the few programs that enables as many of the possibilities as it does. I was trying to think of another program you might test that takes it this far. Macromedia Freehand is the only other one I have that does. Sadly, its menus work just fine for me also. Copy the master.lic file from your old install to your new one. I have multiple versions of v15 installed but all in the same partition. I don't know if the partition thing is the issue. I know Mac user have to have a separate license if they want to run A:M on their PC emulator.

I did a vid on this a while back http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=241122

Sorry, when you said 2003 I just thought v13 when really it was the v10 you had. Since all your versions have this problem and none of mine do (I have v10.5 installed and it does menus fine also) I'm going to say it's a problem peculiar to your computer and not something the thatt Hash will be able to re enact to study. You can drag individual icons from the commands tab to that new toolbar you created. V15 is dramatically more stable than the V10 versions. I recommend it. I only have that V10.5 installed so I can test for differences in the way it handled stuff versus today's versions. It does happen. But I wouldn't' want to go back to v10 full time.

here's the list of changes from v15e thru v15h

By the way... Welcome to the A:M forum!

Hey, I just caught it. That looks wonderful! Fine work, Gerry!