robcat2075

TSM2 rig test...

Some of those are bit busy for my taste but you can enter whatever suits your taste and fits the rules...

He's got FINgers...

How many times has this happened to you? You line up the perfect Birds Eye View to move that spline or rotate that bone and then you realize you need to go to a different Birds Eye View to hide some mesh first... and then you'll need to refind your current view! D'oh! Or maybe you sneeze while you're Turning the view and everything spins away to who-knows-where! Gah! If only you could get your view back! When you are in a standard Orthogonal view the Numberpad 7 key will take you back to the last-used Birds Eye View... but that doesn't work when you're already in a Birds Eye View! You need the amazing Birds Eye View Queue! With Birds Eye View Queue you can click back through any of your previous views and click forward again to your more recent views. Birds Eye View Queue has three buttons on your interface... View Undo, View Redo, and Clear View Undo Stack They have Keyboard shortcuts... View Undo: ALT+SHIFT+Z View Redo: ALT+SHIFT+Y ... but you can customize those at Tools>Customize>Keyboard>View Birds Eye View Queue is one of the hot new features of v19. Save yourself time! Spare yourself frustration! Start using Birds Eye View Queue Today! Many thanks to Steffen Gross for implementing this feature!

I look forward to seeing your entry!

That is news to me! I didn't know anyone had gotten that working. I'll give their 30 day trial a trial when I have time.

Here is a quick overview of using Cylinder mapping on a more complex shape... Here is the PRJ if you want to look at the Pose sliders and stuff... PunchMapping-->E--->_BI_Projects-->hash 2-->SockPuppet-->Punch PunchMapping.zip

Gerald, is there a tut on how to get the 3DCoat painting back in to A:M? Because splines are continuous across CPs, and the shape on one side depends on what the shape is on the other side It is not practical to make a split between patches and spread them apart. Try this: Lathe a vase. Make a Pose slider for it. In the Pose, go to Muscle mode. With the Pose slider at 100%, do a "Flatten". Now slide the Pose slider from 0% (original shape) to 100% ("Flattened"). VaseFlatten.prj You can see that Flatten does a good job of unwrapping most of the mesh around the vertical axis but one set of patches at the back have to be stretched way, way, way out for the rest of them to get flat. That stretching also distorts the splines of their neighbor patches. The Flatten method is good for decaling the patches that are not the very stretched patches or their immediate neighbors. So, yes, with Flatten you would need at least two decals, one for your flattened front and another for your flattened back. You could include some patches in both and use an alpha channel to fade between them. I like to use Cylinder mapping instead of flatten. If a shape can be arranged around the vertical axis, cylinder mapping lets you cover all of it with one decal and just one seam at the back. I'm not sure what this is asking.

Examples and Context. the red ones are the most important. Kinematic - makes the end of a chain of bones seek a target (without having to pose all the bones in the chain). Legs are the most common use Aim at - knee and elbow pointers are the most common use. You could control two eyeballs at once by making them aim at a common target null or bone. See "Simplest IK Leg" and "Adding an IK Leg" on my Tutorials page for examples of Kinematic and Aim At use. Orient Like - The most common use is for "fan" bones. You can see an example of a fan bone in" CP Weighting vs. Fan-Boning" Translate to - A bone that is a child of another bone will inherit both Translation and Rotation from its parent. A Translate To constraint is a way of making a bone get only translation from another bone. A head that is on the top of a spine could follow the spine without having to rotate like it. Roll Like - useful for creating partial rotation. When your hand turns (as if it were turning a door knob), the skin by your wrist turns the most, the skin by your elbow not much and the skin in the middle about half way in between. Putting the CPs for the middle skin on a bone that is constrained to Roll Like the hand, but only 50%, will simulate that... without following any of the hand rotation on other axes. Aim Roll (Handle) At - permits a target to influence only the Z-axis roll of a Bone. "Gas Pump Hose" on my Tutorials page uses Aim Roll At to keep all the bones in a chain aligned. Path - Often seen in tutorials where you animate a walk "cycle" and make a waling character follow a path. A more practical use is to make chains of bones conform to curvy paths. See BasicWormCrawl in https://forums.hash.com/topic/45166-path-constraint-for-a-bone-chain/?tab=comments#comment-387426 Surface Constraint creation example. Euler, Spherical and Translate Limits are rarely used in characters. Group is like a Translate To Constraint to make a bone follow a Group of CPs rather than a bone. I use this to attach buttons to groups in simulated cloth see Chicago Bears fan in simcloth Hawaiian shirt with buttons and collar

Further adornments... Inserting the head ornaments...

I appreciate your persistence!

Je regrette il ñ'y a pas une édition Français! Does this make any sense? I copied a paragraph from the PDF into Google Translate. I don't think it understands the CG meaning of "translate to" (to move something from one point to another point) but it looks serviceable otherwise.

A cube is the absolute worst-case example for trying to unfold a spline model. I'm still thinking of a good answer. 3,4,5 are no longer necessary Once you have the Pose with the unfolded mesh visible in a window, do RMB-->Apply Snapshot It will prompt you for a save location and resolution. That will grab the screen, save the image with the splines on it, import it back into your project AND... stamp it back on your model! Wow. 6 is also not necessary. Poses only affect your model if they are set to ON or some non-zero slider value. You can leave them in your model in case you need to revisit them for some reason.

Hi Teo, Do you have the Technical Reference? You can download TECHREF.pdf at ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/docs/ It begins discussing constraints at pg. 140 and describes each individually except the recently added "Group" constraint and "Bullet" constraints. Aim At, Translate To, Orient Like and Kinematic are the four important ones. They are used more than all the others combined, a hundred times over. The others are great to have but those four do most of the work. I have never used "Aim Roll Like Two" If you still have questions, ask.

A test of a webbed appendage. @createo @CodyP24 You had previously wondered about CP weighting... in this example, the splines in the middle are weighted 50/50 to the bones on each side to create the behavior of a stretchy, flexible membrane. FinTesth800.mp4

The spline over the top of the head doesn't have enough CPs to make the fin shape so i add just enough to define the contour, then stitch in splines to connect it to the rest of the head... Eyebags added. if I turn him white he looks like Grandpa Munster...

I'm reminded of a network exec's explanation of why the Leslie Nielsen comedy, "Police Squad" had failed on television. "The problem was, you had to watch it."

I position the ear so i know where splines will have to go to eventually. Most of the face is filled in by extruding and reshaping splines from the edge of the mouth and then when no more fill is needed, splines are extended to connect to adjacent edges. Pseudo time-lapse...

I will add that a Pose is the most common place to create and store the constraints that make a model's "rig" work. This used to be done in an Action, then the Action was "dropped" on the model each time the model was used, but a Pose is saved with a model and can be saved ON so it never needs to be turned on again.

You got that by changing the gravity! Very interesting.

That model seems to have all the normals outward already, so Renumber and Refind Normals doesn't change anything? It also still has the problem I noted above with the patch that shades well only if its normal is pointing in. 5006Normaltrouble.mov

To make the elfin ear I thought I could lathe out a tall cup and push the splines down on one side... But after quite a bit of pushing and pulling of CPs I wasn't happy with the shading the stretched patches were making... So I deleted all but the front edge of the ear... ...and resplined between the edges with more conventional contours...

Before I surface the outside of the face I extrude and extend some splines from the inside edge of the mouth to make a simple oral cavity. Just in case he ever opens his mouth wide enough to see inside. The scalp is extruded up and over from the brow spline.

Over the transom... Each of those is a deep topic, but.... CP weighting allows you to apportion the influence of more than one bone to a CP, rather than having it rigidly attached to just one bone. This is useful for the stretches and shrinks that surfaces between bones do, such as at the elbow or knee. Fan bones are another way of creating that in-between behavior, but slightly different outcomes than CP weighting. At the Sept 26, 2020 Live Answer Time I showed several comparisons of fan-boning and CP weighting. We talked abut rigging and CP weighting quite a bit last year at LAT. Several of those might be worth watching. my tutorials page also has several entries about CP weighting and fan-boning Smart skin lets you relate any change of something with the rotation of a bone. Usually this is about CP motion, typically when the above two tactics can't produce a desired joint deformation. See this post A simple example of smart skin? In addition to the above, the rarely used Bone Falloffs allow yet another way to weight CPs. example Two bone spring A:M Poses let you collect any set of keyframed changes to almost any thing into one control slider or an ON/OFF switch. A slider that moves the CPs of a mouth from "eee" to "ooo" shapes would be a classic Pose slider case but there are infinite others. ON/OFF poses can be used as "drop on poses. Do a search on "Pose" on my tutorials page and you will find many entries in which a Pose has been the solution for many different problems. Polygon programs need "weight painting" because they have thousands x more vertices to manage than we have CPS. It is not humanly possible to manually weight all the vertices in a dense polygon model but a good A:M model has a light enough mesh that it is possible. For unhappily dense A:M models the Transfer_AW plugin can make it possible to weight a light mesh and approximate that result on a dense one. Rigged in 60 Seconds?

Like most animation blogs there hasn't been much activity on it lately, but Mark Kennedy's Temple of the Seven Golden Camels Everything I know about the art of storyboarding. ...contains many useful essays about storyboarding and layout and related concerns. He can often distill it all down to a simple aphorism like Flat is Funny, Depth is Dramatic