robcat2075

Thanks David, that's a neat set up. I'm not sure I can see it on yours, but I think the surface constraint really follows a four-subdivision-per-spline approximation of the surface rather than the actual patch surface. That's what the tests I've tried so far indicate. This is a bone following the surface of a 3-cross-section lathed cylinder edit: subdividing the cylinder into 16 sections didn't help. the constrained bone is still moving in straight line paths, about 4 sections per 90° turn. I'd be curious to see if anyone can load this test PRJ and get a different result. SurfConTest.zip

the animation is 5 minutes long? that's 7200 frames. One uncompressed 640x480 frame takes almost a megabyte. So you got off easy. you can load your movie into your images folder and do a "Save as Animation" to compress it with a smaller codec. But you didn't say what codec you used to begin with. they're all different.

Never mind. I got it to work a bit. However, I'm finding the constrained object is following a jagged straight line path over the surface rather than following the actual surface curve. this is an onionskin screen shot Anyone know what's up with that?

Does anyone have a small example PRJ that shows a "surface constraint" in operation?

You need a second choreography action. In the tuts link in my sig there's a video on "adding animation after an action" that explains this. Watch that. The vid mentions a "Blend" mode setting. In some versions of A:M it may need to be set to "Add" rather than "replace" like I said in the video.

I think that looks pretty successful, but I think this idea... would be an easy improvement to avoid the doll-hair look. It wouldn't have to be a complicated map. Just fade into something darker from the edge of the hair line. I remember some close-ups in "Incredibles" that made me go "ouch... doll-hair". It's a tough problem to solve. But your work does look very good.

Issues?

Do you really mean smartskin shapes? Or are you rigging distortion boxes? "morph targets" don't really exist in A:M.

There are "Glow intensity" and "Glow radius" values in the chor properties. You could keyframe those directly. They would affect every glowing object in your shot, but it would be a way to vary the glow. glowvarying.mov glowvarying.zip

I think that looks like a pretty promising candidate for rigging. There are some good tuts in the rigging forum on strategies for rigging a face. You may find after you get it moving that maybe a five point patch or hook may have been better here than there, but you don't know until you try.

I haven't made a study of TSM2 quadruped yet, but you may want to investigate some of the options for "necks" to see which you prefer. If you chose "IK Neck" there are really two neck controls. "head" controls just the stub at the base of the head. "IK neck control" handles the longer chain of bones in the neck. Here's a PRJ that shows animating the IK neck control (and head) to lower the head below the shoulders. Look in Action 2 from the side. It's bones only, no mesh. I've made visible the neck bones which would normally be hidden so you can see their movement. IKNeckMovement.zip Tail problem can probably be solved by placing the base tail bone to the base of the tail in the model.

Welcome back! Did you know you're still a Hash Fellow as Tralfaz?

You only need to create "timelines" for bones that will have animation at some point. You can see all the bones that have keys in the chor in the PWS whether you have them selected at the moment or not. Presuming it was in its default position until then... go back to 0 and force a keyframe on it, then go to the last frame where you still wanted it to still be in that default position and force another keyframe on it. Remember to zero slope those two keyframes. Then start animating as usual.

You can greatly simplify the animation of any rotating object by going to its properties and right-click transform>rotate>convert driver to and change the bone to "Euler" instead of the default Quaternion mode You can set one key at frame 0 and another at the end for (number of turns you want X 360°) and A:M will do the whole thing for you. This should eliminate the need for the MUFOOF technique OR... you can set frame 0 to 0° rotation and frame 1 to anything, say 90°, and then in the PWS change the "post extrapolation method" (Squiggly gray line to right of item) to "accumulate". There are 3 squiggles. You want the last one. A:M will automatically add 90° (or whatever) on each successive frame. Anyway, I've been thinking one could use a blurry transparency map to simulate a fast moving rotor. I made the map with radial blur in Photoshop. It's a 2 blade rotor that I set to rotate a little less than 90° per frame for that severe strobing effect you see in movies. There's no real motion blur here: rotortest03H.mov Helicopter02.zip Tip: If you choose a codec besides "Animation" (like MPEG4 or Sorenson3) you will get much smaller file sizes for posting movies. Format>SaveOptions>set

After reading your post a bit more carefully, I think I spotted the problem... You want something selected when you make a keyframe, typically the same something you want to create a keyframe for. Still watch my vid though.

can you show us what you have so far? The wheels on the example look too shiny for rubber. I'd think rubber would have low "specular intensity".

Many possibilities.... First, watch the "Keyframing Options" video in the Tut link in my signature. See if that clears up anything.

Everyone has a different take on that. Me, I favor... 1st, CP weighting since it doesn't need any new bones 2nd, Fanbones since they maintain volume better and are easier to refine than Smartskin 3rd, Smartskin where 1 and 2 weren't enough. In practice, any fanbone situation will also involve some CP weighting unless you have a separate fanbone for every CP in a joint (which is what some people were doing before CP weighting came along).

Not much. A mac user could use the first two to get his bones placed and then do the weighting ( I tend to do my weighting and fanboning before part C) then get send the file to a friendly PC user to run part C . If TSM2 is not an option use one of the other premade rig solutions here on the forum like Squetch or 2008. Don't use AM2001 as the more modern rigs are more functional. Rolling your own is the hard way to go unless you desperately need something not built into the premade rigs, which is unlikely.

My other thought is... do you really need 3 CPs at the corner of the mouth when you can make the same shape with 2 or 1 CPs?

The "crease" is really just the shape your CPs are making. When you have some CPs VERY close together they will do their job and try to make very tight shapes. My first guess is that the middle CP of a group of three is making a small peak or valley. here's a simplified example: model: CPCreases.zip (JPG banding may make this look less smooth) you can make small CP adjustments easier with 4 5 and 6 keys 4 constrains CP to direction of spline 5 constrains CP to perpendicular to direction of spline but still along patch surface 6 constrains CP to perpendicular to patch surface Another possibility is that you have some spline continuity mistake, but you seem be doing well at that so I doubt that's the problem here.

I'll join. Define the parameters so it all fits together like fps, min time, max time, going left or going right, common ball model...

Regrettably TSM2 doesn't work with current MacOS. Anzovin didn't have the programming staff on hand to update TSM2 and that was a big reason it was discontinued. I'm hopeful that someday someone might purchase the source code and fix it. I'd be curious to know if TSM2A and TSM2B work if you delete the TSM2C from the dir. Of course, C is the biggy.

I like that. You might make the legs even shorter and the head bigger if it's a child.

I think vern left out one key word... Bias adjustment... well, that's two. Those lumps can be fixed by slightly adjusting the bias of the CP. You can adjust it manually with the yellow handles, but it's actually easier to do fine adjustments in the properties box. Select the CP and you can drag on the number in the properties to change it in 1° increments. It's almost always the gamma that you adjust, rarely the alpha. Someone will probably pop in to say adjusting bias is bad for animation, but that hasn't been true for several years.