robcat2075

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

Also... Unless you've just emerged from underneath a rock which was underneath yet another rock you are already familiar with "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams. It is full of essential nuts and bolts character animation advice although I have noticed computer animators seem to have trouble transferring its lessons to 3D CG workflow. There are many cheap used copies out there but it is hard to know if they are selling the 1st edition or the expanded edition. "The Disney Villain" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston is not a landmark of animation literature like their "Illusion of Life" was but it gives their insider appraisal of just about every bad guy (turns out, they are not all women and cats) ever to appear in Disney animation, mostly with a "what went wrong" analysis. These are available cheaply used.

that is very odd!

That looks very timely! Ripped from today's headlines!

My workflow for faces is to model things that I know have to be in a certain place... the eyeballs, the eye openings, the nose, the mouth opening... then begin connecting those parts together with splines to fashion the in between surfaces. I model each part with as few splines as possible. Those are easier to stitch together than something with excess splines i have to find a home for. Clearly my front and side rotoscopes don't match up well but I'll make do.

This a demon in an old Dutch painting that I started modeling for "Planes Trains Automobiles"... but didn't finish! It's not much to go on. I did these drawings to visualize the head... After some more development I got to this concept... And here is as far as I got before pressing pause in 2018... to be continued...

I have "SfD" but haven't gotten to it yet. Likewise for "Save the Cat" There are a plethora of animation books available now but I'm not sure their studio world advice scales down well to the single animator. "Prepare to Board" by Nancy Beiman wasn't bad. I thought it would be about storyboarding but it's mostly about everything you have to do before that. The first edition can be had used inexpensively. "Directing the Story" by Francis Glebas I would rate lower but it is about story development (feature, not short). I'd wait for a used copy to come up for $10. The most fascinating animation-related book I've read is (famous Disney instructor) Don Graham's "Composing Pictures". It's not about story nor about animation really but about arranging elements within the frame. Just about every page is something I didn't know people though much about but it turned out there was lots to think about that thing. Better than any class I've taken. Unfortunately it is out of print again and very expensive, even used.

It's probably too late to warn you but don't bother with Robert McKee's "Story." He was quite the rage 15 years ago. He is spoken of as if he is one of the screenwriting gurus of Hollywood and yet the apex of his career seems to have been writing one episode of "Spencer for Hire." He taught screenwriting at USC? How did that happen?

It's great fun to watch the details develop. I like the water spots on the coffeepot. i have a library of textures like that but I'm too unimaginative to use them.

Treeez should already be included in your v15. Check your HXT folder

After ReNumber CPs and Refind Normals, the normals were all pointing outward but the smoothness of the shading got worse... This is also interesting. I wondered if detaching and re-attaching spline intersections might change things, but after the Renumber and Refind, Detach became unavailable for this intersection...

The real hoax is that even if you win the goat you don't get the goat.