robcat2075

if you "spherical" apply the map at http://flickr.com/photos/87849770@N00/2572996930 you can get the new 2008 ball but I haven't found an equivalent classic soccer ball map. There ought to be one out there. EDIT: here is the actual Creative Commons License image in case the above link goes dead:

good-lookin model! I'll be interested to see how the hair performs.

You can right-click in the Chor window>Plugins>Simcloth Simulate

No, but you can (T)urn the model to other angles. use CTRL for for rotation around the screen z axis. then apply the decal. You can also create a pose for the model, turn the model and apply the decal in the pose.

How to preserve Photoshop transparency when making decals... http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=241122

One quick point I'd make is ... maintain overall volume. When a ball stretches it gets a little narrower. When it squashes it gets a bit fatter. Yes, the falling motion looks out of whack, like it's not accelerating. Tracking dots would be needed to really evaluate it and pinpoint it. A good start, but that one will need specific diagnosis, that i won't get to immediately. For now, go out and play in the sun again.

Something has gone wrong here. Remember you can make special case keyframes anywhere you want and adjust the curves leading into and out of them anyway you want, so there is no need to lose the natural acceleration of the ball's falling motion.

try making the ball jump itself into the air from a standstill (and fall back down to land). Unlike a frog or rabbit the ball has no legs to push itself off with, so squash and stretch is involved. extra points if you can make it leap with sideways motion, as a frog or rabbit would do.

I sense a mistake right there. You rotate arm bones, you dont' grab them and move them to new locations. Always use the rotate manipulators for bones, don't drag the tip around. Jeff Lew uses an old technique for adding constraints to a character. Remember to import the action that came with the character and drop that on the character in the chor. When I do that, that character works fine.

It's alive! much easier than calculating X and Y. There is a bit of tradition and formula about the frames around the bounce, but that's a lesson for another day. If you have "The Animator's Survival Kit" it's on pg 93-94 But I'll tell you, for the very first bouncing ball assignment at AnimationMentor they wanted people to explicitly key the ball on every frame, much like you had done as they hadn't intruduced the curve editor yet. MOst of them looked absolutely awful since most of them didn't know what you knew about the math of the motion. (Me, I figured the mentor was never going to see my channels anyway so I just edited my curves and my bouncing ball bounced just fine.)

That's impressive. What do we have to do to keep the ball from penetrating the track edges sometimes?

You do have the "Show Bias Handles" button on? It doesn't have a default keyboard shortcut but you can assign one in Tools>Customize>Keyboard On rare occasions I have encountered invisble bias handles. I think it was a graphics card problem. But I could hover my cursor over where the bias handle was supposed to be and move it. I dont 'reccommend it.

Wait, Hold it! Here's a better intro to channel editing... channelbiasmp4.mov

This isn't exactly an introduction to the curve editor (which is accessed by pressing the button with the RGB lines on it) but it shows manipulating the shape of the curves with the bias handles. CPs can be peaked or smooth, just like in models. http://www.hash.com/two/RCHolmen/biasmagnitudeMP4Low.mov Someday I'll do a bouncing ball tut that covers all this but I haven't done that yet.

The "takeoff" looks odd, partly because the spacing is inconsistent and partly because there's no anticipation prior to leaving the ground. Anticipation is a later lesson , however. A more typical gambit is to have the ball enter from the side, near the apex of a hop, or just start from high and fall into the first bounce. the first two hops look good, none-the-less. Are you actually keyframing on every frame? That's a worthwhile exercise and not far removed from what 2D animators have to do anyway but the magic of CG is that by editing the "curves" you can get A:M to properly place those inbetweens and to whatever precision required. But maybe you haven't been introduced to the curve editor yet. Working on a bigger scale would make sense because the long graceful hops you are doing wouldn't be possible for a ball that is only getting 2cm of altitude. And fewer decimal places are needed. But I'm a little doubtful that a distance of less than .01 cm is the problem, I suspect some other error. No, if this helps you make sense of why the motion is the way it is, then it's good. Eventually you get so you can eyeball this stuff.

Hold on. I'll try to make a demo later to day using your character. I'm not saying it's easy, but it doesn't get any easier than TSM.

besides the special cases of a cone or a cylinder it's probably topologically impossible. yes. I'm pretty sure that's standard practice. However.... There is an "A:M Paint" program you can find discussed somewhere on this forum that allows you to paint on the whole model in 3D. Sounds like a bargain at $99

I see quite few things not done right. For example "torso" has been changed to be a child of "pelvis". It needs to be a child of "body". That's how TSM built it. I also see that the Foot IK Control bones have been moved to be children of the lower legs. They need to remain at the very top level of the heirarchy. Also CPs have been attached to the control bones that Rigger makes. No. You attach CPs to the bones that you have after you run Builder and Flipper. Thy will get hidden after you run Rigger, but they are the bones that the CPS go to. Similarly I see that the fan bones aren't part of the geometry bone heirarchy. You've been attaching them to the control bones that Rigger makes. That wont' work for long. I'm sure there are other things I haven't caught. I'd have to really dig into it to figure out why the legs fly around, but I know that doesn't happen in a regular TSM rig. In the TSM2 folder inthe Hxt folder in your AM folder there is a manual that explains the workflow for installing TSM2. I recommend starting over and installing TSM the way the manual shows. Dont' guess. Don't try to skip steps. Not following the steps in the manual is making it WAY harder than it needs to be.

If it works it works, but it really ought to work with "replace", so to me it's still a mystery.

A TSM2 character doing a squat. TSMsquat.mov the PRJ: TSM2Squat.zip I hope this ends the controversy. But seriously... you gotta be more specific about your problem. I've done walks with TSM2. It's just fine. There are some videos in the tutorial link in my signature about making walks. There's also a vid about "Keyframing Options" there you should be familiar with before you try something like a walk.

While you're on this... is there a shortcut key to change the timeline from the keyframe view to the spline view and back?

my signature at the bottom of my posts

There's a better one on that in the tut link in my sig..."KeyFraming Options"

I understand that it would be uneconomical to continue stocking low-volume products. Perhaps we could persuade Anzovin to put their out-of-print CDs in some sort of on-demand CafePress situation (CafePress does do data CDs) where they could still make money off each sale and yet not have to manage the order taking and duplication.

Thanks! I just realized I made one major misstep while I was doing that... I should have done my CP assigning and weighting before I ran TSM rigger. Then I wouldn't have had to turn on and off any geometry bones; it would have been far simpler. I think I got used to doing my weighting after Rigger for some reason on another project, but generally that's the wrong workflow. Ultimately I got everything assigned ok, but it would have been easier if I had done it before running TSMRigger.