robcat2075

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I think they could all look right depending on the context. But I want to see this movie so I can find out what that glowing green mist is!

Even if you never model anything you can still animate with A:M using the many already made characters. But you'll also enjoy making your own characters, even if they are not as complex at first. As noted above, time and persistence are very useful in this endeavor.

mtpeak is the authority on that rig, but I don't think the neck geo bone is intended to be animated directly. I believe it follows the head control so you don't have to key the neck bone at all. (Translate the head bone to move the neck) The head is two controls in one.

look in your pose folders for a make visible on/off switch.

Well, I'll just bump this up to recycle it one more time! Change the 5 to a 9 this year. (see top post)

The witch and the elf (?) toon render real well. If you put a white/light grey toon line on the cat that would look very classic.

you mean "transition" to another action? see next comment... in the tut link in my sig there is a vid on "Adding animation after an Action" that covers both some of your path constraint trouble and how to add new animation after an action. Numerous bugs removed. New rendering features like SSS and new cloth. Also some new plugins are not written for V11

TSMRigger will crash when it encounters a bone name in one of its scripts that it can't find in the model. This can be due to an actual missing bone or it can be due to a difference in spelling due to capitalization. If one were in a detective mood, you'd use a difference-flagging-capable text editor to find the change between running TSMFLipper and Mirror bone, and would give a clue as to what is going wrong.

I'm glad you have progress, but I'm wondering why mirrorbone didn't... mirror bones for you. If I run TSMBuilder and install the default bones, then select the "body" bone and run MirrorBone with its defaults, everything mirrors as we would hope. However I find that if I select a bone on the arm or leg, i get incomplete mirroring. If I select the "1 right hand" bone I get a result that looks like what TNT got. Just to try, you might select the body bone before you invoke MirrorBone if you hadn't done that previously. MirrorBone ought to be a one step replacement for TSMFlipper.

The burn effects tut seems to explain it. What part is not working for you?

Shouldn't be I guess. When something doesn't work, I try testing a simple situation. Try deleting all bones except one spine bone and the top leg bone. See if that mirrors correctly. (and of course you've saved a copy of your work before you do this) If it works, try deleting less and less until it fails. Then you know what element is a problem If it never works, then something must be wrong with your plugin settings or the way you are using it or the plugin itself. If you still have V13 you could try mirroing in that too. Just to see if it makes a difference. I'm not saying it will. I dont' expect it to. But you never know... Rigger has trouble with caps in names. Mirrorbone will flip bones with Caps in names but Rigger won't recognize them or will crash. But TNT hasn't gotten to the Rigger stage yet so I don't think that's the issue yet.

just wondering.... what's the stuff with "FIN..." in caps inthe bone list?

It sounds like "MirrorBones" is doing something odd. That's not an official part of TSM2, however. Try flipping with TSMFlipper. It won't mirror CP assignments but you will get bones flipped.

Here's some pics of mine. V5 on the left was actually called "Martin Hash's 3D Animation". "Martin Hash's Animation:Master" was the name for what would later be called the NetRender version. After V5 the names were unified again. Before V5 you didn't get a manual, you got a pamphlet! The manuals were a big improvement but I can imagine the cost of printing them was substantial and they seemed to be growing by about 150 pages with every version. The good news now is that almost all of the information in the manuals is now in the "help" menu. You just have to search for it a bit more.

Is there sound in that clip? The properties of the mov says it has audio but I dont' hear anything.

and maybe one axial rotation 45° in each direction that would be for the "upper arm." I believe it can all be in the same smartskin. One key in each direction but all in the same smartskin. You'd probably do a separate SS for the shoulder bone (called "arm" in TSM2") if your CP weighting doesn't fully fixx the motion it does up and down. But the shoulder moves so little that CP weighting might do it all. Yes. you might do one at 90 forward, 45 forward if needed, 45 outward (probably excessive), and some small angle backward... 30?

That looks about as low as you can go.

The arm doesn't look bad , but of course from this angle we can't tell much about how it looks when the arm bends forward. I think if you did just one corrective smartskin key at each 90° bend (or maybe something less like 75°) it would be ready to go. Lots of incremental keys tend not to work well. With TSM2 it's best to do your smartskinning after you have your fan bones in and constrained and after you have your CPs weighted, but BEFORE you run Rigger. Then it's still easy to move your geometry bones individually if you want to smartskin at a certain angle for them. You want to do smartskin on geometry bones, not on the control bones that TSM2 adds on top of them. I think Caroline's tut covers that so maybe you've done it that way. you can put anything in a Zip and post it closing tip... it's better to not up load movies in "Animation"codec (that's the default codec in Quicktime settings only because it's first alphabetically). It makes the file size so enormous that most people won't try. It eats up server space too. You can reload animations into the images folder in A:M and resave them with better compression (Sor 3 or MPEG4) if they are big. But i downloaded it.

I'm not sure if a slider is possible for just a material. but you can enable "show more than drivers" next to Shortcut to (your model) and then you can keyframe properties like emission rate or force for a material on a group. In the PWS Drag the material onto groups you have defined and it will only affect those groups.

I agree there is much to learn beyond TAoA:M. The defense I would offer for TAoA:M is that it is small enough not to scare off the new user. It's rather like a quick-start guide to the major feature points of A:M so a user can get some base-level understanding and get to accomplishing SOMETHING quickly without getting overwhelmed by the enormous possibilities. Back around V7 or so you got a manual of almost 700 pages. It certainly had more detail in it but it was almost like you had to read the entire book before you could start. My hope is that we can get every new user to connect with the forum where their post-TAoA:M questions can be answered.

That's a great looking character! great shaggy hair! No rule of thumb really, since each model is a unique case. SS should be your last resort after you get as close as possible with fanning and CP weighting. You might show a mov of one arm doing a sample move on each axis and someone might pop in with suggestions. edit: and render it in shaded wireframe so we know where the CPs are. My first guess is that the hair "color" has a gradient inadvertently set on it. you could post the hair material you created and get feedback.

It only has 100 views so far. Pull it, add the ending and then the other 100,000 will come by

Show a shaded wire frame and it will be easier to see what you have going on there. typically you extrude one more ring off the end of a tube and then scale those down to about 1% of their original size. 0% is too small.

Aha! I've been searching for a good phrase to describe that.