robcat2075

It so happens that I've been working on process for rigging a face using just bone falloffs to get most of the bells and whistles like smiling/frowning/ooo/mmm. It's not ready for prime-time yet but there is promise in bone falloffs. Of course alot of time is spent on positioning the bones just-so... jury is still out on whether it is faster than manual CP editing.

the chin is too prominent for a female face. I think you really, really, REALLY should get a reference photo of a person similar to the character you are trying to model. and then some things would become more apparent when you compare them. And that would give us all a common reference point in trying to improve your model.

Welcome to A:M! Yes, do all the tuts in TAoAM, and if you get stuck ask a question here.

I've run into similar problems with TSM2. Should I be doing the same thing, i.e., turning off the IK setups before creating the cog joint constraints? That will help. However, the most important thing is to make sure you are attaching your cogs to the actual geometry bones and not control bones that TSM2 adds. TSM2 hides most of the geometry bones so it's easy to go wrong. The easiest time to add fanbones (or weight CPs) is before you run TSM Rigger. YOu can test them by opening an action and using the rotate manipulator to move bones individually. For example, if you are testing a right elbow fan, you'd use the rotate manipulator to move "1 right lowerarm1" and watch the elbow fan while you do. Then go back to your pose or model window to make any tweaks. TSM Rigger will preserve your fanbones when it does its thing.

First, buy A:M v3.0 twelve years ago...

- in the model, all the "spine" bones need to be exactly centered; to have start and end at x=0 - make sure the Key Model filter and Translate and Rotate filters are on when you do your copying and pasting

That got better! Still needs stronger poses and, in general, I don't like talking straight into the camera, but thinning that out has helped. Ship it off to the voting and brace yourself, I'm sure you'll get comments!

actually, I disagree with the premise of the initial question a bit... I think the people who make great models in A:M are remarkable artists even if they don't also draw or sculpt. I think the whole spline thing is a valid medium for artists to work in. It's a new one... it doesn't have the storied history of sculpting or painting... but give it time.

There's a simple solution to something not looking like you want it to... change it! Where's your reference for the profile view? If you're modeling without reference pics... you're going to keep making flat faces.

Start with something simpler than a human while you are learning to model. I think it's pretty hard to interpret 2D pictures into a 3D shape. The first time I tried to make an original character I did a sketch, but I still didn't have the whole shape in my mind yet so I made a clay model. I had never made a clay model before but it really helped to understand how the features related to each other in space. That was ten years ago. The model ended up like this. I haven't made a clay model for anything since, but I haven't made another original character since then either.

I second Rodney's suggestion to start a thread here. Picka small project to start, and when you have a problem post a screen shot of it and ask a question.

Welcome to A:M! Your best bet for importing video is to convert it to a targa series and import that as an image sequence. Many video editing programs can do the conversion. Second choice... quicktime (.mov). Some quicktime codecs will work better than others. keep them short. Seconds not minutes.

I tried a quick test in V13 also and was able to get hair color on a gradient haircombiner.zip Just to eliminate the obvious... you are trying a Final render, right? real-time won't show complex hair color. That screen cap looks like a real time render.

first guess... make sure there is no color specified in any part of the hair material. That would over ride a surface color.

That looks engaging. Show us a clip!

Argh - you're so right, Mark. So would I add fan bones even in the fingers? for convenience, my alternate scripts for advfingers and advthumbs automatically build and constrain three fanbones at every finger joint. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=273221 http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=274090 these rig a 3-bone control , rather than TSM2's regular 2-bone control, however.

yay! Those are great tuts.

First, I"m not saying this is a guaranteed fix. These are things to TRY, one at a time. Things might get better. Things might get worse. You try things. Anyway... after I click "advanced" I get several tabs. one says "trouble shooting". That has a slider for graphics acceleration. There's also a special tab that my graphics card (ATI) has added that gives me a button to bring up their proprietary control panel. That has a bunch of options. Your card may be completely different. We don't even know what card you have yet. And unless it's exactly the same as mine I couldn't tell you much about it. But these things tend to have alot of options that affect what you see. On mine I have to have things set just right for the real time anti-aliasing to look right. Remember what you are changing so you can set it back if it doesn't make things better. And what happened when you tried a VERY small tga as a rotoscope? Do you know how much memory your card has?

I'm finding that the "with rotation x, y, z" statement seems to apply those transformations in relation to the "world" and not by regarding a bone that was duplicated as a 0, 0, 0 starting point. Would have been cool if it had worked the second way. Somewhat related, I think the "roll like" offset problem I mentioned above was an illusion caused by a small error that rotation statement created.

Hey I just caught that. Less is definitely more, wouldn't you say? I still think there's too much "small" going on and not enough "big", but I can finally start to see the core ideas that you are trying to present I like the shrug and sigh, I think that's your best idea. Sighs are hard to do with a CG character. One-handed gestures tend to be better than two handed gestures because they are non-symmetrical. When you are doing a one-handed gesture, I'd drop the other arm to the to the side rather than float in space. Good posing is a constant challenge. Here's ONE way I might loosen up the first pose and give it more direction. It's a broad pose, but I like broad poses. It could be toned down or made even bigger. We could go thru every pose and find ways to make them stronger and less stiff. That's most of the battle in character animation.

"display"

You do have to do some preparation of your character to fit him to the imported motion. There are some long threads archived on this forum about how and several people have had good success just using free BVH files from the web.

A:M can load BVH files. I'd hope that any motion capture equipment would include the software to record your motion to those BVH files. Check that out.

That's what "Peaking" is for. Really. That six-holed cube representation suggests that splines have to meet at 90 or 180 degree angles. They can meet at any angle. The four holed cube reduces the situation down to the topic issue of good continuity: we want two splines criss-crossing and no more. We don't want a third one dead-ending in to that. We don't even want to suggest that that is a normal practice. Don't start them off by showing a picture of that.

Don't do that! they are supposed to be pointing backwards TSM builder originates the bones correctly rotated. My first suspicion is that this has something to do with the two-bone groups that make an "upper arm" or "lower arm" not being really straight. I have a second suspicion but that's my first.