robcat2075

I recommend Vern's plan B. Constrain both hands (IK hands) to the rake and animate the rake. It's much the same situation as this animation where a character has two hands on a shovel: http://www.brilliantisland.com/am/dig25.mov

It is mentioned in the manual under "IMPORTANT NOTES" You can save your character with "TSM Constraints ON" so you don't have to turn it on again. Most of the String Errors will disappear after you save your character, restart A:M and reload the character. A:M is having trouble displaying the word "relationship" in some spots. That's an A:M problem, not really a TSM2 problem.

That turned out well. Nice work!

my guess is that one foot is moving more than the other or is not moving at a constant speed backwards when it is on the ground. Or perhap the character is moving on a curved path.

also ... if the script didn't fully execute, you can look thru the character to see what got done and what didnt' get done that you were expecting and that will give you a fair idea of where to look for a mistake. If a constraint in the middle of the script didn't get made, then you know the error was somewhere before that. If the script crashed A:M, leaving you with nothing to examine, try running just the first half. If it survives, you know your error was in the second half. If it still crashed, you know the error was in the first half. And you can divide in to smaller parts from there.

How big is it? The PC version is only about 7 Mb.

If you want to make the Squetch spine, dont' try to add it into the TSM2 Spine script. Throw out the TSM2 spine script and replace it with one of your own that creates the bones and constraints you need. There's nothing in the TSM2 spine script that any other part of TSM2 needs or looks for. I can run TSM Rigger with a totally blank spine script; all the other body parts get rigged according to their scripts When I've crashed TSM2 it's always been because my script referenced a bone that didnt' exist. Typically because I slightly mispelled the bone name. When TSM2 has not crashed but not completed all of a script it has been because I had a stray character or mispelling in some place other than a bone name.

As far as the 3 bone spine... just replace the spine script with one that works on 3 bones. Three bones that you put in the spine component. Alternatively it wouldn't be hard to script 3 new bones based on the position of those 5 TSM2 bones. Then just constrain the 5 bones to those 3 and continue on rigging the 3. (But I'll tell ya... that five bone TSM2 spine is one of the big reasons TSM2 animators love TSM2 ) this converting back to V12 stuff I don't see the need for? TSM Rigger (the last TSM step) doesn't read any model files at all. It operates on what is in your model window which means it could have been a V13 model by that point. the only Pre V13 things TSM needs is "components" You can run Builder in V13 and save its result in V13, close A:M, reopen A:M, reload that V13 model and TSM FLipper and TSM Rigger work just fine on it.

modifying the TSM2 sourcecode to add certain functionality would be ideal. Especially to update it for Mac Users. I did inquire about releasing it but so far... no response on that. Yes, you can manually add anything in before running Rigger, but I agree that would be too error prone for the average user. Creating elements thru scripting means it always gets done in exactly the right place and in the right heirarchy and the user never has to bother with it. My goal is to add features but maintain that simple TSM workflow.

The task is just a bit beyond a standard issue text editor because first you need to search for something that you don't want to replace (the name of the bone, in green below) and then locate it SEGMENT tags to replace those (in red below). The first one is predictably nearby... the closing tag could be quite a way away depending how many children your bone has. Not a hard algorithm to write. you're right, it's possible a text editor could be reprogrammed to do this task. No, we want nulls for their distinct appearance. the fact that they are just bones in disguise is fortunate.

Amusing... in an Arkansas sort of way.

That's what my app proposal above was about. I can almost see the code in front of me, but I haven't done any real programming in about 3 years so there'd be a certain time spent getting back up to speed on the little details. If anyone out there is enough of a programmer to read and write text files and do search/slice/insert type operations on strings, I can tell them what they need to do. As I see it the only things that are hard-coded in TSM2 are the names of those component and Script files. Inside those it's wide open. I haven't quite deduced the proper workflow for creating them but the TSM2 rig has poses in it that contain information on both the On and Off positions, so I suspect this can be done. Just a theory. I do expect that some things for Squetch will have to be dragged into the model after TSM is done but that will still be a lot faster than having to manuallyreset all those compensates.

Rule No. 2 Components are the templates TSM2 uses to build up the initial set of bones you position in your character. Components are regular A:M mdl files with just bones in them. You can open them up in A:M and look at them. Notice there is just one "finger" component, not a different one for each finger. TSM2 cleverly copies and renames the template bones for as many fingers as you need. Likewise for arms and legs and spines and anything else you might have more than one instance of. Suppose you wanted TSM2 to always add a fan bone at the knuckles of your rig. You could add those bones to the "finger" component and TSM2 will create fanebones on all the knuckles of all the fingers in your rig. However, you have to do this modding in V11.1 or V12 as Components resaved in V13 or higher won't be read by TSM2. (TSM2 runs fine in V13 and higher, just don't edit components in V13 or higher) If you add quite a few bones to a Component some may not get written unless you juggle the order in which they are listed in the PWS just right. Just moving one bone to the top of what is otherwise a list of equal heirarchy bones can mean the difference between all appearing or just one. Also, adding bones to the Components increases the chance the end user may accidentally mess one up or be confused about placing them. In addition, an extra bone in a component can sometimes be mistakenly seen by TSM Rigger as a "system" that you must choose to rig or not rig. Since you need V11.1 or V12 to modify components that might seem limiting, however, in my own work I've moved away from adding ANY bones to the stock TSM2 Components since an equivalent bone can almost always be created in the scripting stage. Creating the bones in scripting means I only have to manage one alternate file for a body part rather than two. Creating bones in scripting is available to all TSM2 users, not just the ones who have V11.1 or V12. My face rig is one exception where I have added quite a few bones to the "neck" component. Although we really won't do much with Components I mention Components here for those who are curious about how this all works and may want to investigate further.

You can build that rig using TSM. Just use a bone where there was a null TSM doesn't have to handle nulls. Nulls are just bones with a different onscreen appearance. There's nothing a Null does in a rig that a bone can't do also. I have a rig that has lots of nulls in it. They were all created as bones, placed as bones , constrained as bones... all that. When I'm done I just change their tags to NULLOBJECT, and then they appear as Nulls.

This isn't a solution for Kdiff (a text editor?) but my notion for a Flash app was to write a loop that would -take a list of bone names, -search thru the mdl file for an occurance until it found one -backtrack to replace it's SEGMENT tag -from there search count thru the and tags to find the correct closing tag -start over on the next bone name in the list

I thought I posted here last night but I dont' see it. try again... to add animation after an Action you need to right-click on your character in the PWS and add new>Choreography Action to hold the new keyframes sample: SecondChorAction.zip notice where the "red bars" have been adjusted to start and end. Also notice that I had to make ease setting s onthe path constraint to keep it from self-adjusting to the length of the chor. And most important , I had to force keyframes on the bones i wanted to animate at the very start of that 2nd action. Before I moved them anywhere.

that's a fine looking machine! Did the tire tread get modeled or mapped?

Not nearly enough info, but first guess.... there's still some of your old rig there affecting some bones.

As far as folders in folders, I haven't tried it yet. If it can't, write your poses into their immediate parent folder, with the intention of dragging them into another folder manually later. The other folders could be created by TSM with one pose so they'd be already present.

You're dragging those in from another model now anyway, so you don't really need to write them in TSM, right? The expressions don't have to be re-written for each character, do they?

This was going to come later in "Limitations" but... so far, I haven't found a way to create a null. The fact that the TSM2 rig uses no nulls in it is telling. You can still have nulls however. Create bone that would do what your null would do. When you're done rigging you can take your mdl into a text editor and change the bone tags ... (there's a dinosaur from the past!) to ... Be careful. A bone with children will have its closing tag after its children's tags I've thought of writing a little app that would crawl thru a mdl file and properly match up opening and closing tags for a bone and convert them. Hey... you're a programmer... you could do that! I find that adding a null to the component causes the body part to not get writen at all by TSM Builder

All the old projects should open in V15. Files saved in V13 or later can't be brought back into V11 or V12.

Forward This material may only be of interest to people who are knowledgeable about rigging and understand what the various constraints do and why they are used. But hopefully they will use this to come up with new things that are useful to the typical user. Introduction The core concept of TSM2 is that you place the bare minimum of bones in your character to define the essential joints (admittedly, quite a few in a human) and it will then look at those and use them as landmarks for placing the swarm of intermediary and control bones and various constraints that are needed for a responsive and easy to pose rig. It hides everything you don't need to see and exposes only what you do need to see. It does it quickly and does it automatically. No matter how your character is scaled or postured, the new bones and constraints are adapted to it with no after-the-fact noodling required. That in itself is great since the rig TSM2 installs is an excellent one. The "automatically" thing is extra cool because it's not hard-coded into TSM2. Although undocumented, it's all governed by modifiable components and scripts. If there's a part of the TSM2 rig one wants to operate differently or replace entirely, a clever user can do that. As far as I know, I'm the first clever user to do this and in this thread I'll show what I've found out over the last two months of examining this. Rule No. 1 Any new scripts and components you make may only replace an existing one with the same name. Anzovin never expected that users would be writing their own scripts; there is no provision to point TSM2 to alternate elements at runtime. So you can't have several named versions of "arm" in a TSM folder. TSM will only look for "arm.txt", not "arm1.txt" or "arm2.txt". If you have extra files in a TSM2 folder TSM2 sometimes gets confused and skips all of them, even the one that was correctly named. Do not confuse TSM2. You'll need to maintain another folder with your various versions with their various names. Rename the version you want to use to a standard TSM file name and copy it over an existing TSM element in a TSM folder.

well, that would describe rigging in general anyway. bits of advice: -read every TSM script from top to bottom to get a sense of what is available and what the variations are. The finger script above doesn't exploit everything that can be done. -some things are available that never appear in TSM scripts. For example TSM2 never uses an Euler Constraint but it takes the same parameter format as a Translate to constraint and if you write an Euler constraint in that form TSM2 will create an Euler constraint. -rather than change the TSM "components" to accomodate new features, use scripting to add needed bones on top of the existing "TSM Builder" bones. This will make it possible to bone a model once and experiment later with different rigs on different body parts

that looks real sharp!