robcat2075

It is possible to apply a decal from the camera view in the chor, so possibly you could apply decals to a mesh that has been distorted. The fade-in/fade-out is something you'd have to achieve by editing the channels for the decal after the fact in the PWS. I forget the exact workflow for applying decals from the camera view. THere has been a discussion of it on the forum several years ago. Look for "camera mapping"

Since you can click and drag on those number boxes to rotate a group, I think those should be displaying updated numbers as you rotate. report that as a bug to AMreports. I dont' have V15 yet so I can't test to see it it is fixed in V15.

Look in the Project Workspace. THere's an "eye" icon for each model in your chor. you can turn it off to hide a model.

Good news and bad news.... the good news is Rigger ran fine for me. I sent you a link to the rigged model. you can edit you post above to take your link out. the bad news is I don't know why it didn't run for you. You're on V15 andI'm on v13 but other people have used V15 with success. when you have time you might try running rigger with everything set to "dont' rig" except "spine" and see if it still crashes. If it doesn't try adding a few more body aprts until you find the one that crashes. if it does crash with "spine" on try a different body part and see if it still crashes. you can at least find out if it's Rigger itself or a specific body part that is the problem. I've only crashed Rigger when I've been writing my own TSM scripts and mispelled a bone name. But I presume you aren't doing that. Have you added any other 3rd party plugins to hxt?

Yup, as noted earlier in this thread Panther is the last Mac version TSM2 worked on. Hopefully someday someone will acquire the code for TSM2 and update it for current MacOS

post the file

Here's my alternate script for the thumb. go back to the version of your character you saved before you ran Rigger and run Rigger on it with this script in the scripts folder. advthumb.txt However, I loaded up the ogre and those fingers work. You turn on the rotate manipulator on the last bone and you turn the blue ring to bend the last joint.

The one example of an "advanced Property" I see enabled in TSM2 is "with lag". I guess you tried "with apply before action" and got nothing? It probably isn't in there if they didn't need it for TSM2.

I have no idea what that is, but good luck with it! TSM2 (now free) has many options for strange, oddly configured creatures.

I didn't say it was easy, i just said that was the ideal. Maybe someone found a killer action done in AM2001 that they wanted to use with a character they had boned in TSM. If the scripts used the same components. I'm just brainstorming here. Who knows what crazy stuff pepple will do if you make something possible. TSM FLipper won't flip CP assignments, but perhaps Stephen Gross' Mirrorbone can be used instead.

I've never installed AM2001 since TSM did everthing AM2001 did and more. Well, if your changing the component bone names then anything goes as far as adding bones to the components. My reason for finding a pure scripting solution was so that AM2001 could be installed on the same geometry bones that you would put in for TSM2. Bone your model once and rig it with different rigs with different scripts. The scripts would create control bones that looked like AM2001 control bones to the animator but they'd be driving TSM2 geometry bones. Transparent to the user.

I thought you were doing squetch. I didn't know AM2001 could even be installed in anything other than a T pose. Ok, add a dummy hidden bone to the arm component that is pointing straight out. The user never moves it, never attaches anything to it, but scripts can reference it for any straight out orientation needed. If some one runs a script that is not AM2001 the bone will be ignored. There may still be a pure scripting solution.

another idea... the arm hinge seems to be on an unoffset aim at constraint from the shoulder to the wrist. What if the arm hinge and its child bones were created in the orientation of the upper arm, then you could easily use the orientation of "body" for that elbow controller. THEN after those have been created the scripting does the aimat constraint and pulls the arm hinge into position, I presume its child bones will follow with it. make sure any constraints that target these moved bones are scripted after the above. Alternative I'd consider... is there some other mechanism to control the IK arm besides this particular scheme? Something that would appear similar to the animator but do its job without this exact arrangement of bones? there have to be a dozen variations on IK arm out there.

Here's the last dirty trick I'd try after absolutely all else had failed... you could put the relevant scripting for that problem bone in a body part that isn't mirrored like "spine" or "neck". You'll have to explicitly script the left and right versions but that will solve the probelm of rotation being different on left and right sides. I'm not sure what order the scripts are executed, if "spine" is executed before "arm" and your bones will need some parents that "arm" was going to create, then you might create some temporary bones in the correct position that are then later duplicated by "arm" then discarded. If "Spine" references bones that "arm" hasn't created yet it will crash. and all the vice versas for the above.

since it doesn't matter that the upper and lower arm are of equal length and therefore it doesn't matter that the elbow controller is not pointing directly at the elbow, does the exact 90° angle matter? what does bicep orient influence? If I make it visible and drag it around nothing moves.

Thanks Robert, your help is much appreciated. That's a poser... If we knew the character would always be modeled with straight arms we could base the orientation of elbow controller on "body" and not need to use "rotation" which is doing some funny mirroring. If we knew the character would always be modeled with bent arms like the above we could start elbow controller from the middle of arm hinge and place the end point at the start of the lower arm, also eliminating having to use "rotation". If I were trying to debug the script you have I would find some way to not use duplicate of "arm hinge" because when arm hinge gets flipped by rigger it's XYZ view of the world is flipped also. Just a theory, I haven't tested that. And there really isnt' anything about elbow controller that is a "duplicate" of arm hinge after you're done with it. How important is the initial roll of arm hinge? is the roll handle pointing up, forward or back in the view you posted? It's possible if arm hinge were created with a different initial roll position, the apparent flipping of elbow controller wouldn't happen.

Okay thanks. Can't bend the fingers too with advanced or otherwise. Even the model from the .hxt can't bend the finger. When I bend it the whole finger bends straight. I have the same character, the fingers work. Are you sure you're turniing the blue ring? they dont' have anyone on staff now to update it and fix bugs.

If you rigged with regular fingers (not "advanced") the one bone controls all 3 joints evenly. advanced fingers have a bone for the first joint and a bone for 2nd/3rd.

"with rotation x,y,z" will point it anywhere you want do you mean when you are animating or that there will be characters you'd install squetch in where straight back is the wrong way? An answer is an answer. even if it's the only one, it's an answer. You only need one. OUtside of expressions and a some poses that have to have specific values at the 0%/OFF position I haven't seen anything in Squetch that couldn't be reproduced with TSM2 scripting.

The "constraints" folder seems to be the character specific things they added in addition to TSM2 bones. things like fanbones at a joint. These are things that are different for each character depending on its mesh so they are not part of the regular TSM build. It looks like they have gone all out and fan boned every single joint to show you examples of what one might do in each situation. youcan open up that "Constraints relationship" inthe PWS to see the list of bones it uses. Most of those could be done away with by CP weighting although sometimes fanboning is easier. Assuming nothing is otherwise wrong, the TSM fingers use one bone for the last two joints. rotate on the red ring for the first joint and the blue ring for the second joint. I'm not a fan of that so I've written a replacement script for TSM fingers that add fanbones at every joint and restores a conventional three control bone finger. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?s=&am...st&p=273221 I'm thinking of making a tut to show how to use TSM2 rig. They used to sell a video on that but they aren't selling videos anymore.

Ok, I'm looking at Woot as a Squetch example.... the elbow controller seems to have an origin point of about 25% of the way from the elbow (a known point after placing your TSM2 Builder bones) and the wrist (also a known point). I could script a bone that starts there by starting it "between" the starting points of the two bones that make up the TSM forearm. the elbow controller points straight back. Normally I'd use an already existing bone as a model for a new bone's orientation, but there isn't one like that in the original TSM2 arm bones so I'd use "with rotation x, x, x" to explicitly point the bone back. The bicep orient bone is tougher as it hangs out in back there. I was about to chicken out and say "add it to the arm component" (a valid solution) but I see now it's about as far back from the shoulder as the forearm is long. I'd script a temporary bone as long as "with length of" the forearm and point it back from the shoulder like I did the above elbow controller. then I could use its endpoint as the starting point of my bicep orient bone and I then give that bicep orient bone the orientation of a forearm bone to make it correctly point outward. The temporary bone could be deleted or just hidden and left in. This is all do-able and I have done similar new bone creation in my own scripts.

What bone in Squetch is it that TSM can't create?

well, I know there is a plugin for squetch, I just know nothing of powers other than using it in the workflow you outlined. here would be the TSM for Squetch workflow equivalents 1) import the Squetch posable model into your model TSM builder creates right side geometry bones 2) create an action and do the Poses thing Fit TSM bones to Mesh. Run TSM Flipper 3) export posed model from the action (just sizes the bones to fit the model to be rigged) 4) delete installation poses 5) Import Final IMPORT Model into newly posed model - I believe this only has poses/relationships in it and does not influence the plugin? Not sure. doesn't matter. 6) Run Install rig plugin (SIRP) TSM Rigger creates additional rig bones and writes constraints and poses 6b) drag in poses containing expressions 6c) program to convert bones to NULLs 7) reset compensates 8) assign & weight CP's Actually I like to do this after TSM Flipper in step 2) but some fan bones may not exist until TSM Rigger is run in step 6)

I don't know all the elements you're using there, it sounds like it would work, but I still think it would be easier to just work with all bones, then have a program that will search thru the model file with a list of bone names and flip them to NULLs. I know that program doesn't exist yet but I suspect it wouldn't be more than a page of code to write. I just found out that Flash can write files known as "shared objects" to the user's hard drive (normally Flash doesn't allow itself to write ANYTHING to the user's computer) so that makes me more likely to write this thing. I've written apps in Flash before that parsed and altered large text files, but to save the result I was having to make it print the result to a window from which I would copy and paste into a text editor. It worked fine but saving directly would be nicer. No ETA on when I'll get around to this though. One caution on this... TSM Flipper will flip "right Bone" to "left Bone" but will also flip "Right Bone" to "left Bone" Normally this is not a problem, unless you have written a script that you sent looking for "Left Bone" when "left Bone" is what is really there. That will cause TSM Rigger to crash.

"replace" or "Add" may be the blend mode you need to set onthe new chor action.