robcat2075

No. The easiest way is to animate the wheels to match the motion of the car. If you convert the "driver" for the bones for the wheels from "quaternion" to "Euler" they will be easier to keyframe for multiple revolutions. select the bone inthe chor window, Right click on "rotate" in the properties window for the bone. Maybe. You'd have to experiment a lot to get good results. Easier to aniamate the objects moving. you can put all the obects on the same path and use the "ease" settings to make them appear to follow each other. FO r what you are doing the versions are the same. you need to give each wheel a bone so it can turn. Hash.com has a button on the front page to buy V15

They even have a better name for it! I always thought "store roll" was an unnecessarily jargonesque term. I knew there had to be a way to do that! I'm glad you spent the hours researching that and not me.

Cool character. I still have 10.5 on my machine so I looked at it. Basically, the AM2001 rig process isn't done to its conclusion. THere are no constraints on any of the bones. The install rig tutorial has changed a bit since 10.5 so i would go back to "The art of A:M" book that came with your v10.5 and follow that one very carefully. ftp://ftp.hash.com/pub/updates/windows/Am2003/2003Manual.pdf But i would recommend making the leap to v15. $50 for one year. your model will still work.

Anzovin's Bundle wasn't their regular mode. They put that together to clear out their stock of physical CDs they had on the shelf. So the bundle wasn't a downloadable item. However, there's still a ton of good tutorial material avaiable for A:M, much of it free here on the forum.

your way: place two bones on rake at intended position for hands pose hands at intended position near bones press offset button constrain one hand press offset button constrain other hand you still need offset constraints because the bones in the rake will never exactly match the hand bone you are constraining to it. my way: pose hands at intended position on rake press offest button constrain one hand press offset button constrain other hand If you need to shift the hand position later, offsets are animateable like anything else. in both cases you animate the arms by leading them around with the rake. I see both methods as functionally the same. If the rake were never to touch the ground and just be held inthe air by the character I'd do one FK arm , constrain the rake to that, and make the other arm IK, and constrain it to the rake. But if the rake has to be moved along the ground I'd go with two IK arms constrained to the rake

This is really the worst way to animate. Simple bones are not easily controlled enough for real posing. TSM2 for A:M is free now and as easy to install as simple bones. If you're on a PC there's a download in the rigging forum. Don't spend any more time fighting a non-rig. A:M bones can work either way. Is is possible to lead a chain of bones around by the tip of the last one. you can also make them move in FK by choosing the base of your chain, hit R and using the rotate manipulator rings to turn it. In TSM2 if you wanted an FK spine you could choose "Dont' rig" for the spine at the last step of the TSM2 process.

Back to the original topic of the "String Error"... If you save your model, restart A:M and reload, most of the string errors are gone. H0wever, the places that would normal say "Relationship" still show "Error Loading String: 5002" followed by a number you can fix that with a search and replace in a text editor by replacing Error Loading String: 5002 with Relationship then resave your file

YOu need both translate and orient so the hands maintain their orientation relative to the rake.

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?