robcat2075

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!

that looks good. It will need careful lighting to bring out the detail.

check the first post

Versatile, yes! Robust, no. It is very easy to crash A:M or get incomplete results when scripting for TSM2. There is, unfortunately, no error checking and no error messaging so successful script writing is for the very patient and very diligent. You have to get happy with the idea of pawing thru 800 lines of code to find a single character error. Here's a small example of what can be done however... If you don't like the way TSM "advanced fingers" control the last two joints of a finger with one bone, this script will make TSM2 write a dedicated control bone for each joint and yet still retain the ability to move the hidden metatarsal bones in the palm of the hand by translating the first joint. In addition it will write and properly constrain three fan bones at each knuckle (for those of you who spline your hands with 3 rings at each knuckle) advfinger_fanbones.zip retitle the script as "advfinger.txt" and copy it into the "TSM/scripts" folder. you may wish to save your original "advfinger.txt" to some other location for safe keeping. Do not rename it to something like "advfinger_original.txt" and leave it in the scripts folder. Follow the normal workflow of using TSM Builder to place bones in your character (choosing "advanced fingers") and using TSM Flipper to flip right to left. Of course you've read the TSM manual to understand this process. Attach your CPS. Sorry, that's still mostly a manual thing. but dont' worry about complex CP weighting here. The fan bones on the knuckles will replace most of that. Then run TSM Rigger. Do not attach CPs to anything called "control". You may want to hide them while you do your CP attaching. the new fan bones have "fan" in their names like "advfinger1fanA" the longest fan bone is for the ring farthest down the joint. the shortest one is for the ring farthest up. Guess what the middle length one is for? hide them when you are done. leave just the "control" bones visible. I fully anticipate that someone will do a step wrong and make this appear to not work. It does work. This is just an example of a simple mod to TSM. Much more is possible and when my enthusiasm and time are sufficient I'll get to that.

If you like the TSM2 rig, you can rig with TSM2 now, today. Download it, use it, love it. If you need to use the Squetch rig, it will be possible to eliminate compensate resetting by using TSM2 to install it. Someone knowledgeable about Squetch will need to the detail work of converting Squetch to terms TSM2 works with. That's probably not me, so I dont' have an ETA on that, but I'm confident it can be done.. again, you can use TSM2 now. It's quick way to install a great rig.

Don't move the model bone. basically, you animate it like the guy was on a treadmill. Have you done #5 in TAoA:M? that covers the basic workflow of walkcycles.

Here's a typical problem with animated jumps... leaving the ground without the body fully extended. Everything should be completely stretched out at the last moment before his toes leave the ground. In real life it's hard to get very far if you dont' straighten out. In animation it looks like the character is floating because in real life no one can really jump that way, so it implies the character has no weight or is being moved by some unseen force.

post a model on which this has happened. don't forget the decal.

13.0t is the last version for the Yeti CD. You can download that from HAsh. You seem to have every brick individually modeled, that's going to make your model file very large. Usually a texture would be used for that to give the appearance of bricks. But that wouldn't necessarily render faster. Your light is a "sun" light which has to use ray-tracing to cast shadows. that will be slow. It might be possible ot use a "kleig" light instead, set to use "shadow maps" which are faster. But i was able to "Final" render your 1st frame in 14 seconds with your settings. My computer is less than yours. Something else must be wrong for yours to be so slow.

The path constraint has a item in its properties called "ease". Set it to 0 a the time you want the action to start at the beginning of the path and 100 at the time you want it reach the end. you can also set values in between to slow down or speed up.

Maybe what you're looking for is "IBL"... Image Based Lighting. Sometimes mistakenly called HDRI. Haven't ventured into it myself yet.

Suppose I told you I could pretty much do that with TSM2?

I can't even get a message like that. If I leave a field incomplete the "Next" button stays greyed out and if I type in a wrong value it says the information is incorrect. But I can't get a "missing field" message. What OS are you on?

Possibly it needs my name in the top field? "Robert Holmen" although for me, any text in that field will do.

That looks real good. I suppose the Maya guys are still figuring out how many weeks it will take them to do it.

I dunno... could be an imposter. I better take that link down again.... BTW, I did suggest that Anzovin just continue to keep TSM2 for sale as a download item with a caveat that they couldn't support it anymore, but they went the extra mile and made it free. Thanks again to all the Anzovins!

OK, i put the link back up. But I'm warnin' ya, Vern... it's a link to something on the intertubes... this whole "net" thing is just a Pandora's box of malware and demons and stuff that god-knows-where it came from. I have a free lance project (which led to all this) I have to finish up and then all my TWO stuff to get back to and get out the door so it will be weeks before I can do a proper presentation. In the meantime, TSM2 works just fine like it always did and nothing I'm doing is going invalidate the way TSM2 is used now.

Yes, it is possible that some one might use Google to find something on the web. I recall reading something about how people did that. A "search engine" they call it. How modern! Dang, I am so backwards. Big business apparently. So they say.