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Try making the Camera and the Face Cam Rotate Master Visible at 1% in "Face Controls ( 1-Mirrored / 2-Split )". Make sure they are hidden at 0%. Also try hitting the [space] bar. I'll post a revised LiteFace rig after I've check it out a little more.

If you are having trouble with your lower lip distorting when your jaw is open: Face Rigging Relationships > Face Constraint Relationships > Lips Left Lower: Turn "Scale To Reach" OFF in the "Aim At" constraint. Face Rigging Relationships > Face Constraint Relationships > Lips Right Lower: Turn "Scale To Reach" OFF in the "Aim At" constraint. This is good advice for life in general ...

I've been looking into the issue with the Master nulls not showing up when you change the Face Controls slider to 1%. It seems to be some kind of culling issue in A:M. If you look at your model from the Front view, then rotate slightly using the "T" key, do the Master nulls show up? I don't know how to fix that. They seem to appear and disappear at random times. I'm not even sure if I can put together a simple example of this phenomenon for A:M Reports.

I believe so. Make a new material. Right-click on the Attribute. Choose Change Type To > Plugin > kci:dnd > BitmapPlus.

Nice progress! It's looking good.

It is part of a light rig. There should be a similarly named Action in the Actions folder. Put the "c1-ico-f1 (8)-m" model in a chor. Drag the Action onto the model. To change the overall light intensity, change the intensity of the "c1-ico-f1 (8)" light in the folder.

That's great Gerry! But watching that little girl do the "bump and grind" is a little disturbing ...

OK, I just tried a quick experiment and it seemed to work. Save a copy of your model. Open your model in a new Action. In the Action: turn Face > Face Rigging > Face Constraints OFF. turn Face > Face Rigging > Position Control Nulls ON. Move the big Face Controls null farther out in front of the face. Export the Action as a model ( I didn't have to force keyframes or anything).

That would be easy to check out. Just make the Tongue Base (and children) a child of the Jaw bone and see if that works for you. It will still Aim At the Tongue Control null, but that null is a child of the Jaw Master so it shouldn't hurt anything. I designed it to work so all the Master nulls are visible at 1% and all the L/R (split) control nulls are visible at 2%. But Ultimately they can be however you want them. If you switch them, it shouldn't break the rig. Probably the easiest way is to : ( EDIT: SEE THE NEXT POST FOR THE EASIEST METHOD ) Save a copy of your model first In the Model window, switch to side view. Place markers at every "control" null. Control nulls have "control" in their names. In the PWS, select the Face Controls null and bring up the Translate Manipulator. Drag the Translate Manipulator farther out in front of the face. Drag each control null that moved back to its marker. You can also change the positions of the *start* of the geometry bones to better match the curvature of the face. But if you change the position of the *ends* of a bone, you either have to re-export the model (with constraints OFF and Place Control Nulls ON) or manually reposition the control null(s) associated with the bone until it is placed exactly at the tip of the bone. The only thing that happens when you export the Action is that the control nulls (the little ones, not the big Master nulls) get positioned at the tips of the appropriate geometry bones. The only two cardinal rules that I can think of at the moment are: Each small "control" null (a control null has "control" in its name) should be positioned exactly at the tip of a geometry bone. Do not move a Master null (a master null has "master" in its name) from one side of the face to the other. This seems to break the MultiD Relationships required for automatic mirroring of facial expressions. If you want to change the way the eyelids open/close or the way the tongue stretches/curls, you can edit the poses for them in Face > Face Rigging.

The tongue geometry bones - "%) Tongue 1", "%) Tongue 2", and "%) Tongue 3" - should be children of "Tongue Base". "Tongue Base" is a direct child of "Face Bones". The only thing Tongue Base does is Aim At the Tongue Control null, which is a child of Jaw Master. The Tongue Stretch Master and Tongue Curl Master drive percentage poses. You can find the poses in Face > Face Rigging. This is strange. I tried it with just the rig (no mesh attached) and at 1%, the Master Nulls appeared and at 2%, the split control nulls appeared. Do you see the nulls correctly when you view the model from Front View instead of looking through the camera? Any L/R controls should be Hidden=ON at 0, Hidden=ON at 24 and Hidden=OFF at 48. L/R controls are enabled when th slider is at 2% (split controls). Oh ... sure ... you're going to make me work. OK, I'll try to rig up a face mesh and post it before too long.

Hmmm, are we going to see some animation with all these guys? Looks like a great story!

Set your building on a ground plane. Make sure it is set it to "Cast Shadows". Set the ground plane to "Receive Shadows" and "Shadow Only" Make sure the Alpha Buffer is set to ON in the camera properties (the camera in the folder, not the camera shortcut in the chor - you can't set it in a camera shortcut) Render to TGA.

Have you read my tutorial on CP weighting with the LiteFace bones?

OK Tralfaz, it is getting really tedious to be always saying "ohhh awesome" .... "Wow" .... "incredible" and all that. Maybe you can start introducing flaws into your models just so we will have something else to say ... Really great Pod Bay model, and I like the lighting too!

I've had odd results when copy/paste mirrored on the Squetch rig from time to time. In my cases, it was only the Torso/Chest Controller that did funny things. That is easy for you to fix. Just set its rotation back to 0,0,0 and adjust it manually.

I finally re-worked the LiteFace rig to get around an issue AM was having with the "Install" Action. When you tried to export the Action as a Model when you had a model with smartskins, it would sometimes crash the program. Now there is no longer any "Install" action. You still have to create a new Action and export it as a model in order to automatically position all the control nulls, but there are no longer any action objects to worry about. I also wrote new documentation about how to install it. You can grab the new version in the first post. "LiteFace Rig + New Instructions (updated 11/10/09)"

You can see some very nice Flash tutorials for Sweeper here: http://www.hash.com/Sweeper/

First, if AM is saying you have fewer frames in your image sequence that you think you have, make sure none of the images skips a number. For example, image_000.tga, image_0001.tga, image_0003.tga. Also make sure there are actually 400 frames for the sequence in the container. [Edit] As you said already, also make sure the "SPeed" property is "Not Set" If you are sure all the frames are actually there, and the decal still shows fewer frames. Try deleting the decal and the sequence from the container and re-import the sequence, and make a new decal. In addition to Nancy's excellent instructions. If you don't know how long your chor is going to be, and you want to play with the speed of the animated decal, you have two other options. If your image sequence is 400 frames (0-399) Option 1) In the chor, on frame 0, enter 0 for the "frame" property of the decal. On frame 399, enter 399 for the "frame" property. Set the "frame" property's default interpolation method to "Linear". In the PWS Timeline, enter Spline View (or whatever it's called) so you can see the splines of the animatable channels. Click on the decal's "frame" property so it is selected, it's spline should appear in the timeline. Right-click on the keyframe on frame 399 and choose Curve > Post Extrapolation Method > Repeat. This will repeat the image sequence infinitely. Go back to the default "Keyframe View" (or whatever it's called) in the timeline. Adjust the speed of the image sequence playback by sliding the keyframe on frame 399 up or down the timeline. Option 2) Make a new Action with your Snow Emitter model. Follow Nancy's instructions to set the decal's "Frame" property to 0 on frame 0 and 399 on frame 399. Drag the action onto the model shortcut in the PWS and adjust the Action's "Cycle Length" until you get a speed you like. Then adjust the Action's "Repeat" until it lasts for the duration of your chor.

Hey Nancy. if you get a more simple implementation of Cleary's face gizmo working, I would love to see it. He has some interesting ideas, but for some reason I never even saw the Face Gizmo thread until way after I built LiteFace.

I think if you position the boolean cutter bone in a pose, then it will follow the body part as the model moves. Not totally sure about that, but it is worth a try. You might also try constraining (Translate To, Orient Like) the boolean cutter to the desired body part.

Thank you Nancy. I did post a newer version of the LiteFace (http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=46641) But I don't have updated instructions yet. Also, even though it is a smidgen less complicated, you still have to open a new Action window and export. The tricky part is placing all the control nulls at the tips of the face bones. If you want to do that manually, you don't have to export an action. I'll try to get together some updated instructions in the next week.

You might try a material effector. You add a material to it, then whatever the material effector touches will take on that material. You might place the effector under the missile impact site. Then scale the effector over time until it covers the whole landscape...

Not quite last Rendering, fixing things, re-rendering, troubleshooting, re-re-rendering, and editing can actually be quite a bit of work.

I believe AM_fbm turbulance come with the Enhance A:M Demo free download. If you still have the exe on your computer, just run it again ... then find where the installer put the trb files. Otherwise you can go to the Enhance A:M site and download the Enhance:AM Demo (387KB) http://www.shaders.co.uk/enhance:am/demo

Oh yes. Much better!