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Really nice start. I agree about the lip sync. For something like the 11 second club, it seems important to make it more snappy/less mushy. Maybe the facial expressions could be much more exaggerated too. Especially the eyes. If you can create a pose so you can make the eyes physically larger at certain points, that would help too. Adding eyebrows might also help to make his facial expressions more apparent.

Awww man, I'm jonesing already! I can't believe I've become so dependent on a comic strip

I am not an expert in the subtleties of TSM (or TSM FLipper), but with the MirrorBone plugin, it seems you have to have "right" or "left" at the beginning of the bone name, or it will sometimes duplicate certain bones. For example, "right_upper_arm" works - it makes a mirrored bone named "left_upper_arm" But "upper_arm_right" sometimes produces a duplicate of the upper_arm_right bone named "leftupper_arm_right" (in addition to creating a mirrored bone). If you pay close attention to whatever bone naming convention you are using, it is usually pretty easy to spot the wrongly duplicated bones and delete them.

Hi Gerry, When you Copy/Paste Mirrored, be sure you have the "Whole Model" filter button activated. Don't try to just CPM a bone or a branch. At least in v15. I have used CPM on many occasions with the LiteRig and it has always worked fine, but that does not mean it will always work flawlessly for you. I guess it just depends on the way you work. If you can list a series of steps that always produces a funky result, it would help greatly in troubleshooting any problems you might be having. In the movie you posted, it looks like the shoulder bones are rotating around the Z axis. You probably don't need to rotate the shoulder bones for a walk cycle. Just delete the channels for the shoulder bones (in the Action) and it should be fine.

You can safely delete an Action without losing any of your weighting or smartskinning. Those things are stored in the model, not the action.

Gerry, I don't know what is going on. If you send me the model (holmesbryant at gmail dot com) I will take a look at it. Sometimes if I reassign CPs after having already assigned them to a bone, I get results like those in the picture. In those cases, I have to delete the old action and create a new action. Then everything behaves.

Hi Gerry, Screen shots always help. I need a little more information. Assigning CPs to bones in the Modeling window is a basic AM process. The rig, no matter what the rig is, shouldn't have an impact on that. How, exactly, is your mesh getting messed up when you assign CPs? If the mesh is messed up in an Action window, then most likely the roll handles on the bones are not pointing the right way. If you copied the rotation values from the left thumb to the right thumb, then the Z rotation on the right thumb bones will be opposite of what they are supposed to be.

looking pretty good so far

Nice model Paul. Can't wait to see what you are planning to do with him.

Awwww man, how's he going to get a parrot now?

Disp can often create acceptable details, but Tralfaz is going for hyper detail ... and any hyper detail affectionado naturally eschews "acceptable". Geometry always trumps displacement when you want clean lines and super detail, especially up close. Plus, if you ever want to rapid prototype a model, displacement won't show up unless you jump through a bunch of hoops to turn it into geometry ... and it won't look as good.

very cool. great start! In some corners you can get away with setting the bias magnitude to a very small number, like 12 or 20, instead of beveling. It just depends on the area and how far away the next CP is.

That darn lucky hat! I knew it was trouble

It sounds like you have the Legs IK pose turned ON. If you turn it Off, you will be able to see all the leg geometry bones. The Legs IK pose should be in User Properties > Body Rig > Legs IK. I just uploaded a new version of the LiteRig project that I modified back in August. This one has the Legs IK pose turned off. Unfortunately I can't remember if I made any other modifications to the rig.

Thanks for the link! I bookmarked it Those kinds of posts usually go in the OT forum though.

Have you seen this page? http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin7/index.html Not sure if this one works with v15. I think it was made for v12. http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin8/index.html

Great tut Eric. It was the perfect length too. For anyone interested, you can see all of Eric's video tuts here: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=3DDink#grid/uploads

I'm sorry. I edited my post after you read it. It isn't personal jumbotuna. It's my issue. It isn't yours. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

It's the copy protection. Instead of adding another $100 dollars to the cost of the program for a hardware dongle, you just have to place the CD in your drive. Once AM starts, you can take it out if you want. The easiest way is to cannibalize the CD drive from one of your old computers and install it in your current computer. That way, you can just leave the AM CD in the drive. Copy protection is needed. It isn't optional.

In addition to what Robcat said, I think you can also change the length of the action by dragging the *blue* "Action Bar" to whatever frame you want. But the best way to change the length of the action, as stated above, is to place a keyframe on the last frame you want and make sure there are no keyframes after that.

The easiest way would be to use a transparency map or cookie-cut decal. The next easiest way would be to use booleans. If you want to model the holes, then the only advise I can give is .... lots of practice

Thanks Gerry. If you have any questions installing it or troubleshooting issues, please ask! I'm working on some modifications but it's going kind of slow since I'm squeezing it in between other projects. One thing I noticed after rigging about a dozen models with it. The legs work better if the legs are straight and the feet are pointed straight ahead. If you want the character to have bow legs or you want the feet to be splayed outward or pidgen toed, do it in a pose after the character is rigged. Then set the pose to 100% in the Model's properties so you don't have to remember to turn the pose on every time you place the character in a chor.

Yeah ... like you really need another great model in your portfolio

I hope you are saving these chors in an organized fashion. When you are done with the strip, you will be WAY ahead if you ever want to animate them.

getting better Spleen!