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Thanks Stefan. You rock.

Thank you cronos, those are some nice tips.

I haven't tried that in many years because tools like Stefan Gross' Mirror Bones plugin exists ( http://www.sgross.com/plugins/plugin18/index.html ) This plugin will mirror bones, bone falloff properties, constraints and CP weighting. It is usually a much quicker solution for what I think you're trying to do. On complex characters, it can take up to 45 minutes to run, so you have to be patient with it.

that's awesome. you've been a very busy man this week! Thanks for it with all of us.

Wow Mark. You really are a wizard at foliage. That looks really great so far.

None of these projects seems to work. I am opening each project and moving the sneer nulls. The pose sliders move, but the mesh doesn't do anything. I even cracked open the expressions to see what they look like, but I have never worked with expressions, so I have no idea what I'm looking at. Sorry I can't help with the expressions. What if we just use the sneer nulls to control a smartskin for each sneer pose?

31 - 34 fps. You keep outdoing yourself. My browser appears to have the same old Flash plugin it has always had, so nothing exotic is going on there, yet, your swf file is less than 200KB. I do not see how you can pack that geometry and rendering engine into a standard swf file and play it on my standard Flash browser plugin while keeping the swf file under 200kb. Are you sure you aren't pulling our legs?

That's great. Way to go Xtaz. Why not see what it looks like in HAMR?

mark, I personally have no problem with your personal upgrade policy. We all have our own thing. I'm just trying to learn this doggone rig and when things don't work I have no friggin idea if it's me, the rig, or the software....

Yes, based on the movie David posted, the sneer thing does appear to be a v15 issue. i can't really send in a report though, because I have no idea what the problem is, and I doubt anyone at Hash knows this rig well enough to know the problem either. As a work around, I just opened the sneer right and sneer left poses and translate the nostril_right and nostril_left geom bones up a bit. Seems to work OK. I rarely used the sneer pose in TWO anyway.

OK, I have turned my computer off overnight, restarted AM, deleted my copy of Squetchy Sam and extracted a new Sam from the downloaded zip file. I am testing out "v13_Squetchy_Sam_04_23_2008.mdl". All the FACE controls seem to work for him EXCEPT the Sneer controls. I unhid the face bones and none of the bones move when I drag the Sneer Null. I looked in the poses in the Nose_Setup folder but I don't really know what to look for. "nostril_Y_translation_limit" does move stuff, so I think that is working. I could try to switch out the "face_setup_Expressions_DO_NOT_TOUCH" pose, but since this is Squetchy Sam I'm looking at, I'm not sure where to get a replacement pose from. Any ideas?

One more thing. The Sneer poses don't appear to do anything in my model or in Squetchy Sam. None of the sneer bones appear to be moving. I hunted through Sam's properties and all the constraint poses seem to be ON. Do you have any idea how to get the sneer bones to move?

Thanks David. They appear to be working now. tongue_constraints and cheek_constraints were both OFF. In addition, the tongue geom bones had all acquired a length of 0 in the model somehow. I fixed the problems and everything seems OK.

Funny you should ask. There happens to a most excellent (IMHO) tutorial on the very subject of Post Effects. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showt...t=0#entry252870

I'm at the place in the PDF tutorial where I'm setting up the tongue poses. In Squetchy Sam, the tongue_target_base bone appears to be constrained to aim at the tongue_target null with "Scale to Reach" turned ON. Also, the tongue bones appear to be constrained to "Orient Like" the tongue_target. But in my model, none of those constraints appears to be in place. Do you know in which pose I should apply these constraints? Also in face_setup -> cheek_movement_for_building_squints : cheek_right_up and cheek_left_up aren't doing anything. Should some bones be moving with these poses? Thanks

Thanks for that awesome face setup tutorial David. It's a life saver.

I think the easiest way is to trace your logo in Adobe Illustrator. Then use A:M's AI Wizard to get it into AM. Here's a tutorial for the AI Wizard http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29733

Thanks David. Don't worry about the delays. I'm just grateful that you respond. There isn't any way I could install this rig without your and Mark's help. On one hand, I'm awed by the incredible amount of time and effort you guys put into the rig and documentation. It's obvious you collectively put hundreds of hours into this. On the other hand, I'm absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of it. There are times when I have to stop working on the rigging because my brain just shuts down and refuses to go any farther. This rig is not for the faint of heart. I think this exercise is very good for me because I will think twice before pestering a TD to add some cool new feature to a rig. I would much rather just improvise with what's there than add another level of complexity to something that already works pretty well. A word of advise: When some animator suggests a new feature - ignore him/her

I'm pretty sure the AM license is tied to your hardware, so even if you reformat the hard drive and re-install the OS, you should still be able to install AM and enter the same registration code you used the first time. ... but cross your fingers, just in case.

Thanks for your replies David and Mark. I've been running around a lot the past few days and haven't had a chance to work on my rigging project. One pose I know I was having trouble with was the NarrowOO pose. I know I defined an underlying pose that does exactly what the NarrowOO pose is supposed to do, but I can't find it and I don't know what poses to adjust in the NarrowOO relationship to get that effect. Do you know what poses I need to adjust?

I've finished working through "Face_Setup_04_17_2008.pdf" and now I'm lost. I'm looking through Squetchy Sam's User Properties but I cannot figure out how to start defining poses for the FACE ui. At the moment, only the "eye blink" null is doing anything. Can someone (David? Ken? Anyone?) please give me a clue about where to go to hook the FACE Nulls up to the underlying poses I set up in the pdf instructions? Thanks

I'm getting between 20-30 fps on Firefox, AMD 3.2GHz, ATI x800xl video.

It could very well be a simple case of a crucial missing keyframe, combined with tweening, like Carolin suggested. If that is the case, Robert's video is a very nice introduction about how to keep bones in place. Your issue could also be "Key Drift", where the bone drifts a bit between two identical keyframes. Robert's video doesn't cover key drift. For more on "Key Drift" and "Interpolation", read Pages 3 and 18 of the Tutorial here: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29743

I haven't heard anything from Martin or the Hash crew about AM being discontinued.

In addition to Yves advice .... You can turn the camera while in camera view by holding down the [shift] key and dragging with the middle mouse button.