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Bones can have control points assigned to them. Nulls cannot. However, Nulls are much easier than bones to select and drag around in a window. For this reason, a bone is often constrained to "Aim At" or "Orient Like" a null. Then when you want to rotate the bone (and the associated control points), all you have to do is drag the Null around.

If you aren't using paths, just animate he cannon firing and moving through the whole chor. Then drag a new "cannon roll" action into the chor and set its "Chor Time Start" and "Chor Time End" values to match the timing of the second cannon move. Drag a new "cannon roll" action into th chor for the third cannon move. Use multiple instances of the "cannon roll" action and set the Chor Time for each instance to match each time the cannon moves.

Dude, wow. If you make an on-line modeling/texturing app, it would be almost criminal not to make it compatible with WebHAMR. Make it so the user can save the model in a format the WebHAMR can open (a basic AM mdl plain text file). That would be a very good marriage of technologies.

Make sure you are in Bones Mode. Right-click in the model window and choose New -> Null

I understand now what you are wanting to do. I wrote a tutorial about how to do just that: http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=31992

For things like rope and chains, read this tutorial. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29914

Set the decal "Type" to "Cookie Cut". If the image has an alpha channel, the black area of the alpha channel will turn transparent in AM once you set the decal type to "cookie cut".

Cool tank tread! For something like this, it is much easier to apply a Patch Image. First, model the tread so every patch is the same size. Select all the CPs in the tread (just the tread, not the other mechanical bits) and name the group something like ... "tread". Right-click on the "tread" group and choose "Add Image". The image you choose will be applied to each patch in the group. If your tread image is a seamless texture and your patches are the same size, the image will repeat ... seamlessly ... around the tread. Some of the patch images will probably be rotated the wrong way. Select the "Patch Group Mode" button, select a patch, and press Ctrl-R on the keyboard to rotate the image in 90 degree increments.

That's awesome. Too bad that engine and suspension are going to be hidden. Really impressive.

If you have your model constrained to a path in the Chor, you have to set "Has Stride Length" to ON in the Action. If you don't have the model constrained to a path, make sure the action shortcut property "Chor Range" is set correctly in the chor. If you have a chor that is 200 frames long, and you want your walk cycle to be active for the whole chor length, set Chor Range -> Start to "0" and Chor Range -> End to "200".

Also, you can often get better results on any type of Cloth Sim by animating the cloth at half the speed you want. Or, if it's already animated, make the action or chor action twice as long as it is supposed to be. The run the cloth sim. Then delete every other keyframe from the sim. Then shrink the action or chor action back down to its proper length.

I can't answer if SLI or Crossfire give better realtime performance in AM, but HASH once said AM uses the CPU more than the video card even for realtime display. I still have an old ATI X800XL video card with a new AMD X2 6400 (3.2GHz) and 4GB RAM and AM handles fine for me.

Here's another (updated) cloth tutorial. http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29731 Cloth is not for the faint of heart. It is difficult and time consuming no matter how much experience you have with it.

In addition, AM seems to play better with ATI cards than with NVidia. I was using AM on someone else's machine a couple weeks ago and they had an NVidia card and the "Black CPs" problem was really irritating.

That's really nice! It has great depth and a cool "once upon a time" feel to it that begs to be made into a story.

Woah, Caroline. You are becoming quite adept at this. Yay Caroline!!! I remember not long ago you were the one asking all the questions. Doesn't it feel good to have an answer every once in awhile?

You may need to have "Show Advanced Properties" checked in Tools->Options->Global.

I'm not exactly an expert with Newton, but I've done a couple of tests with it that worked out OK. If you can give specific problems or questions, maybe I or someone else can answer them. Otherwise it's kind of hard to help.

I saw a picture of an Italian police car that was this same model (real car). I can only imagine what an Italian car chase looks like!

You guys are awesome. .... just awesome.

Should you be in a compromising mood, it would be really helpful if the FACE interface switch was left at least. Do you mean the pose slider that turns the interface on and off? I would say that is a lot more than simply helpful. I would say it is really necessary to have that because without a switch to turn it off, the face interface shows up in the final renders.

I would really like to chime in. Really! But I didn't catch this conversation when it was first starting out and now I'm not even sure I know what you're talking about. I trust you guys will make the wisest and most benevolent decision.

Or decal it in another program before you import it into AM.

I had about 30 choreographies once that used the same lighting setup, but different light colors. I made an empty model and placed all my lights in that model (about 20 of them). Then I made a percentage pose for each light that changed the light's color from red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple-indigo. This saved me time in a couple of ways. When I needed to fix something in the light rig, I just changed it in the model and all the chors that included my "light rig" model were automatically updated. All my light colors were on a series of pose sliders. It was quicker to have the pose slider window open and drag sliders back and forth, than to crack open the Properties panel for each light I had to change the color on.

Probably not if it's a graphics driver problem. Especially since you are the first person I have ever heard of that has had that particular problem. I am assuming you have an NVidia graphics card. They seem to give the most trouble. The only thing I can think of is to update your graphics drivers ... or revert to older drivers ... to try and find one that plays nice with AM.