DrPhibes

This contest is a really fun idea!

That is great news!

Robert, This solution works in the choreography also! So after I create an animation through some poses I baked the animation. Then I followed your steps above and was able to change the driver. worked perfectly. Thanks so much for the help! Charles

Thanks Robert for this solution! I will try this out. Yes, you are correct, I meant euler. I am not sure this will fix the problem if I am baking out an animation in the choreography. Won't that just resort to the quaternion? I have an animation for a character done entirely through pose sliders. This character has a few constraints that use a null target to direct the z-roll of a couple bones. The animation then gets baked out in a chor and I export that action to a file that I then use a tool to convert to a CSV to extract the specific z-roll data and apply to a real world actuator. This was all working fine two years ago when I set this up, and now that I need to create a new animation this forcing of the quaternion driver issue has popped up. This of course means that the z rotate data is not accurate anymore. I was going to look back to try and figure out what version of the software I would have been using summer of 2020. Maybe it would work ok there.

I would like to use the Vector Interpolation driver on bones in an action file. I used to be able to select it in the option menu and set it for the project be default, but now everything is defaulting to quaternion. Even an older project is defaulting to quat. I change it in the options to vector and it just keeps reverting to quaternion. I don't want the rotate.w channel for this project, just xyz absolute values. How do I fix this? Thanks all, Charles

Robert, This is really helpful! Thank you very much for the deep dive! I will have more questions as I go here. I am hoping to create a more direct translation of a spline from A:M to Rhino and back. the polygon formats that I can use to get models to and from are ok, but I think there has to be a better way.

I have been working with A:M to create motion profiles for animatronics. Successfully I programed the animatronics for some pieces in Las Vegas last year, writing our own app to help translate to our controllers. You can see some of our process here. I am still working on refining this process and I was hoping someone could point me to some documentation of what all the switches are in an .ACT file or a .MDL file so I can better create some of the tools I need. I have looked on the FTP and at the SDK materials, but I could not find some plain language materials describing all of the syntax of the files. I am not a programmer by nature and there is a lot I don't know, so perhaps it is there, but I need a little more guidance to sort it out. everything I have done so far is simply by trial and error. For example, I can open an action file in text editor and understand what is the axis, time, and position of a bone and this made it easy to convert to what I needed. However, there are other tags in a model file I don't quite know what they all are and I would like to understand them more clearly to leverage for other conversions. For example the following; <SPLINE> 262145 0 1 -18.4294033 -2.04771137 0 . . 262145 0 9 24.2136593 -1.03441095 0 . . </SPLINE> creates a two point spline in a model file. what does the "262145" indicate? What does the "0" following it indicate? what does the ". ." at the end indicate? Thanks for any help in parsing this out. Charles

I have designed many 3d printable models in A:M, but as Robert mentioned it is not really intended as a CAD program. The kind of Boolean functions you want are not really practical in A:M, but there are best practices and techniques within A:M that can get you there. This is a functional "steam" engine I did all in A:M https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:25624 Charles

Solved the problem! It has everything to do with the files names! I shortened all the files names and it worked fine! I don't know why the longer files names work on other PCs. All of my machines are Windows 10. Thanks for all your help in trying to sort this out Robert! CB

Recorded a new WAV - Works! Split original and save - Did not work Merged to mono and save - did not work

That worked! Did you simply merge the tracks in Audacity and export to the 44.1kHz? I tried to do that just now and my file did not work, but yours worked fine.

Yeah, and it works fine for me on other machines, but not on this one. All the files you sent me DO work fine here, so this is a mystery. I can't tell what the difference is in the files. I thought maybe about saving out as a entirely different format and then back to a wav. I said Audacity above when I meant Adobe Audition. I should try Audacity.

Both work equally well. Import and playback without error.

I can't post publicly, but I sent you a link via a PM. I thought it was because of the different sample rates. Yours was 32kHz and my original was a 48kHz, but after saving out several from Audacity changing to various sample rates, none of them worked. So there is something else different about your wav file than mine that I am missing. What software are you using when you edit or save wav files? CB

That worked! What is the difference there?