Gerry

It's a good find, but it would be *nice* to know the ins and outs and what-have-yous. However I believe I'll be going back to the cloth material for this cape; I'd switched to a series of bones with dynamic contstraints, which works okay, but there's a lot of tweaking with the cp weighting and it was never 100% though I had planned to work with it further. I might have two models for this character and use on a case-by-case basis. Not every shot he's in needs a waving cape anyway. EDIT: I do have a cloth question though: if a character appears in a shot at say, frame 320, is there a way to start the cloth sim at that frame instead of zero? Guess I should go test.

I did mine in a (4) side view and it went like butter.

Dang that's an incredible find Robert! I just re-tried a test for Biff's cape that I'd given up on. Check this out, it's behaving beautifully. I did try putting a path constraint on Biff so he could walk over a distance, but the cloth got wonky almost immediately. So here he's walking in place. But it would be a cinch to do the sim, then put him on a path if I wanted. Did you just stumble across this! Biff_WalkCapeTest_h264.mov

That's interesting. It would never have occurred to me that it was the camera view! I was having trouble with a cloth sim a couple weeks ago that I may go back and try again, just to see.

thanks guys. I won't be making it to this one. Anyone live down there?

I too get that simbiont error, I just click through it. Some third party materials and plugins don't work on the Mac. I can't help with the dope sheet question though.

"Cicak" has been accepted into the Palm Beach International Film Festival and they've put up a pretty nice web page for it: http://pbiff.festivalgenius.com/2012/films...ooney_pbiff2012

yep, a lot of keys are "window-dependent" for want of a better term. I've set keyframe interpolations when all I wanted was to switch views and it confused the heck out of me the first few (dozen) times!

Dude! Don't ever grow old! Happy Birthday!

Ooh, that's nice! I may be able to use this!

I guess I spoke too soon about the finger fix. When I tested, it didn't occur to me to test anything but the fingers (which worked great btw!), however once I put the model into a chor, I discovered that the rig arms somehow broke even though the fingers still work. So I went back to my original version of the model for now, but I will revisit installing the new hands again and note all the steps I take.

Just my two cents but you probably shouldn't do a sitcom. Unless you turn it serious I just watched "A Beautiful Mind" and of course noted the fact that "The Big Bang Theory" is that movie, updated and turned into a comedy.

Okay, no need to panic, people. I deleted all the hand fan bones from the fan bones relationship and created a new one just for the hand fan bones. *Most* of the work was hinding, unhiding and rehiding all the finger bones. But everything works now.

I noticed this when I was making the screen movie. Here's the three fan bones for the finger; only the second one is a problem. But I noticed in the bone names that this one has two dots and a pipe before it and I wondered what that might mean. Is it somehow outside the hierarchy? Maybe it doesn't mean anything but it got me wondering.

Tried making a screen movie and in doing so I apparently was able to change the enforcement percentage, closed, quit and restarted, and though the enforcement is now at 50% where I want it, the fan splines won't deform correctly. I'm going to explore something else before I try another movie but I'll make one shortly.

Changing the enforcement is exactly the prob! I go to edit the fan bones relationship and change the enforcement of these two fan bones, but with the fan bones relationship "on" at all times, the enforcement change doesn't stay set. I'm also not certain that the relationship where I thought it was on is the problem. I go through all the relationships, set the Fan Bones to "not set" in all of them, but it stays on regardless. It appears I got it to switch to "off" in some of them, but I change the enforcement and it doesn't take. I'm going to go through and redo all the fan bones in a new relationship, but I have a feeling I should give it a different name than it has now. EDIT: AND delete the original relationship first!

Maybe I'll just redo the fan bones constraints. the one hangup is that the middle fan bones I added to your new finger bones are set at 100% and I can't change them to 50%. Otherwise everything looks good.

Kind of like Borat with guns.

Hm, well I did a little checking and it appears the fan bones are "on" inside my head dynamic constraints relationship. So I switch it to "not set" inside that relationship, but there doesn't seem to be an option to save at that point. The model doesn't get an asterisk indicating a change has been made, so I tried a "Save as..." but the problem persists. But in the model itself everything is "not set" by default.

Hey Robert, I tried your fix and it worked great! I do have another somewhat related problem, but unrelated to the finger bones fix. I created a "Fan Bones Constraints" relationship to control the various fan bones I inserted. In the model, the Fan Bones Constraints are "not set" by default. But when I open the model in an action, the Fan Bone Constraints are always on. I remember reading something about this awhile back but I can't figure out how to leave them at "not set" since adding constraints to it with the new finger bones won't take, obviously, because when I go to edit the relationship, they're on by default. I tried changing them to "not set" and then quitting without saving but that doesn't make any sense. Seems there's a way to do this but I can't figure it out.

I've often thought of doing an Indy parody called "Hindustani Jones" about a bullwhip-and-pistol packing adventurer from the Middle East who comes to America to search for a mysterious treasure, have adventures, completely misread the culture, and randomly shoot and beat up unsuspecting Americans. It would be HILARIOUS! Do that one Mark, do that one!

Hi Roger, it sounds like you're in "Bones" mode in a modeling window. Hit F5 to switch back to "Modeling" mode in the same window and you can move the model cp's. In "Bones" mode (F6) you can move and create bones and assign cp's to them. But you can't move cp's in "Bones" mode. Hope that helps. Post a screen shot if you're still having probs.

Congratulations Jesse! Maybe we'll meet up at a film festival one of these days!

Haven't gotten back to this but I will and I'll let you know how it goes. I did import the first .mdl from you, and the Relationships went right into the TSM folder very nicely, so there's that. More later.

Okay Robert, I downloaded and I'm taking a shot on working through this, but what I need are the "1 right finger" and "1 left finger" bones, not "2". Can I just rename the ones in your model and put them in the appropriate positions? Seems like that should work.