Gerry

This appears to be a little more complicated than I thought. There are other missing bones in the index finger that are present in finger 2, namely "2 right finger2 roller parent", "2 right finger2 roller", and "2 right finger2 roller compensator". These are all microscopic (all have a length of .04") and it's a little more than I want to delve into at the moment. I thought it would be a relatively easy fix but it's easier to just use the bones that are present. Just FYI.

So would I! I rigged him exactly the way I've done my other characters. The same bone is missing on both hands. I can still manipulate the index finger with the geometry bones but it's a bit of a hassle.

I rigged Biff with The Setup Machine and it went fine (although I had to do it in v15) but the index finger control bone somehow got left out. I checked to see if maybe it was just hidden while the geometry bones were left unhidden, but it's simply absent. But this should be an easy fix, right? Add a control bone in the correct place, add constraints in the TSM Relationships that match the ones on the second finger and good to go? I'm going to do a Save As and experiment on a copy of the model but any suggestions would be welcome in case I'm not seeing something crucial here.

Nice start! I can see where it might be helpful to put just a little more "push" in just before he starts the final rise up off the floor, with a bit more lean-forward in his upper body. But I think you're on the right track and I also think you can probably see where the problem areas are. Just keep going. Have you video'd yourself getting up like that?

Yeah, there are a lot of variations possible. this is really just the bare bones with tons of potential.

I've been formulating some ideas for The Nightcallers and Kickstarter for several weeks now but it's too soon to go into detail here. Suffice it to say that Mark's success has given me more impetus!

You can officially call me Lieutenant Commander! ...unofficially you can still call me Gerry though.

Nice test, I've been meaning to play around with flocking lately.

As we speak I'm installing TSM2 and it works fine, install is easy and customization is easy. I have no real complaints with it although it doesn't currently work past v.15. My characters are completely non-standard and I still puzzle over exactly how to rig shoulders and hips though it's way simpler than it would be for a more humanoid character. Likewise faces are even more non-standard than bodies. I have no complaints with TSM but I would like to comprehend rigging more thoroughly, and the Zundel tutes have done that even though the model I built and rigged is pretty wonky. that's not my concern. It's no different than having to do a whole bunch of crappy drawings to get to one good one. It's just practice! But eventually TSM will age out, maybe not for years, but I want to have something to jump to that I feel equally confident with.

Here's a thought, what about a "show properties" box for bones similar to what we've got for the modeling phase. I noticed there's already an info box that shows in bones mode if you hit R, S or N, but currently it only shows the relevant scaling, translation or rotation numbers. What about a box that shows: Bone name Parent Child(ren) Constraints Etc. The intent being a simpler way to see all the relevant info for a bone in one place. Doable? Desirable? Practical? Redundant?

Are you talking about visibility? Yep, just so you can unclutter the diagram pretty much.

What Robert describes (expand the tree, shift-select, delete) is how Zundel does it in his videos, and it works fine. Yes it's more than one click but it's efficient and does what you're trying to do.

Whoa--- that's NEW! There are sometimes 250+ entries!!! I have given-up on trying to make it all the way thru before because it takes so much time and you can only listen to the same clip so many times before you go nuts... plus a LOT of entries are pretty darned bad. Hm, I thought it was old! Haven't been over there in a year or more, they may have changed their system. Have you participated in a round of voting yet? I could be completely wrong on this.

I've never gotten advanced enough with Maya to know if that flowchart interface is used for rigging. I was just making a general comment about their usefulness in presenting interrelated elements in a graphical way. So no, I'm not making a comparison about rigging in Maya! EDIT: I should also say that with what I learned from the Zundel tutes, I feel like I could now build a basic rig from scratch. I think it's the "following along" that gets me in trouble, not the underlying theory of rigging. The one area where I'm still not sure of myself would be building squash and stretch into the limbs. The rig he builds doesn't have it.

The 11-second club also creates a Catch-22 with their voting process where you are obliged to watch every entry before you can vote. I can completely understand why, but you have to be pretty dedicated to even consider participating.

I found myself wishing for a graphical diagram showing all the bones, their relationships, constraints, the geometry bones vs. the control bones, etc. Some way I could see in a picture where everything went and why. I know that's a tall order, and made complicated by the fact that rigs are as individual as their creators. But it wouldn't have to be rig-dependent, just a live diagram interface where maybe bones could be dragged around and reordered. I know that's the intent of the pws but unfortunately I don't find that graphical enough. A diagram-based system like this would enable you to turn sets of bones on and off, and maybe by mousing over you could see constraints and parent/child relationships. Other apps have a diagram-based way of showing stuff like this. the node system in Maya, or the new materials editor in 3DS comes to mind, but Adobe Encore has something similar and I believe After Effects does too though I just discovered that by accident a couple weeks ago. I should stop now. Like Confucius said, be careful what you wish for.

I'm not sure there's a "simple" solution. It reminds me of what's required for creating a blog. There are packages (I'm familiar with WordPress but I have a feeling they're all similar) and the basic problem is this: They try to create a blog formatting interface that requires no actual code writing; but what they end up with is something that is every bit as complicated as writing code, the only difference is there's no code writing. But it's not a simpler solution. Rigging strikes me as similar. You can either tackle rigging, or you can tackle installing a pre-made rig. But either way there are many complex steps and no one-size-fits-all solution. I've installed the Setup Machine a good half-dozen times, but every time I do, I open up the instructions, read through them more than once, and keep them open while I'm installing. I suppose if I did nothing but this it would come more naturally, but otherwise, it's always a complex exercise that requires intense focus.

Nice one! One of these days I'll try another entry.

It has to to with the arms and the control rig mainly. There are issues with "Compensate Mode" in the version he's teaching in, and as much as I tried to follow meticulously, there are a few points where having it "off" by default causes him to go back over and fix things, reparenting, etc, when, e.g., "attached to parent" doesn't properly show in the properties panel. I also deviated at a couple of points that didn't seem *important* at the time (moving a couple of bones, or fiddling with CP assignments) after constraints were created, but neglecting to note that some constraints were "on" by default in the model instead of "not set". Seems like some of those decisions might have been poorly thought out! He also takes some very efficient "workaround" routes, e.g., not using automatic CFA but instead copying over geometry, bones, constraint relationships, CP assignments, etc. manually, though in a highly organized way that I understood and could follow along. David was very helpful about fixing the arm, but my whole aim was to get it myself, not have others fix my mistakes. But that's all details. I'm unable to really "see through" to the mechanical cause-and-effect and comprehend the big picture of what's going on. I could post my wonky model but then I'm back to my original question, which is, should I be taking the time for this or get back to my live project. This morning I decided to spend the day working through the rig from scratch but once I started on that path and started poking through the last few saved versions of the model, I had no idea where to start.

I've been working through the Barry Zundel videos but keep running into a wall. I've learned a ton, but I think my time will be better spent getting back to the "Nightcallers" trailer. I think I sort of understand rigging better than I did before, but in the videos he encounters occasional problems (mostly with Compensate Mode and parenting hierarchy) and it just gets my mental knickers in a twist. I don't need the rigging knowledge for "Nightcallers" since I use The Setup Machine, and I am making good progress on modeling Biff, so it's back to them lovable bugheads for the nonce!

...seriously! Hope you have a good one that involves relaxing a little.

The PC (Dell Precision 670 running Windows XP Pro) has a Xeon 2.80Ghz CPU, 2GB of RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 3450/4000 SDI (graphics card?). It's also six-plus years old and has been getting pokey the last couple years. The Mac is a 2-1/2 year old iMac that I maxed out when I bought it but I don't know the specs at the moment. Fastest processor and graphics card and 4GB of ram I think. But the difference is so dramatic it seems like it's more than hardware and I wondered if there was some difference in the versions. So 16.0b is newer than 16.0, or is it the other way around?

Just voted again!

I'm currently running 16.0a on my office pc and 16.0 on the Mac at home and the one difference I've noticed is that the Mac version render times run rings around the pc version. Last week I was rendering a shot from "Nightcallers" that I started at the office but it was averaging five and a half to six minutes per frame, so I cancelled it and continued on the Mac when I got home. There the very same frames were rendering at a minute and a half. So I'm left to wonder if it's the platform or some crucial difference between 16.0 and 16.0a.

Hey Daniel, can you post some pics of your setup and maybe some stuff you make? I find this whole technology really incredible, I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I had the time and space for it.