Gerry

This is my favorite, the "Skylark" tutorial. I've recommended this one many times and in fact just used it myself this week. It's a little creaky but still a good work process for splining faces. You should also have (or create if possible) a side view of the head, though the tute doesn't mention rotoscopes at all. http://www.hash.com/users/jsherwood/tutes/SkyLark.pdf

Actually that's *normal*, as AM prj files are plain text. Normally what you would do is copy and paste into a plain text editor (I use Wordpad on a PC, but TextEdit or BBEdit would work on a Mac) and save with a .prj extension. But when it wouldn't then open in AM, I looked at the code and there appears to be large blocks of gibberish text that look like they don't belong. Not sure what to make of it. Maybe it should be zipped before uploading.

Ya know the bark material that made the face disappear may just need to be scaled down. that's a swell model and character. Even the roots seem to have attitude! Remember though that trees don't *need* to be brown, and you could lighten up the bark color quite a lot and not lose anything. I think it would improve actually.

Great to see a new one of these, mark!

Steve, if you have QT pro, position the playhead where you want the audio to start, and under the edit menu use "Add to Movie". this will layer the sound over the video. It may take a bit of trial and error but it will work just fine.

Hey jason, I downloaded this prj and saved as a text file to a .prj format, but it doesn't want to open. There's some big blocks of code that look a little strange as well. Anyone else download and open this okay?

Hair movement is looking good.

What I'm sayin.

I like the new hair. Will you have some dynamics on it to, ya know, wave around and drive the girls wild? On the guitar solo you posted earlier, strumming the chords needs some simple movement on the left hand, and there was something about the way you've constructed the shoulder that, in that piece, makes it look like a weird elbow. But overall nice progress and I like the stylized facial features.

Gee we never would have guessed!

Gene this is really wonderful work. Sure it can be improved but that applies to most of us here, and your progress is simply amazing. I posted a comment on YouTube but I think it was appended to your last comment instead of the main list. But the sentiment is the same!

Very nice job. What is "book matched"?

Wow, that's great. Thanks Gerry.

Two more cents to add...I believe acoustic guitars have a seam at the bottom, where the strap peg would be. So having a seam there wouldn't be a drawback. What I mean is that if you were to go the "flatten" route you could do it in two halves and save some heartache trying to flatten or unwrap the entire side section in one go. EDIT: Yikes! I wish I'd seen this before I did my dinky little decaling tute! Brilliant!

Wow, I feel like I'm in some good company. I'm just working on cp weighting for the first time too. Great work on these hands, Stian.

Steve, thanks for posting that tutorial (and of course thanks to Jim Talbot for doing it)! Some extremely handy tips in there. Are there subsequent segments available?

Got it! That is awesome!

Yeah, nice work!

Hey Spleen I don't know if this is a problem but your YouTube link from Tuesday doesn't seem to work. I can log onto YouTube, but if I click your link it just hangs, then the error message. Can I search by your user name or account over there?

That sounds like a good plan for someone who knows what they're doing but that's not the only problem I found. Starting from scratch I think will be less trouble. Thanks for the response.

Wow, "Puppet Method"! I didn't know there was a word for it. Back in 2000 when I was creating the original "Sister Mary Dracula" Flash animation, I was really sweating the lipsynch/phoneme problem, when a friend told me "forget about phonemes! You only need two mouth positions: open and closed." And he was right. It's not only a cinch, but it's much funnier (if funny is what you're going for). I've noticed in some CG-animated TV spots that there's a trend toward a jerky, rough almost clay animation look. It's not just that it's cheaper to do, there's a certain charm to something that's a little rough-edged and clunky. It's nicer to look at and a relief from the overly natural, realistic approach that a lot of CG animators aspire to. It's also a good way to totally avoid the "Uncanny Valley".

thanks Rob, but I'm going to take a step back and rerig. If there are more problems I'll let you know.

Without actually seeing it my first guess is that the roll handle of one of the bones was not oriented correctly before Rigger was run. Is there a way to fix this though? I tried turning off constraints, then rotating the thumb bones in the modeling window, but when I turned the constraints back on the thumb twisted wacky.

Hey Robcat, that's a great tute as usual. However I'm putting the TSM2 rig into my Skarab model and I'm having some trouble with the thumb controls. Rotating the "Left thumb control 2" bends the last thumb joint sideways instead of backwards/forwards like it's supposed to. I tried turning off the constraints and repositioning the bones in the modeling window but that screws up the model in the action window. Is there a way to rectify this? Everything else is working great and I'm getting into cp weighting which is going fine.

Creepy! No, brilliant! No, creepy! Hey, whatever happened to that cathedral model?