Gerry

You know Mike, I've been meaning to try that approach and had forgotten about it. This would be a good time to do so. Thanks!

Thanks Steve! I've got the LiteFace in, and it went just swimmingly right up until the very end, and I've got one wonky cheekbone that I don't know how to fix, or what to turn on or off to do so. Can anyone suggest a fix for this?

I've got the rig in and it went great. What if anything do I need to turn on or off to do smart skinning? I tried it once with everything turned off but the smartskin misbehaved.

I think that's something we all need to work on!

Hi Simon- A very low-level practice that I'm trying to adhere to is really simple and great if it's a one-person project: write down a schedule, give yourself deadlines for each task. this isn't the same as an elaborate management scheme but it sure helps! Also, adding on to what Mark mentioned about naming conventions for models etc., I've gotten into the habit of naming models for what's been done on them, e.g., "Skarab_geometryonly.mdl", "Skarab_cpsWeighted.mdl", "Skarab_weightedAndDecaled_v1.mdl" , "Skarab_weightedAndDecaled_v2.mdl" and the main thing is, when it's done, it's simply "Skarab.mdl" and that's the final model. If I need to do additional work, or, say, an arm or hand is wonky, I'll take the final model and "Save as..." as something like "Skarab_handTesting.mdl" and when it's fixed and done, that one gets named "Skarab.mdl" and I overwrite the original final version. But there's *always* only one final model so I don't get confused by different versions.

thanks David, and that reminds me, I need to look at your eye modeling tut again!

I'm going through installing the 2008 rig and it's going very well, but at one point I did something and I wonder if it will cause problems and if so what I should look for. On page 70 where it goes "Plug ins>Wizards>Install Rig..." when I did that, my "Install Rig" doesn't have an ellipsis, and when I clicked Install Rig nothing happened. So I clicked it again. Still nothing, so I've been proceeding to do cp weighting and it's going fine, but did I plant a time bomb for myself later by clicking it twice? Is something supposed to happen when you click "Install Rig"?

this is going very smoothly so far, great instructions!

I'm taking my first stab at using this rig, but the first thing I noticed is that MirrorBones doesn't show up in my plugin wizards. It's in the hxt folder, and I've tried tricking it into appearing by throwing some bones in my model, but it won't show up. I see some other folks had a prob with this earlier. I'm using v. 17a on a pc. EDIT:Never mind, got it.

I've got a standard Logitech two-button-and-scroll-wheel mouse on my Mac and I can left click/right click to weld cp's just fine.

Yikes, well good luck with it anyway! Hope it's not too painful.

Here's a test of the Gingerbread Man's moves. I've stripped out everything so you'll need to use your imaginin'. He starts out on the base of the candelabra, and there will be lots of snow falling and pretty stuff in the background. It's not perfect, a little floaty, but I'm hoping it makes up in sheer happiness what it lacks in polish. I may still go in and tweak some keyframes, but I'm taking it home tonight and doing a final render of the whole thing. We'll see tomorrow! GingermanBlockingTest_h264.mov

Can you not import the model just once, then duplicate it? Are the cp names still different when you do it that way?

I showed a first draft to my boss and she likes it, but asked about something that had got me wondering just the day before. So now when the snow starts falling, the gingerbread man...well, you'll see!

Very nice for a first pass Steve. Is that Freddy Mercury singing?

Thanks Steve. I thought I would need some help but with those stupid branches out, I can render it just fine.

I just took out the dang branches! Problem solved.

Wow, pretty atmospheric! I'd like to see more, that's too short!

I don't know what is up with this hair material. I've made the attached movie, it's only four frames (frames 10, 60, 110, 160) but the fir branch with the hair material is still wonky. I previously had brightness varying along hair length, then deleted keyframes and set it to 80%, then backed it off to 40%, and there are now no keyframes on its settings except for the color changes that happen around frame 1206. But it wants to do this change (looks like it's getting brighter and cruddier) and I can't track it down. it also comes and goes; somtimes when I render frame 110 it's fine; sometimes not. These frames are just for rendering guidance but I sure would like to figure this out. I may strip out everything else and zip up the chor with just the fir branches if anyone else wants to take a look at. Maybe tomorrow. Holiday2012_testframes.mov

As I mentioned elsewhere I'll probably be needing some help rendering this. I'm currently rendering out each 50th frame for reference, then I'll post a link to the files and asking for some bids down in the "employment" section.

thanks Gerald, I'll let you know!

I'm doing a test render of my holiday animation and even at one pass, at half-size (360x180) each frame is taking around ten minutes. I'm only rendering every tenth frame and it looks like around 45 hours just for this test. And it *doesn't* have the snow falling, just some hair material and the shooting "roman candles". I need to look into this and then I'll be in touch with a couple of folks here who have render farms. I should also test the render times on the Mac as it's always rendered faster, but I'm a little leery that the Mac may render the particle systems differently. It has in the past but that's a few versions ago.

Thanks Mark, that makes a lot of sense. When I would go to change the color in the emitter, I had a completely separate problem where the bottom, oh, 1/4 of the particle hair was white, couldn't figure that out and when I tried to take a screenshot to post here, the particle hair would "smear" across the frame. So I couldn't even get a screenshot to try to diagnose! But obviously the percentage I was seeing in place of the timeline was percentage of the length of the hairs. I vaguely remember there being a setting for that but as I said I was in over my hair, er, head.

You guys are both great for looking into this! I'm thinking that I set too many initial settings in the material itself and it confused the program. Or me. Ideally I'd like the branch to go from grey to brown and the needles from grey to green. It seems like I should be able to set the two colors independent from each other though. But if I have to have one mesh for the branch and a duplicate for the hair emitter that would work.

Sorry if this isn't clear, but it's getting mighty confusing! Here's a test I rendered overnight, every 10th frame so it goes pretty quick. It's the fir branches at the bottom, I want to change the needles from grey to green. The hair material didn't work, so I'm trying an animated decal of a pine needle going from grey to green and it wants to stay green no matter what I do. I think I've already tried what Matt's suggesting, but I'll wait to see his test. This should be a lot easier than it is! I tried it in v16 as well, but it's not working there either. Wholething_10frameintervals_h264.mov