bobcroucher

Hi David, I just read all 10 pages of your thread. I am really impressed with all of your hard work. It is amazing the things people, yourself included, can do with the primitive, but powerful, set of constraints, poses, and expressions in AM. A couple of items in response to earlier postings: This is a little known AM feature: The compensated force keyframe. You can turn on compensate mode before doing a force keyframe. Make sure your Key Mode settings are set to include the bones, properties, or poses which you want reset. Then press Force Key. This "Compensated" keyframe puts the values of the properties back to the values they would have had, if the current action wasn't there. Usually, this is the default model state (unless you are working with multiple actions). All the filtered animated properties should be forced to their previous values. This can be done at a later frame to un-squetch your character. David, you mentioned that you added a couple bones to allow an offset be created from this constrained value. If you set the constraint for "Before Action=ON", then the constraint is performed before the channels in the actions. This allows direct animation of the constrained bone in the action to be treated like an offset channel for the constraint. The results of the action are after the constraint, and therefore added to the constraints result. This can sometimes be used to reduce the number of bones or the complexity of your rig a tiny bit. Awesome work! Bob Croucher

Hi John, Great work. It looks very nice. I loaded the Thom project. One of the glitches occurs at 8:09. The action THOM WALK 01 008 needed to last a bit longer. It ended before the next action (THOM WALK 01 009) had ramped all the way to 100%. At 22:12 thom's arm completely disappeared. I don't know why this is yet. This still needs investigated. Bob

I recently fixed a memory leak reported on AM:Reports which occured when the smoothing option was ON. The project attached also has smoothing ON. I think the memory usage should be much lower in Alpha 8 when released, or in Alpha 7 even with smoothing set to OFF. Smoothing should not affect storage requirements since it is only used for a smoother version for display, but the leak was leaving all of the subdivided models around. So frame by frame more and more memory was consumed.

Thanks for the project Steffen. The last Thom's pants project of yours I looked at cost me a month worth of bug hunting. This one looks great! I noticed your FPS was bumped to 300. Ten times as many per second as usual. I wondered if it would sim OK at 30 fps if I upped the steps from 5 to 50 per frame. It worked fine. This sims just a bit faster, but mostly it only has keys at 30 fps, which made the file and RAM situation significantly better. This may not work if the character motion was super fast, but it did in this case. Next, I upped the subdivisions to 4 then 16, as a test. It was much slower to sim, but much more wrinkling was apparent behind the knees, and between the thighs and the pelvis. Bob