detbear

Hey Fuchur, I understand... I sent you an email via your website form. William

Fuchur, I need to send you an inquiry via e-mail but I don't know how. How can I best contact you? William

Rusty.... You may be thinking of the channel switch.... The rotation channel must be switched to Euler so that when you go beyond 100% it doesn't go back to 01, 02, 03, etc. Instead, when in the Euler mode the digits keep moving up 100, 101, 102,.........302.......4,500..... etc. This extends the rotation range beyond 1 single loop. William

The Mufoof stuff is also on one of the Extra's DVD's. I think in the tutorial section somewhere. Great stuff by the way. It is a really good "go to" for airplane props/ etc. ALSO....for wheels on the ground, there is a formula to calculate the rotation to distance ratio. A long time ago there was a tutorial on this also but I'm not sure where that one is.

Simmon,' So I opened one of my models and went into bones mode......Clicked in the outer space which selected the infamous "Black" model bone. Then I went to "Translate" mode('N' Key)....... Grabbed the handle and scaled the bone down. It seemed to scale fine. However....I already had bones/ rigg set up....so it scaled all those down as well. Didn't impact the mesh though. William

Hey Simmon I'm not sure about that one.....However, you could just make and size a new bone for the entire model. Then assign everything to it. It would scale all under it's heirarchy.

In my case, I designed our dragon partly based on what he would be doing in the film. It wasn't absolutely necessary for him to have arms.....But he had to have wings. I decided on the TSM2 rig which worked well for the legs, long tail, long neck, and wings. Nancy G did a nice job with the textures and spots. Attached is a short animation and two screenshots of how the dragon was designed to the role he played. Wyboo_Dragon_shot_021.mov William

Looking for some info on how to mirror smartskin. Is there a "Mirror smartskin" function now. Where and How?

Hey Roger, I went through the "CuteZee" Dragon Building process a few years ago. Here's a snap shot of "Sparky." William

Robert... You beat me to it man.... I was just looking up the link to your selection sets video tutorial... SELECTION SETS is a great new feature......especially for animators who like to be able to quickly select certain bones or sets of bones. This makes getting keyframes set fast and improves the animation workflow a great deal. ALSO...a big hats of to Robcat for making a great "How to use it" Vid.' William

make an action of your imported model expand the action, so you can see the "shortcut of your model" be sure "animated mode" is on right-click on the "shorcut of your model"->plugins->import mdd now you have an "muscle"-animated action. go to the frame you want to copy out the keyframes. select cps and edit->"copy keframes" make a new percentage pose on your model. select all cps (or only those that should have a pose-keframe), edit->"paste keframe" voila. you shoud now have a percentage pose... Willi.... Thanks so much for responding. This is a process I've been wanting to learn how to accomplish but the proper steps have been unclear. I will try it out. I'm hoping to "Backdoor" a rigged character from another app that way. My original hope was to use this to get the CPs moved in a kneebend into smartskin somehow. But there are sooo many other uses for this process also. Thank you for responding. William

Hey, I realize that this may defeat the purpose of becoming a better modeller, but there are Angelina J look-alike 3D models out there. You could grab one that and import it as an .obj.....THEN use the "Retopo" tool to match the features with fewer splines. But like I said, it may not be your goal....

Explain that more. I'll have to show an example when I finish....stay tuned. The goal is to use a bone to place a cp in a apecific location....But in order to make that happen, the bone and cp must be synch'd up......This is why a "snap bone to cp's position" feature would be worth it.

that also works, however I'm still having the problem of the bone orientation not surviving the export of the chor as a model. Robert.... That looks like a very promising constraint Application. The hurdle in my case is that when the mesh change does take place, it needs to go to specific locations and the bones need to be there as well. However...this constraint does hold some good application if it turns out to work like you are trying to get it to.

It's more than a "Notion."

Is there a tutorial or example somewhere on ther forums here on how to best use the group constraint? I'd like to find out a bit more about it. I've seen it for a long time on the constraints list, but haven't messed with it at all.

Is this for a modifiable character? I think the Group constraint and export from Chor would work well for that. I'm no expert with the group constraint, so I could be off base. When I looked at how it worked, it was based on selecting groups from a very small drop window. If you have 100 or more cp's set up in groups, its painful to select the correct group for each bone. Would it work.....I think yes. But that would be a very long process. I may not be seeing the correct way to utilize the group constraint, but it would be very difficult unless you only had a few groups in that list.

Yes...the bone would basically maintain it's length and orientation.....and just have its origin/ base placed on the exact point as the CP..... You would want the ability to rotate the orientation and even translate the bone later down the road. This function would just be for initial placement of the Bone. Even dreaming a bit more.....it would be helpful to do this also in an action window too. Basically the cp's in this case would act as a pattern to place the bones at specific points in x,y,z space. There's a purpose for this....although it seems ludicrous at present. When I get something operational and working, I'll show you.....but I'm working through it by hand, so it's at a snail's pace. I realize Steffen is booked solid at the moment. I'm working on this by hand and just wishing a function like this existed.

I looked at that constraint method and even though it will work, I think the task is rather daunting on a larger scale. A function to snap a bone to a specific cp's position within the modeling window in "Bones Mode" is what would be ideal: 1.select bone 2.right click and select "snap to CP" 3.Left click on desired CP Result......The bone is re-positioned at the x,y,z position of the cp. Example....if I want a bone at every cp on a spline ring, then positioning this by hand can be a lot of tedious work.

So what you're saying is that if I export the model, the bones won't need to have the constraint in order to remain in that position? If so.....that could be very interesting indeed.

In that case, a great new feature suggestion would be a "Make bone at CP". That would be very cool.

Here's a Noob question for you guys that I missed on somewhere down the road. Is it possible to snap a bone to a CP's position? If so, how might that be accomplished? William

Really nice work. The style captures the old school Trek in a good way. Nice mood/ lighting in your render examples too.

sounds like a good workflow to Messiah. I wonder if your process would work back into A:M instead just as a trial.

I did a quick experiment that resulted in the imported mdd crunching the whole Hash model.....really ugly. I moved an elbow bone in a Hash model in the Choreography. Exported the data as mdd Then imported the mdd data back onto a boneless version of the hash model(just to see what the results would be) I must be missing some key elements in the process. I found that you must import the mdd onto a model in an action or choreography. The result shows the move across the keyframes. But their are deformations and the model is all messed up. A step by step process guide is needed in this case for me at least. The import of the .mdd gives an error also. I'm using v16 on a pc