detbear

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

Hey Fuchur. Thanks for the reply. I think you are right along those lines. However, I'm looking at a specific part of the rigging process in the smartskin "Pose" Action. This may not even be possible or an option, But moving cps at each percentage of a heavy mesh can be daunting. But if you could import mdd motion from the rigged app and paste those cp frames in a smartskin pose....well.....the work would be done for you....Again...if that is possible. For instance....An mdd of an elbow bend could be used by copying 3 keys: 1 at 00% / 1 at 50% / and 1 at 100%. Then those keys could be pasted in the smartskin pose action at the same percentages.

I guess, effectively...with some effort, this would be a way to import the skin weights/morph targets of a rigg from another App and use the pose process in a smartskin to morph the joints for things like elbows, knees, fingers, etc. Especially if the imported OBJ character has a bunch of cps that would be hard to weight and/ or smartskin. Not to mention the facial morph transfer posibilities. William

Elm....This is a late post on this thread but I have 2 important questions concerning the mdd to pose process: 1.Do you import the mdd into a pose and copy it there....Or where do you access the copied mesh from...and where do you paste it... 2.I want to import a model from other software. I can import an obj from the other App, but it of course will not bring the rig. However, I can bring in .Mdd of the joints bent(elbow, knee, neck, shoulder, etc) If what you are saying is true, I should be able to smartskin/ pose these by some how pasting keys of the cps from the mdd file exported out of the other App into Hash. This character would of course need to be rigged in Hash prior to using the Mdds. What is the method used to get the mdd keyframes pasted into the percentages of each pose. My hope is to round about get the smartskin in the pose to morph to the morph shape I export from the other App. William

Welcome to the forum!!! It is best to use a sequence if you can like Xtaz suggested. (Right click on "Images" folder in the project workspace and choose import sequence) Choose new rotoscope and select the sequence. If you need to have audio, you can import it separately with a few easy steps. To make an image sequence I normally utilize Quicktime Pro. You can import your video into QT pro and export sequence. To get the audio, you can export "audio only" as a separate file. Just bring both files into Hash and into your project. Don't give up as this is a very friendly process with Hash. Cool thing about image sequences is that you can use them in your camera also if you ever want to blend CG with live video. Awesome for skies/backgrounds/ etc. Again...welcome.

Hey Will, You gotta keep that dream going man. Don't let the day job strike you down. Most of us are there in that boat. Pick a sequence, choose a few people here to help iron it out(If you don't pick me I understand). And make it fantabulous. Then stab it out from there. I would love to help you for Romen. I can certainly offer a similar deal as Robcat. (Again, if you don't select me, I understand) Just don't give up on your vision. It has great potential. Keep the team of people small and in good communication. Heck...develop the fight sequence you've been boarding out. That could be used for a cool teaser/ trailer. I would suggest that each animator be given short enough shot(s) so that they can re-do them to your liking/ artistic vision if need be. Plus shorter sequences allow for feature polish. Much of my film was sped up with poor polish or less than I originally hoped for. William D.