Roger

So I am resculpting some parts of my dragon character that I haven't been happy with, seeing as how the penguin is just about done. I've moved the legs in a little close to the body, so they're not sticking so far out to the sides, hopefully it is looking more bipedal now. Resculpting the feet to look more like talons instead of, well, whatever the heck they looked like before (they were kinda bad) I'm not quite done with the snout portion of the dragon head, haven't decided whether I want to have nostrils, a mouth that opens and closes (or just a paste-on replacement type mouth) or what. I think I may rework the hands as well, although they're not as bad as the feet.

I still need to work on the beveling for the buoy, but it is not a priority right now. As far as the mushrooms - they're not much but I'm trying to do something every day. I figured knocking out some props that could just be lathed was not a bad idea.

That might work. Strangely, when I selected all the wanted points, even though the center CP was selected, once the weighting was done the center CP was no longer selected. Not sure what happened there. I will double-check the weighting on that point. So glad this thing is coming together. I just need to check the way the torso is bending and I can start animating. Thanks for the tip about the foot controls, I added those in and hid the original foot bones, it looks better and makes more sense when posing.

Is it possible to manually add a CP when editing CP weights? Like force it to appear in the column on the left with all the other CPs that are listed? Seems like that should be possible. Or would you need to have the dev kit (or that level of knowledge) to do this?

Some mushrooms for the forest area the dragon lives in - I also need to do a few different kinds of shrubs and some trees but its a start:

So my updates have not been as frequent, but I have been making more progress. Here is the penguin character, from another thread. Ironing out some minor rigging details, need to add a few other things like proper pupils:

Well, here is the thing - in the penguing_Rigging_B vid you select the points on the left half including the hook (if you are looking at the penguin from the front). I've tried using lasso mode, I can select the same points on the right but no matter the angle I'm at that center cp always gets selected. It doesn't get selected on the back though. I can't figure out why that is. I also can't unselect that center cp. I don't think the leg will move right if I just select the other CPs without the hook.

I'm trying to select just the points that make up the right half of the spline ring where the leg starts. However, when I do that the point right in the middle that I have circled in red keeps getting selected. If I try to deselect it, I also lose the point that is directly to the right of it. Any ideas what I am doing wrong here? I need to get my weighting identical to what it is on the other side.

I opened your .PRJ file but there is no .jpg for the roto. If it is anything like this, though, what I would do is extrude along a path for the upper and lower limbs. The hand grip, if it is like this one is going to be trickier. Probably what you would want to do is place splines along the outside (trace the grip, I guess) and then extrude that up 3 or 4 times. That will give you some points to work with so that you can match the contour of the grip from the front view. The left and right sides of the grip will not have any patches, so you will need to stitch those in manually. I'm still learning myself so I'm not sure how much this helps you, but that is the way I would start. There may be a better way.

When exactly do you want to use an action? I have a bit of confusion as to when you would want to use them. I am guessing something like walk or run cycles would best be handled by an action, while blinks, winks or hand clenches could be driven by pose sliders. Am I correct in assuming that most animation you are (in general) going to want to do pose-to-pose in the choreography?

I will have to save a separate project file for experimenting with. I got the smartskin looking ok, so I may stick with that. Not sure why one side was bulging out before but I think I had mirror mode turned on. As far as the neck getting hinky, I just straightened that spline out as part of the smartskin. Finally, this is starting to make some more sense.

What is the better practice, creating a smartskin in Bones mode or in an Action? I noticed you get the option in both modes when clicking on a bone. Could being in a different mode produce different results?

Yes, CP weighting has been done. Maybe I'll try and weight these points instead of using the smartskin. While I don't think I will be having the penguin doing side bends, it would be nice to have the option.

Ok, so I successfully made my smartskin, but now I have a strange kink in the spline running down the middle of the neck, and also the middle spline is bulging out on the righthand side (if looking at the penguin, lefthand from the penguin's point of view). Not sure what I did that this happened, and I'm trying to figure out how to fix it. May need to delete the smartskin and redo it.

Ok, I figured out what I was doing wrong, I was not in the Action mode when trying to adjust the bone.

So I am working on smartskin to adjust the area where my penguins flippers connect to her body. I am selecting the torso bone and doing New > smartskin. Problem is when it jumps to the 90 degree rotation. I understand this is normal, however, I can't see the bone to move it back and it seems to *really* distort the model. Should I keep my model in shaded wireframe mode while doing this, or would just wireframe make seeing the bone easier?

Thanks, I think I got close manually doing it but that should let me know if I've got it exactly.

So I am going through all my "pre-flight" checks (so to speak) before starting trying to animate with this thing. I was looking at the bones that make up the spine and were a little concerned that they all seemed to be rotated just a few degrees off-center of the y-axis. Is this cause for concern? I have managed to get them more or less squared up, except for one. It still looks a little off to me. I took a screen grab looking up from the bottom. The pelvis and first spine bone look absolutely square, the 2nd spine bone and head look like they are still off a little bit.

Ok, thanks Nancy and Xtaz. I should be able to scale it back up. Not sure how that happened but I must have done it inadvertantly at some point.

Ok so I don't need to be overly concerned with it. Shouldn't it be larger though? I don't remember scaling it down that small. Also, how do I deselect it so if I start assigning points I'm assigning them to the bones I want and not the model bone? If I click off the model it seems like that bone is automatically selected.

Ok I moved it from where it was and it does appear to be a bone, when I moved it diagonally from where it was it scaled way up and is a black bone. So I am thinking it maybe is the model bone after all. If it is the model bone, shouldn't it be larger and not scaled down so you can't see it? Is this bone not normally visible? When I start reassigning points, are they no longer going to be assigned to this model bone? Also I can't figure out why it is scaling when I move it around, I don't have scale selected on the toolbar just "standard mode".

Hello I am not really sure what the yellow dot is done at the bottom near the origin and between the feet. I wonder if it is the model bone, but it doesn't seem to have any scale to it and if I rotate around it it appears to be a singel point. It has the name of a previous project ( think I opened that project and save it with a new name) and if I right-click it and choose delete my entire penguin disappears (which leads me to think it is the model bone but I thought normally those aren't visible?). Also when it is selected all the points on the left-hand side (right if you are looking at the model) are selected. Any ideas as to what the heck this might be?

Will importing a saved model file from your local disk screw up a project, such that you get the problems with prior versions losing their changes? I thought this only happened if you saved something from the project as a model file. So I am assuming it goes the other way as well? Or am I wrong here? Because I just imported an eyeball model from the extras, it turned my entire penguin orange (not sure why but it looks like it applied the beak color to the entire body) and then when I went back a version the penguin was also orange. The version before that is ok, and I didn't lose much in the way of work but this makes things difficult. I guess I will have to model everything in the project and only import models into a chor.

Also, thank you Jakerupert for the merge&purge plugin.

tools/Customize/keyboard/export will get you all the shortcuts in a KeyboardShortcuts.html file in your hash folder on your HD. Wow - that is really cool. Printing one up right now - thanks Nancy