Roger

Thanks Robcat - I will check that one out. Here is the .avi of what is going on: capture_1.zip

Hi all, Back to working on the project after too long away from it. I am doing the last bits of cleaning up the rigging on my penguin character, and I have a pose that I have no clue what it does (or was supposed to do). I want to delete it, but can't seem to. If I hit the delete key on the keyboard with it highlighted, nothing happens. If I right click it, there is no option to delete. This happens in both the Properties area and in the Pose Sliders pane. Also, something I thought was strange, it does not show up in the Project Workspace. My other poses do (pose 2 and Leg Constraints) but not pose 1. I really want to get rid of pose 1, because if I turn it on it does strange things to the character, and doesn't seem to have any function. Actually, scratch that, all the poses seem to be doing odd things when I toggle them on and off in the pose slider area, and I can't figure out what is going on. It is almost like there were keys set and it is playing back an animation. I will post a screengrab but I need to download camtasia again. (I would just buy it but damn $300 is steep)

I would do the Cooper tutorial in The Art of AM. Lathing/extruding doesn't really work for a face, you need to build it patch by patch. The face will be made up of circular splines radiating out from the lips - kinda hard to explain, but the Cooper tutorial is pretty good. Or you could just use that as a rough guide and choose your own rotoscopes to model from. Get a friend and take a front and side view of their head.

They can follow whatever the shape of the leg is. In your case that looks straight up and down from the side but a little tilted inward from the front. I eyeballed it but you can look from the top to get the best view for such a bone. Ok - from the side view should the thigh line up with the spine? Because currently the spine is a little forward of the legs. Also, should I be zeroing out the spine from the side along the Y axis? Or is that not as critical as the X axis?

Also when using the mirror bones plugin and using the pelvis as the parent (and not for instance, the right thigh) shouldn't it mirror ALL the bones that the pelvis is a parent of and not just from the thigh down? Because that is what it did with mine. I deleted the extra bones, but I'm not sure what I did that was different.

Wasn't sure if I should start another thread but since my questions are related to this I figured I would just tack them onto this one. 1. From the side, the bones which make up the leg should be straight up and down, but from the front it doesn't matter if they are a little off-center (for this particular character) as long as the roll handles are pointing forward, right? 2. How do you make sure the roll handles are pointing straight forward? In the video it looks like you're just kind of eyeballing it.

I didn't think you would have - I guess I was just being paranoid.

Something about that disturbs me - like I'm going to see security cam footage of my penguin holding up a 7-11. Hopefully the model is only residing with myself and Robcat for now.

Doh posted the same comment twice - deleted

I'll give that another try. Played around with it after work today but could not get it looking right. Looked odd. I think I'll need to experiment to get it looking right.

I have been working through TAOAM to bolster my weak areas. I know my modeling skills improved quite a bit after doing those tutorials. Having said that, rigging is a real bugaboo (for me). TAOAM has the basic info but I feel the tutorials there are lacking. You could probably do a whole other companion manual just on rigging. These videos have cleared up some misconceptions I had. Thank you Robcat. (now I need to get back to implementing these fixes )

OK well I guess this wasn't a very good question. I imagine you can weight a half a ring but it probably doens't make sense to. I'll have to watch the tutorials again, quite possibly I missed something.

This is a question for Will (or if anyone else feels like chiming in, feel free) - I was watching your tutorials on smartskin and noticed when you were doing CP weighting you weren't always selecting the entire spline ring? Or was I just seeing things incorrectly? Are there instances where it would make sense to weight one half of a spline ring differently than another half? So far, I have been weighting the rings that make up the joints on my penguin 50/50 or 60/40 (or whatever value) but have been using the whole spline ring when assigning weights to the bones.

I am trying to upload a screengrab I did of the smartskin motion. Anyone know why .avi files aren't allowed? It worked last time I posted an .avi file.

In bones mode, I selected one of my leg bones then right-clicked it and chose "new smartskin". However, something odd happened. The leg bone jumps into a really wierd position. I noticed in the resulting relationship window, 2 of my poses are turned off. If I turn them back on, the leg goes back to normal. What is going on here that starting a smartskin causes the leg bones to behave like this?

So right now I am working on learning smartskin. I'm in bones mode, I right click the bone that I want to drive the muscle motion, then go to New smartskin (I didn't see an option to choose x, y, or z rotate though - this was listed in the technical reference, and the copy I have is pretty old so something may have changed). AM then brought up a new Action window. I then moved my bone where I wanted it, and went into Muscle mode to adjust the control points at that extreme position. It seems to be working, when I move the bone now the points follow. Is that more or less how it is supposed to work? Also, in Muscle mode, the points that make up the smartskin turn blue, correct? I think I made an error in the way I was adjusting the CPs, though. I probably should have moved the bone to the most extreme position I expect it to be in, then adjust the mesh in Muscle mode. I adjusted the mesh at a few different positions the bone was in, so now when I move that bone I get a sort of undulating look to the skin.

Well that's just it. Lawsuits due to a maiming or death at a meat-packing plant are expensive, so there is an incentive to contain those costs. If you fall asleep and smack your head on your Cintiq, its not quite the same as getting getting caught in a piece of industrial machinery.

That is one thing I just don't understand. I'm not sure it is healthy or desirable to work to work more than 60-70 hour weeks for extended periods. I would have to do a search, but I'm quite sure I've read studies that suggest that (unless you are one of the *very* rare individuals that can manage on 4 hours) attempting to get by on 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night is akin to being legally drunk. As far as the medical and legal fields, I know I wouldn't want someone operating on me or reviewing a contract/preparing a legal defense that is only averaging 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night. I suspect that a lot of the horror stories you hear about surgical mishaps are (wrong limbs amputated, wrong surgeries/procedures, medical instruments left in body cavities) at least in part due to sleep deprivation. Video games/movies may not be life or death, but mistakes still cost money. There was a story not too long ago about EA regularly working employees 90 to 100 hour weeks. I can imagine putting in some OT if you are in the home stretch of a project, but if these kind of hours are normal all the time, then its indicative of poor management or feature creep. Are these type of hours just the nature of these industries, that nothing would get done, otherwise? Or is it more a "well thats the way its always been, so thats the way it will always be" type thing? I imagine most people would be completely burnt out after 5 to 10 years of that.

Yeah, I didn't think there were either. I don't know what the global pool of animation jobs is, as far as major film studios or video games studios goes. I would guess that it isn't that high, maybe a few thousand? If you included anything that involved animation (flash for websites, games for mobile devices, casino games, outdoor signage, architectual pre-vis, forensic animation, etc) it is probably higher but I doubt it is anywhere near the number of jobs for say, the healthcare field. Still, $1400 to $2000 is a (relatively) cheap price to pursue an interest, compared to spending major $$$ for a degree.

This sounds like an interesting class. Too bad I'm not in that area. I am not sure I understand what is driving the demand for all these schools? Surely there can't be that many jobs going unfilled. Animation has never been more accessible, for $600 (price of a copy of AM and low-end pc) you have access to the kind of tools that cost upwards of $50000 20 years ago. So, things have never been better in that respect. Finding someone else to pay you to do animation work is another matter, though.

Thanks - its wending its way through the tubes presently.

Ok - got it. I'll try stitching another spline ring between the 2 rings that are on the thigh.

Where would you put the spline ring, another horizontal ring on each leg?

Ok, so I'm experimenting with simple walk with my penguin model, and the butt has some serious "junk in the trunk funk" going on. (see screenshot) I'm thinking smartskin would help here but am not sure where to start. Ideas?

Ok, I think I have it. That makes more sense.