Playing with Pose Sliders and...?

[Kelley]

I took my fish character, duped the head, installed mouth bones and started playing with building Sliders.

 

1st question: Can you have three [more than two, anyway] mouth positions on one slider? For example: "AH" at 0%. "EE" at 50% and "OO" at 100%? At the moment, it would appear not...only my two-position sliders move anything on the model...but hope springs eternal.

 

2nd: When I copied the fish's head, it's textures came over with it. I can do a snapshot in the Modeling/Bones window, and in the Action window, and it looks fine. But in the Choreography, it's solid black. Where did the textures go?

[youngman]

Hi Kelley,

Just a thought.In your pws open up your decal folder on the model and the image subfolder,it could be that you have to add the image back in.

 

Jay

[Paul Forwood]

Can you have three [more than two, anyway] mouth positions on one slider? For example: "AH" at 0%. "EE" at 50% and "OO" at 100%?

Absolutely!

I often lay out all my vowel shapes on one slider.

One thing that you must bare in mind though is that as there is a transition from one pose to the next it will cause any poses that lay between those two poses to appear in your animation.

 

If your poses aren't showing up press the space bar a couple of times. Save your project and open it again. Check if they have been set. Sometimes I find poses and constraints go missing and I have to redo them. I don't know what the cause is but rebooting A:M seems to clean thing up and after that the keys set properly.

[KenH]

Are there any lights in your chor? If not, turn on "use front realtime light" in the chor properties.

[Kelley]

Thanks guys, I'll do a run-through on the adviso's tonight. [Got house guests this weekend]

 

Looks like putting multiple mouth poses on a single slider is not the way to go here.

 

I have [for example] a slider that goes from 'AA---EE". How to then build a slider that goes from "EE---OO" with the "EE" position of the mouth being the same in both? There are no keyframes to copy.

[KenH]

There should be keyframes in the pose. But if you can't find them, then you could make the EEE mouth shape in an action and copy the keyframes from there to the start of each pose.

[Kelley]

There should be keyframes in the pose. But if you can't find them, then you could make the EEE mouth shape in an action and copy the keyframes from there to the start of each pose.

 

Excellent! Thanks Ken.

[Fuchur]

The problem with that approach is, that you are not very flexible... it is best to make every Mouthshape in its own pose.

There are of course exceptions like when you do a smile and an angry mouthshape, or something... because those two wont be used at the same time, they can be used on one slider.

0% is the startingposition, so dont change this and 100% is the mouseshape you want... for example an A.

Make that with every more important letter... some can be combined together like A and H for example. O and U is although possible, and so on.

Now just blend them in the Action or Chereo like you want.

 

If it is then a bit annoying to use all of them, you can make a different pose and just set different poses under this new pose. So you can combine the many different poses to one new. Example:

You have "Eyebrows up / down", "Eyes open / close" and "Angry Mouth / Smile".

You can now easily make a new pose called "Angry Character / Happy Character" or something like that by combining the three under the new pose without moving CPs around in "Angry Character / Happy Character".

 

If you need more "space" on your Slider, you can rightclick on a Pose in for example the timeline(is a bit tricky here, because you have to select it with a left click first...) or the poseslider-window and use Properties or something like that. That will open the properties of the pose where you can set the start and ending-point of the pose. There you can easily set in -100 to 200 or whatever you want. In the end it doesnt make a big difference to 0-100 but it just helps you to get a better overview...

 

*Fuchur*