Nothing to show yet, but I hope by creating a new thread, this will encourage me to stop procrastinating and animate the shot.

In this scene Woot has been transformed into Green Monkey and is scampering around madly, climbing up Mrs Yoop's chair.
Has anyone done any of the shots either side of this one? I don't want to run into continuity hiccups again.

You might get some insight by updating the preceding and following shots on your SVN, presuming anyone working on them has committed their WIPs

Whether the monkey jumps up on a chair (Mrs Yoop's chair), on a statue or anything else is not important to the story. What is important is that he is excited, and that he looks like a monkey in distress.

Exactly. It's only important for continuity. The chair is up the other end of the room from where the action is. It's unlikely Woot would run up there to be distressed and then run back down for the rest of the shots.

Not much to show after several hours of trying to get this chap constrained to a path (and keeping the program afloat).

Click to view attachment

The green monkey's action looks great.

There looks to be a path ease issue? He seems to jump back to the begining of the path.

That's a great looking action, Stephen. I could use it in "Can it be true" song. Is the action uploaded to SVN?

The problem is, I can't constrain him to the path at all. The first part is just normal animation, but the second bit, when he jumps, is where he should blend to the path for the run cycle sequence. He jumps to some arbitrary position to the right of the path. If I move the path he doesn't follow. I can't work it out, but it is a while since I've played around with actions and things might have changed in the new versions.
Dhar, I'm afraid I haven't had any luck submitting work to SVN. Last time, I simply emailed the project to Martin.

Hey, that looks like great stuff.

Is the path problem one of those "red bar not in the right place" things? I have no idea really.

Here's an update.
There's loads I'm not happy with, it's proving more difficult than I imagined, but Martin is breathing down my neck, so I won't have much more time to work on it.
I've abandoned the paths, I seem to have forgotten how that all works.

Click to view attachment

Looks great.

I'm not a big fan of paths and actions either. Its proving to be more trouble than its worth.

The jump at the end he goes up rather too fast. But the shot looks real good.

What are the numbers on the floor? Is that some sort of temporary position reference?

Too bad for you.

I know. I wish I was a programmer to understand how it works better so that I don't keep hitting walls. There are times when I feel like I'm not cut out to be a computer animator. But that's no fault of A:M.

Sorry Martin, I didn't mean anything bad by that. It is just my frustration with myself more than it is with A:M.

You're absolutely right Rob, he does jump up too quickly, more like a rocket in fact. I've only got a 132 frames for the shot, so I was hoping to get away with it, shouldn't be too difficult to rejig and fix.
Yeah, the check pattern is to help me avoid feet slipping.
With regards to actions, in common with most people I've used them a lot for repetitive stuff like walks and in the past it's been relatively easy to add choreography action on top. I don't think I would ever use them for 'acting' type animation, except for maybe having a separate action for the lip synch.

There's no frame limit you have to meet, Stephen. We haven't done music for this sequence yet. You can extend the scene as much as you need.

Merely to give this thread some sense of completion, here's the final Monkey scamper.
(Anyone else find animating the monkey's tail target rather awkward?)

I'll be taking a back seat on the TWO project from now on, not that anyone will notice, but good luck to everyone, especially Martin on making it a big success.
Click to view attachment

yeah, that jump looks more plausible.

Beautifully animated, Stephen!