This is just another very short one so hopefully it won't take too long.

I'm having trouble finding Green Monkey's eye aimer bone. Does he have one?

Also I am finding that my dialogue action displays correctly in the action window but something seems to be affecting it in the choreography so that none of the poses reach full strength. Everything seems to be in order so I guess this is a bug. Anyone else seeing this?
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Edit: Ah! I think I found the problem with the action not displaying correctly in the choreography. Whoever set up this shot posed alot of GM's bones on frame 0 of the choreography. Some of those bones are also controlled by the FACE so there is a conflict. I just deleted the channels for thos bones from the choreography action.

I would still like to know if there is an eye aimer bone though.
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Yes there is - but you'll have to make it visible in the model (expand FACE Interface - Master - should be right under it).

I have found in general it is better to set the Master Eye target pose to ON, and have the eye's aim at master target = 100% (under FACE poses folder). Seems to give better range of motion for the eyes in some models (don't know about monkeyboy)

Thanks, Nancy. I'll use the master eye target.

This is the shot as I received it:

Click to view attachment

I think Green Monkey is meant to be hanging on to a rock face, exhausted and hungry. To animate this properly would require a more detailed foreground model rather than this massive set which is 99.9% out of shot and has no detail for close ups like this. GM needs protruding rock shelves to grip onto.

I had to move the camera on frame 0 to get it outside of the rock. How much freedom do I have to change the camera motion and the framing?

Here is my first pass at the lipsync. I haven't done much with his body and limbs yet:

Click to view attachment

I'll have to find that eye aimer bone. I find it much easier, after moving the head, to rotate the eye aimer bone close up than to move the eye target, which usually requires zooming out.

On some of the TWO characters, the eye aimer bone becomes visible when you set the FACE controls to "1" or "2"...I know that's true on Tinman because I set it that way, there may be a few others like that.

Hope that helps, Paul.

Thanks, David and Nancy! I found the eye aimer bone in the hierarchy and deleted all the previous eye motion.

I think that I will go more with the extreme pose on, " hungry", as in this take:

Click to view attachment
The lighting seems rather intense in this choreography but I'm not going to tamper with it.

I have to agree with Stephen Millingen, in his recent post, when he says that Green Monkey's tail controller is difficult to use. I would go farther and say that it is almost impossible. I would have used a chain of two or three control bones to control a longer chain of geometry bones but we have to work with what we've got I guess.

The tail is rigged with dynamic constraints so we'll probably simulate it.

You can turn the dynamics off and animate with the geometry bones. There are poses to unhide the geom bones and to hide the rest.

Thanks, Martin and Mark. I think, as GM is meant to be exhausted here, I will hardly need to animate the tail, especially as from this camera angle it may not even be seen.

I deleted any keys that I had put on the tail and I'm just letting it do it's own thing. It's not too bad except for the way the tip twists around.

As this is such a short clip I've been thinking that it would be better to have a static camera. Here are two clips, (not finished), and I think I prefer the static one.
Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment
Any thoughts? Have GM in motion or the camera but not both is what I'm thinking.

The static side camera shot certainly lets us see the great GM animation... I say go for it.

A:M is refusing to open my project at the moment. It seems to be related to a "translate to" constraint that I put on GM's right hand controller and maybe also the switch to IK from FK.
Here is the error message:
Click to view attachment
A:M just shuts down after this. What's the best course of action? A:M Reports?

If you're having the hand "translate to" or "orient like" something else, if you switch from IK to FK it will cause you a problem. This is because the IK hand controller is set to "translate to" and "orient like" the "right/left_hand_controller" when in FK...in IK, the "right/left_hand_controller" is set to "orient like" the "right/left_hand_IK_controller". You will have to switch which hand controller is set to "orient like" something...the "translate to" would only work in IK on the hand controller.

Hope that helps, Paul.

Thank you, David. I think I get the gist of what you are saying but this was all working just fine right up to the point when I saved it. Only when I attempted to open the project today did the problem surface. You can see in the last two movies that I posted that the right hand is locked down after a few frames and is released near to the end of the sequence. No exceptions occurred until I tried to open the project today. What changed?

How are other people locking hands down? Which is the safest hand bone to use with a translate to constraint and an FK/IK switch?
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Edit:
Regarding opening the project file:
I can drop back to a previous version of the choreography and use this to overwrite the problematic one, which should allow me to open the project again, so that part is okay. But I would like to know how to go about locking a hand down for a few frames without triggering exceptions.
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Edit 2:
Okay. I got it. (It's been awhile).
Solution: Don't use the "translate-to" constraint as it isn't neccessary for this shot.

For locking down hands, I usually switch the arm to IK, then switch it back to regular (FK?) when it's time to move the hand again.

Yes. That is what I did.

This has been committed, as Martin requested, but I was unable to access or update the dot project data.