The basic TSM2 rig controls, just in case you are confused by TSM2's non-use of nulls in the rig.

Click to view attachment

there are other nuances, but these are the basics.

Thanks for the very helpful addition to the arsenal of A:M knowledge.

And what a fun goofball character!

Thank you!

Wow...I gotta start making tutorials like that- seems there's no better way to do it. ONE THING...a feature you missed- the finger controls have a neat 'auto curl' feature if you rotate the roll-handle at the top bone of a finger...

That character was made by Kevin Detwiler, one of my AnimationMentor classmates. He asked me to rig it for him and somewhere out there is his demo reel with a wonderful short he did with "Larry" for his final class project. Animated with Animation:Master, of course.




I guess that would actually be the way the standard TSM2 fingers work with one bone for the whole finger. This example was the "advanced finger" option which divides the control between two bones.

Iv been using tsm2 for a while and didn't know a lot of that, amazing just how much I don't know I sometimes suprize myself lol

Thanks for the tut.

Any chance one of those will ever exists for the TSM quad?????

This is from Anzovin,
Since they no longer sell it, I guess it`s o.k. to post it here.

Hey Robcat, that's a great tute as usual. However I'm putting the TSM2 rig into my Skarab model and I'm having some trouble with the thumb controls. Rotating the "Left thumb control 2" bends the last thumb joint sideways instead of backwards/forwards like it's supposed to. I tried turning off the constraints and repositioning the bones in the modeling window but that screws up the model in the action window. Is there a way to rectify this? Everything else is working great and I'm getting into cp weighting which is going fine.

Without actually seeing it my first guess is that the roll handle of one of the bones was not oriented correctly before Rigger was run.

So---HERE's the million dollar question... Does TSM2 work with V15.0F???

It certainly looks okay so far. I have just been rendering some stuff which has a TSM2 rig and it is performing as it should. I haven't had time to actually start a new rigging session, I'm only rendering a model that was rigged in A:M 15.0e, but I don't expect any problems.

Is there a way to fix this though? I tried turning off constraints, then rotating the thumb bones in the modeling window, but when I turned the constraints back on the thumb twisted wacky.

If you can email me the hand, I'll take a look at it. I don't know enough about what has gone wrong to know what to tell you yet.

theguy (at) brilliantisland.com

thanks Rob, but I'm going to take a step back and rerig. If there are more problems I'll let you know.

If you think you found a bone mistake you can re-run rigger to re-rig a thumb.

-delete the TSM constraints for that thumb. This takes a bit of detective work in the PWS. Every constraint referencing a bone in the thumb.

-delete the rigging bones that TSMRigger added to the thumb. these are typically black bones in the PWS.

-save model with new name

-run TSMRigger and deselect every item in the list of things it will rig except the the thumb you want to re rig


It is possible to do this wrong and get unexpected results.

That sounds like a good plan for someone who knows what they're doing but that's not the only problem I found. Starting from scratch I think will be less trouble. Thanks for the response.