I took one of my previously rigged characters and deleted all the bones and relationships. Then I set up and rigged it from scratch following Caroline's excellent tutorial for TSM2. (THANKS SO MUCH FOR THAT CAROLINE!!!) I'm still getting used to using this new setup, but so far everything seems to work great. My own rig wasn't bad, but TSM2 offers some features I hadn't bothered with adding to mine (like stretching).

I have a few questions though.

1. I love how I can rotate a foot back very far with TSM2! The leg on my rig is almost identical to the David Rogers' setup in "Animation Master - A Complete Guide". It's a very good setup, but one thing bothers me. When I have the leg bent back, if I try to rotate the foot back too far it will flip in the oppopsite direction. This doesn't happen with the TSM2 rig. However, I find the nulls on my rig much easier to grab and work with than the control bones of TSM2. So I tried adding nulls to the TSM rig by adding "orient like" and "translate to" constraints to the foot control bones. After I did that, the TSM foot also began to have the same flipping problem as my other rig. So my question is this: Does anyone know a good way to set up nulls for the TSM2 feet that won't change the normal behavior?

2. This one is easier to explain. I was making a walk cycle and when I try to paste mirrored a pose something weird happens to the spine and makes my character try to stick her head up her own butt. (Something I thought only my bosses at work were able to do!) Has anyone else encountered this problem, and is there a fix for it?

3. Why do some control bones have falloff? I thought falloff was only used for bones that have CPs associated with them.

I had some other questions that have slipped my mind at the moment, so I'll add them later if I remember them.

Overall, I am really pleased with TSM2. It really simplifies things and makes a dandy little rig! I would like to thank everyone at Anzovin for creating it and also for making it freely available.

You would constrain the "IK foot control" to a null. But I've never had trouble selecting the IK foot controls.

I'd have to see an example in practice to know what was wrong.



I'd have to see an example PRJ

Falloff is a property that can be on or off but it only has effect if you actually "Compute CP weights" in the model window.

If any of the TSM2 control bones have falloff on it's just an oversight.

Try setting the Null's Roll-Method (In the Properties Panel) from "Y-Poles-Singularity" to "Z-Singularity".

Ahhh, art imitates life! (I hope none of your bosses visit this forum!) I don't know how to fix that in TSM, but if it is only the Torso bone that is affected this way, you just have to set the filter to "Key Bone" and copy/paste (not paste mirrored) from a good keyframe to the current one. Or reset the the rotation to 0,0,0 so you can see what you are doing, and adjust the Torso from there.

oops!

sorry... triple posted somehow.

That solved my problem completely! Is there a way to permanently change this for the model? I was only able to find that opton by opening an action window.

Here's an example of the spine problem I'm having. I just threw this one together quickly using the basic TSM guy to see if it also happened with other models. He's not as deformed as my own model was, but he definitely suffers from the same paste mirrored issue.

Click to view attachment Click to view attachment
.......................Original Pose.....................................................Paste Mirrored.......................

Open the model window, select the null (in the model window or in the Bones tree) and look in the Property Panel. Roll Method should be there.

... don't have a clue about the spine problem.

Can you post the action file? Zip it up first.

I couldn't find it there, but I was able to solve the problem. I opened up my "setup" relationship and selected the null and was able to change the property there.


I would, but I don't have any zip software installed. (Using the kids' laptop here.) If you have the basic TSM character (I think he either comes with TSM or was in the hash extras library.) Just try making a pose and then doing a paste mirror.


I've also been reading through the legs script trying to figure out if there's a way to fix the legs' z-rotation problem when switching to FK so I won't have to manually rotate the bones for every model. I removed the relationship part of the script and saw that the bones were created with the roll handles pointing the right way. I didn't think a relationship would change a bone's position in the actual model itself though, so I am at a loss right now.

One last thing. I've rigged another character and none of the control bones had falloff, so I guess I must have accidentally turned that on myself.

Thanks everyone for your time and help.

I have tried to copy/paste mirrored with TSM2 rigged character and had no problems. That's why I asked for the action file. If you have a windows machine (the laptop), right click on the action file and select the "send to" option. There you can select the "compressed (zipped) folder" option.

Thanks! I never tried that before.

I hadn't saved the previous version, so I quickly made a new one. The same thing happened, so it's obviously repeatable. I embedded everything into this project and zipped it. I sure hope you can figure out what's causing this because I'm at my wits end.

As always, thanks for your time!

Click to view attachment

I was wrong. The bones are NOT created with the roll handles the right way. As far as I can tell, the problem lies with the "inter upper leg" bones being created wrong. The "upper leg" bones are duplicates of those, which is why they are also wrong.

I've tried setting the "with the roll of "leg"" part of the script to other bones with the correct roll, but it doesn't help things. I wonder if roll was calculated differently in older versions of A:M when TSM was originally created. I have no clue. I just know that something isn't working quite like it should.

Since the leg bones in TSM are all vertically straight, you can change the roll part of the script to "rotation 90, 0, 0", but that won't work right if your model's legs aren't perfectly vertical. If only there was a way to set just the z-rotation to 0, but I don't know how.

It looks like I'll just have to manually fix those bones for every model after all.

I still haven't figured out the spine issue either, but I got side-tracked with this whole leg-twisting thing.

I used to think I had at least a rudimentary understanding of rigging, but now I just feel dumb.

Welcome to rigging!

I'm not sure why those bones come out crooked, I've looked at the process in the past and couldn't figure out why. The odd thing is it doesn't happen on every character.

However, once you know the culprit bones it's easy to turn them the right way and resave the character.

Another weird thing about it is that the right and left legs' roll handles point in different directions!!! I thought they would at least be mirrored. It has me completely baffled! Just a quirk of TSM, I guess.

It's an easy enough fix though. I just wish my problems with the spine were as easily dealt with. I can't even make a walk cycle as it is. I guess I'll have to mirror the arms & legs seperately and set the pelvis and spine poses manually.

I finally got to your sample PRJ. I just did a Copy Paste Mirror and it came out perfect. So perfect I was stunned when I dared open my eyes to see it. This is the best Paste mirror has been in the 13 years I've been using A:M.

Click to view attachment


I did this with only the Key Skeletal Translations, Key Skeletal Rotations and Key Model filters on. No others. I selected the Body bone

Are you using the current version? Steffen did some major fixes on CPM just in the last few versions.

BTW, although it's not related to your CPM problem, delete the channels for "hip int" bones (or any other "int") if they get created while you are keyframing. A side effect of keying changes in V13 makes these get keyed sometimes and they should not be. They can be safely deleted as many times as you need to delete them. I added a "deletables" tab to my "selection filters" that listed all of them so they were easy to spot and delete when I'm working with TSM2 rigged characters.

So this is a problem with my A:M v13 and not my TSM rig? That kind of stinks. I was hoping it would be something fixable.

You can still mirror those poses manually. I did all of my shots for TWO in V13 including some complicated walks and I dont' think I ever thought about using CPM.

Wow! Your version seems to have worked perfectly. I am jealous!! It's kind of funny. I've seen several threads where people were worried that TSM wouldn't work with the newer versions of A:M. Looks like it actually works BETTER with the newer versions!

I tried redoing my CPM with the same settings you mentioned and it turned out the same as my other convoluted pose.

I am still a complete noob at animation. I was trying to make some different types of walk cycles as practice. I rely heavily on CPM, so it's a big deal for me when it doesn't work. When you pay $300 for a program, you kind of expect it to work.

But that's beside the point, since this thread is about TSM2....

I think it's a pretty decent rig after I manually fix the leg rolls and add foot control nulls (as a matter of my own preference). A:M problem or not, I still don't understand why CPM doesn't work with the TSM spine when it worked perfectly with my other setup, but I'll figure out how to deal with it. I think the ease and speed of setup far outweigh the problems I've ran into thus far.

It *is* a bug in V13 that seemed to appear more on the TSM2 rig, but we weren't using TSM2 on TWO and among the people who were using TSM2 for other things I guess no one got around to reporting it to Hash so it didn't get noticed during V13.

CPM is something that only works on the full body, and there are only those four major poses in the walk that are whole body keyed anyway. After that you're tweaking individual bones and you don't want to key the whole body every time you do, mirrored or otherwise.

Eyeball those other poses and you'll be a better animator for it.