Animation

The short answer is no. You might be able to use constraints to get the behavior you want.

-Bob Freeman

Right-click the action in the Project Workspace, go to "New" and pick "Rotoscope". After you have done that it will ask you which image you would like to have as your rotoscope.

WIlliam Egginton

Make the object big enough for the camera. Have two models of the snail's shell. One that is the tiny one and one that is the large one. Use the large one for the camera fly through. Use the small one for your other shots. Model substition is done all of the time. Hope that helps.

Frank Silas

I've generally avoided animating directly in a choeography, instead I'll use actions and string them together as late as possible in a cho. The cho viewports were always at least 10fps slower, which although workable, always seemed a waste when I could get a better frame rate elsewhere.

Today I was experimenting with a choroegraphy at work (blending actions and such), getting increasingly frustrated with the speed and clutter of the display. I started messing with options here and there, but one worked amazingly well: turn off the grid.

ctrl-p
choreography
uncheck 'display grid'

On this machine, fps went from 5 to 55 in wireframe mode! No doubt its got to do with drawing object splines over the grid, and even more to do with this crappy machine (laptop running dx6 in software emulation mode). I'll be testing this out at home on my TNT card to see if it gets a speed increase there too.

If nothing else, this might be handy to those of you out there running less than cutting edge machines.

-matt

There's a snap frames to integers tickbox under the move frames dialogue which works well when expanding/compressing keyframes and I assume you could scale a finished timeline by 100% with this option on to fix manual errors

John Henderson

I usually use the "key" button when I want to mark a hold on a bone. Say I have a hold for 20 frames.. i'll key it on frame 1.. then advance 20 frames.. and hit the "key" button to mark it again. Then in the fcurve you can turn the first key to a linear or hold interp.

So to answer you question: if it helps to use it.. then do.

Alot of 3D animators nowadays don't have a traditional animation background. I've seen people just start on frame 1 and plot the entire animation a few frames at a time. It's all about the artist and what gets the job done...

That's precisely how I do it. I'll go though and set up my extremes... I'll usually use the key Branch or Key Model button when doing this so that I won't get undesired results later, when I'm inbetweening. You can even set all your keys' to Hold interpolation when setting them and it's even more like traditional 2D. Use these for timing and composition. Then turn all your keys back to default or spline... and inbetween and tweak.

without keyframing? Hmm. A:M has an autokey already set.. But I find that if I don't set a key for a bone that I plan on animating during each pose then I run into interpolation problems during playback.

What I mean:

Say I have a character that is waving. on frame 1 his arm is down, hand open. frame 15 his arm is up and 30 its back down again. hand closed.

Now you see, I didn't key the hand on frame 15. This will cause A:M to close the hand over the entire 30 frames. When I only want it to close from 15 on. So I need a hand open hold from frame 1 to 15. So I'd key the hand again (using the key button) at frame 15 making sure that the hand stays open.

If you come from a Traditional Animation background.. you'll meld into A:M with little difficulty as far as animation goes. Espeically when you turn on the "Onion skin" feature. *salavates*

Jeffrey Dates

The gunfire is actually a model. It's shaped like a candle flame. I set the ambience to 100% and the color light orange. Then add some glow and render it with night time film bloom. It's looks pretty cool. To animate it, I did it sort of like this:

frame 0: Scale 1, 1, 1

By scaling to 1 instead of 0 is much safer. Somehow, when I scale to 0, the model gets garbled sometimes.

frame 1: scale 120, 120, 20

Note that z scale is 20. This gives you a somewhat flat eruption, like all the force is going outwards.

frame 2: scale 100, 100, 100

The gunfire is normal looking now, and in animation, it looks like a bullet is propelled forward.

frame 3: scale 1, 1, 1

gunfire is done.

Gunfire done as a model is much easier than doing it as a particle effect or composite effect. It's very quick to animate and it doesn't take long to render.

Jeffrey Lew

Here's a handy tip for getting the timing right in an animation...

I have been playing around with a new sampler for my animation's soundtracks, and I had an Idea. I know how difficult it is to time motion in an animation program even though you know in your head exactly how long any action should take. A solution might be to run the action in your head while "singing" into the sampler program. Say "Dum" (or whatever) at the moments when your character hits an extreme motion (keyframe) then just import the sound into A:M and line up the keyframes to the hits of the waveform just like in lip-synching (See pg. 405 of your manual). This would also work for arythmic and secondary motion since you are just singing along with the motion in your mind. But don't forget to take out this soundtrack before you render!

Frank Blakely

For Bs and Ps at least, the mouth is closed far in advance of the sound. Prior to the sound, the mouth is closed to form a seal that allows the air pressure to build up inside the mouth, and the B or P sound is the percussive sound made when that air pressure is released suddenly. The primary difference between the two is that a B sound is made in while the vocal chords are already producing sound, and with the P sound the vocal chords are actuated slight after the percussive sound caused by the sudden release of air.

An M sound doesn't involve the buildup of air in the mouth, but rather the vocal chords are producing sound while the mouth is closed, and the air is being released through the nose.

The upshot of this is that the mouth should close at least a couple of frames before you hear the B, P or M sounds. An M sound actually precedes the vowel that follows it, but for practical purposes the lips close prior to what we count as hearing the M sound the same as B or P.

This is also true of V and F sounds, the V more or less being an F with the vocal chords making sound. Consonants like G, J, or K sounds are less critical because they occur inside the mouth and can't be seen clearly most of the time.

Vowels generally seem to work best when they're timed as you read them, that is they neither lead nor trail the sounds as you read them off the track.

Steph Greenberg

The easiest solution would to to constrain one bone to the other and then use constraint offsets to make any changes to the second bone's motion.

If you need direct access to the motion graph for that bone, you can try this: save the Chor action out as an Action. Then bring the action back in and delete the channels for all the bones except for the one you want to transfer. Rename that bone's entry from it's original name to the name of the bone you want to apply it to. Then apply the action.

Admittedly, this isn't a perfect solution, because you'll have to make any adjustments to that bone in the action. The other thing you could do to get this done easily is to do open the Hash file in a text editor and do a little open-heart surgery. You copy and paste the channel values from under one bone's entry to another. It's actually not that hard--you just have to be very very careful that you don't mess up any of the syntax and keep lots of backups.

Constraining the bones and then baking would be a last resort, because that's going to bake all you're other bone channels too and that's usually a bad idea unless you're absolutely done with the animation and don't plan to make any more changes.

-Raf Anzovin

Yep, but not in one fell swoop as far as I can tell. You can mirror individual keyframes, but not a range of keyframes. If I remember correctly, this is covered in one of the first few tuts in the hash manual. Nevertheless:

Make sure your bones are named properly. AM works out the mirror paste by object names, so 'right hand' will mirror paste onto 'left hand', 'shin right' mirror pastes onto 'shin left' and so on.

On your key/time toolbar, choose what you want to key. This can be bone, branch, or body, and within that, you can keyframe a combination of translate, rotate, and scale.

Get to the frame you want to copy from, select the bone, and choose 'edit->copy keyframe'. Get to the frame you want to paste to (the same frame in your case) and choose 'edit->paste mirrored'.

As the manual points out, this is handy for setting up walk cycles and the like, as you can create an initial extreme pose, paste that to the last frame of the cycle so that it lines up, then mirror paste it in the center of the cycle. Then you can keep mirror pasting refinements you make to the first section of the cycle, so you only have to create half the cycle overall.

Watch out for setting up your keyframe filters correctly. Make sure you have key rotation and translation both turned on, and probably wise to have key branch on too.

-Matt Estela

In the properties dialog of the choreography instance of the object you want to manipulate, go to the first tab and there will be a variety of check boxes one of which is labelled "animate", just uncheck it, then remember to recheck it if you want to add more keyframes later.

Matt Andersen

Well, regardless of what the manual says.. there are two was I often do that.

1) Make sure your Pose has "Display slider on Pose Sliders window" checked in the General properties tab. Then in Chor.. select your model.. and slide the slider to 100

2) Create a new action.. and Slide your Pose to 100 from there. Now drag that Action to your model in Chor and it'll conform to your constraints. Or Select the Model and in the General Properties Tab, set the "Clear Actions With Pose:" to your pose. Then in Action move a bone and clear the action. It'll force A:M to load up your Pose.

Hope that helps ya.

Jeffrey Dates

You have to grab the bone that belongs to the surface to which you are constraining.

Mike Caputo

If you're using v7, all you have to do it is grab the red action bar in the timeline and drag its scale manipulator. You can change the action duration to whatever you want, without editing a single key. If you want even more control, you can use the Action Ease slider to completely retime the action from within the Choreography. You wouldn't believe how much time these features save.

--Raf Anzovin

automatically generates offset values. In am98 you position your arm and hand the way to want to grab something. When you constrain the hand and forearm to the object being handled, the arm and hand jumps and you have to reorient and retranslate so that the two objects aren't intersecting.

In 7.1, you hit the compensate button before each new constraint, and regardless of the constraint being used, the hand does not move or twist *but the constraints are activated*. When you next move the object the hand is handling, the hand follows. The cool thing is that because constraints channels are defaulted to Hold interpolation, you don't have to set a 100% enforcement key, the key before you input 0%. Since compensate came out (perfect but unrelated timing) I have done nothing *but* animations where the character(s) interact extensively with each other and inanimate objects. Compensate came just in time. Compensate along with the beta's like 5-fold increase in the redraw speed of quickshade are the two best things to come out of 7.1 IMHO.

-Armando Afre

First Quat isn't the problem. I'm pretty sure its conflicting channel data. This happens when the aim at null and the bone orientation data are different. this arises from moving the null around after you've set a null key.

Here's what I do: Every few hours or so, when I'm happy with some of the key poses, I go into every bone that is controled by an Aim At null, in this example Bicep, and delete all the channel data for the bicep. all the x, y, z orientation and translation data. You don't need this data because the aim at is what is driving the bicep's movement.

This was why I asked earlier if I could explicitely prohibit some bones from generating channel data on their own.

Save your action as something else, then experiement with deleting all channel data from bones that are driven by nulls. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. Be careful not to delete the aim at constraints tho.

Hope this helps.

-Armando Afre

This tip is just so you can get the water to curve. If you created your water object, then in action straighten the water out so it doesn't curve applly your straight animated water texture. Now thanks to the wonders of HASH UV mapping the water will curve around the bend!

Matt

Using LifeForms (http://www.credo-interactive.com), you can convert BVH files to BVA, which A:M can use. It works very nicely, too.

From the top level of the model copy everything that is keyed (i.e. mind your keyfilters and branch mode) to frame 2, unless you've got keys on frame 2 in which case I'll leave that solution to your own cleverness.

Open up the edit all filtered channels box and group select everything from frame 2 on and slide it right the desired number of frames you wish to add, then group the frame 2 keys and nudge them 1 frame left, then you have your old animation intact with a long pause at the beginning.

Very important to get all the keys copied and into the edit all filtered channels box, remember you can drag and drop bones and channels into an open channel window as well as remove unnecessary ones.

Matt Andersen

Create segments (keep the splinage unattached from the rest of the leaf) of the leaf that are the shape of the bites. Then add a "boolean bone" to those "bite" segments. While animating keep those "boolean bite bones"(say that real fast) scaled to zero in all axis', UNTIL you want the bite to take effect. At the moment you want the bite to take effect scale the "boolean bite bone" to 100%.

James "Dingo" Griggs

Click on the Shortcut to your model in the choreography Project Workspace. In the General Tab of the properties panel will be a field called "Active." Uncheck that at frame 1, advance to 20 seconds and check it. Ta da!

=== David Fontes

QUATERNION INTERPOLATION

Quaternion interpolation achieves the smoothest possible interpolation between any possible keyframes, and suffers no side effects such as a sweet spot or preferred roll region. However, a human does not easily decipher the values stored in the channels. The channels can however be used to adjust the magnitude, timing, softness and ease of the rotational transitions. Understanding the values in the channels should not be necessary to make those adjustments. For those of you that just must know, the four values in the channels consist of x-quat, y-quat, and z-quat, which hold a vector that represents the axis of rotation.

So (80,0,0) would indicate that the bone is being rotated around the x-axis. The w-quat value holds a number that represents how much it was rotated. However this number is not in degrees, rather it is the cosine of half of the angle, scaled up by 100 for easier viewing in the channels. These numbers range from -100 to 100, 100 means no rotation, and -100 which represents 360 degrees. A w-quat value of 0 represents a 180 degree rotation about the axis specified in x-quat, y-quat, and z-quat.

Jeff C.

It's my understanding that the best way to make a spinning object is to place a bone in it aligned along the axis you want to spin about. Then simply manipulate the roll handle of the bone. This will eliminate any flipping problems or geometry problems associated with trying to spin the bone by manipulating the tip.

An example of this is the spinning wheel in my Stride Length tutorial. It's got 1 bone, oriented along the XZ-plane, passing through the center of the wheel. The roll handle points up in the Y direction, and to spin, the roll handle is rotated through 360 degrees.

This way the spin of the object and it's orientation in 3D space can be completely different actions. Think of a spinning top which wobbles around. The top can have a bone oriented along the Y-axis, base at the bottom, tip at the top, with the roll handle parallel to the XZ plane. The spin is constant (the roll handle), while the wobble is affected by the orientation of the bone tip which you can manipulate independent of the roll handle. The base of the bone can be constrained to a path so you can have a traveling, spinning, wobbly top!

== -Jim Sherwood

This is the super-quick-and-dirty solution. Not the most versatile, but it works.

Create a new bone at the top level of the character. Label it Patriarch. Make all other top level bones a child of this bone. Position the bone at the waist, pointing right to left. Make sure the roll handle is pointing up towards the head.

In an action, or choreography, or whatever, rotate the roll handle of the Patriarch. It should easily go through 360 degrees with no flipping.

-- Tony

While the play button is down move bones or muscle points around and they will be recorded. You can see it on the next loop if you have the repeat button down

Will P., Hash Inc.

To inbetween between two different actions in a choreography, you have to make a transition. You could either make a transitional action (which is time consuming and you'll probably never use it again) or you can, in choreography, go to skeletal mode and copy and paste the end frame of the first action and the first frame of the second action. That way, you create a transition as a choreography action.

ed Lynch

You're supposed to be able to accomplish this using the left and right arrow buttons on the Frame toolbar. Just be sure to select which *type* of key you're interested in advancing to.

For instance, if I have 3 keyframes for a specific bone within an animation, if I wanted to shuffle through those keyframes I would have to:

1. Select the bone.
2. Ensure that the key bone toolbar button is pressed. Deselect the other toolbar buttons.
3. Then click the right arrow button on the frame toolbar to advance to the next keyframe. Note that you will only be advancing to the next keyframe for the bone you selected.

That's my understanding of the "go to next keyframe" feature that's available in hash.

Eric W. Dean

I use this button a lot. On the Frame bar, it's the one with a standard "fast-forward to end" icon [a double-arrow] like you'd see on tape deck style controls... only this doesn't fast forward to the end. It jumps to the next keyframe *for whatever is currently selected*.

If you have no next keyframe for the head bone, for example, the button takes you nowhere.

There are default hotkeys for this and its sister keys, but I prefer to set my own. I go to the Tools menu, choose Customize, and set the following keys:

[on a PC kbd]

• Next Frame: CTRL-[right arrow]
• Next KeyFrame: CTRL-SHFT-[right arrow]
• Previous Frame: CTRL-[left arrow]
• Previous Keyframe: CTRL-SHFT-[left arrow]
• Jump to Frame: CTRL-[up arrow]

Note that the 'Jump to...' function asks you to type in a frame number.

If I hold down these hotkeys, my animation plays through the frames, or keyframes, at whatever rate the PC can manage. More detail, slower playback. I try to release the keys before I get to the last bit I want to see, because it takes a while for the PC to finally stop stepping thru the frames sometimes.

James Poulakos

Believe it. I carry a digital stop-watch everywhere I go. When I'm in the subway, I'll time out people's steps and such. It's sorta funny: people look at me, and then they'll start walking -faster-, every single time. Stopwatches have wierd effects on people's minds.

The other thing to remember is the good old 32-feet/sec2 law. That is to say, any falling object will add 32 feet/second to its downward velocity for every second that it's in the air. If you have a spread-sheet program, it's fairly easy to throw up a sheet which shows how far an object will fall from rest in 1 frame, 2 frames, etc., etc., etc. Then, if you want to calculate how long it takes something to fall from distance "X", just look down the sheet until you find the right frame. Likewise, that is the same time it will take an object to reach a rest position at height "X" from having left the ground.

Finally, and probably most important, you need to get quick feedback while you're blocking out the action. I generally create a Tiny (80x60) preview in wireframe mode, showing the entire animation. Just rerender that every time you make a major timing change: it should take like a minute or less, and gives you a better sense for the timing than the scrub is likely to do.

Mostly I think it's practice. I occasionally get my timing right on the first try now, but far more often I still have to tweak fairly seriously. Man I wish we had a Scale-modifier for grouped CPs in channels.

-- Tony

The degree number you choose refers to how long your camera's "shutter" remains open. A setting of 0 means it will only remain open for a very short time and have no blur. This is because it was only open long enough to catch your animation at a single moment in time. A setting of 360 means the shutter will remain open for the duration of the frame, picking up the movement that occurs between frames, thus producing a lot of motion blur. With real cameras, you have to worry about light over-exposure when a shutter remains open but in CG, it only affects the blur (or temporal anti-aliasing).

I began using the 180 degree setting for most of my work but I've become rather fond of the 270 degree setting of late. Of course for some shots, a number in between might be more suitable. Try different numbers and see if you get what you like. One word of advice - don't try to judge what a moblur will look like in an animation by just looking at a single rendered still. Without the motion it compliments, it may look to be too much.

BTW, has anyone ever tried to set the moblur *past* 360? If it's possible, it could produce some very dream-like images.

-ed Lynch

This is one of the things action objects is for. You may want to add a bone to your actor which the object will be attached to, but it's not necessary if you offset the object from the hand bone or whatever. Basically just create a new action with your actor then drop the object which it will pick up and put down to the action, it comes in as an action object, then you open up the channels of the action object and add a translate to and orient like constraint to it's main bone (or whatever) targetted to the actor's hand, this will allow him to hold the object, when you want him to drop it set the constraints to 0% and animate the object alone from then on.

Matt Andersen

I do the latter. it is much easier to move to frame 56 then frame #56565, if you know what I mean. also, you can have different constraints for each action. if you would like a good transition, copy the last frame on the first action into the first frame of the second, then do the next animating thing. if you want to have a deviant walk cycle(different bobbing heads) try turning off KEY TRANSLATION and rely on the rotations of the neck bones/tail etcetera.

Joe

The easiest way to rotate an object is to do the following: Select the model you wish to rotate in the chor window, look at the properties panel and make sure the y orient box is checked. Then in the shortcut to that model in the pws, select the channel for the y orient and go to the properties panel again. There should be a value(?) box to fill in and it should be at 0. Make a keyframe at frame 0, then advance to say frame 30 and type 360 in the value box. Make keyframe. Done.

I don't have the program open in front of me, but that's pretty close as far as I can recall.

Jim Talbot

Select the shortcut-to-handwave (that is, the choreography instance of your hand wave action) in the PWS. Now, in action properties select the "Blend" tab. Check the "Add" button. And that´s it.

Juan Manuel Garófalo

I know many others have used overlapping actions with success. However, two things I have never used because they end up looking canned -- at least with my stuff -- are overlapping libraried actions, and walk cycles.

They just don't do it for me. 100% of my actions are unique, created from scratch, for only the shot in question, never to be used again.

In answer to your query, the easiest way for me to fix this would be to create the action as one action. Not two different actions spliced together.

-Armando Afre

In all honesty, I'm not sure. I haven't used walk-cycles since v.4. I'm not sure how you could effectively modify it since it is in a cycling motion dependent on the length and time of the path. It's just easier for me to do my walks one foot at a time. Even the simple gek-a-gek walk cycle wasn't a cycle. Each of those steps were done by hand with none of that step measuring. I put the feet where I wanted them at the exact time I wanted them. With each new step, I manually placed the foot there at that particular time.

This way, I know just how the walk is gonna look without worrying about cycle-to pathlength interpolation.

Another reason I dislike cycles is that (and I may be wrong with version 6) they require your character to be on a path. That's too constricting to me. I never use paths for characters. I get much better results relying on the tranlation channels to see the position and the arc of a character, say, jumping through the air.

If I want to change his trajectory and speed on a guy constrained to a path, I must first change the path, *then* change the timing. I'd rather change the arc and keyframe positions in channels, killing two birds with one stone. Remember, even if you don't have a visible path within your action or cho, your character still has an editible motion path by way of the translation channels.

Also moving an arm would generally necessitate some counterbalance action of the back and maybe pelvis. I'm not sure how you could do this effectively when your dealing with two actions. It seems to me you'd have to adjust Hand.act, then go back and adjust WalkCycle.act.

But I guess it comes down to whatever works for each animator.

-Armando Afre

Absolutely. I kept the example simple, but there's no limit to the feature.

It's really designed to allow you to animate two characters together.

-mike

Try this. (you can do something similar with bones, but I'm assuming you're talking about muscle) Make your smile at 10. At frame 11 select the cps that made the smile, then hit the up arrow key, then the down arrow key. At frame 50 hit the up, then down arrow keys again. This will make the keys you need. You need to do this at frame 11 because if you don't, you're going to get spline drift in the channels, as the f-curves interpolate from 10 to 50 then down to 60. The key at 11 will ensure that from frames 10 to 50, the channels will reamin absolutely horizontal.

If you're talking about a bone smile, select the bones at 10, key it, then key 11, then key 50 before you go to 60 and make your neutral pose.

you might also want to do what I suggest at frame 11 on frame 49 as well.

-Armando Afre

The best way to do this is to create simple actions... excluding secondary motion and put them all together... meaning if an action moves say the thorax and you then overload annother action that also moves the thorax the action that you overloaded takes over. I belive things haven't changed, the way I do it is if I plan out an action and I know certain things need to happen, I divide all the action for the character into segments of the body so I have my actions for the torso and arms seperate from my actions for the legs and feet, and also seperate from the head and neck. Annother good thing about designing your actions in this fashion is that the leg actions become interchangeable so you can make a run cycle and a walk cycle and they can be placed under any upper body action you like. I do the same with muscle actions on the headI have lower face and upper face actions all of which are completely interchangeable. this gives me the broadest range of facial expressions posible.

-David

You can get this effect fairly easily with two bones. Lets say you have one thorax bone that's moving, and you want to "add" another motion on top of the motion already used. Simply parent the thorax bone to another bone with the same center of rotation and animate that. Since the thorax rotation will be relative to that bone, it should work nicely.

--Raf Anzovin

it's easy when u know how - this one had me tossed for a while until it finally dawned on me...

u need to have a bone selected for anything to work - and it also depends on your key mode buttons (ie. bone, branch, model). same thing applies to the move frames command.

remember, select a bone!

chris g

2 ways at least, you can trim the action to only a portion which you want played (without actually changing the existing action), you do this in the instance item for the action in choreography under general in the crop field, or you can take a knife to the whole action, the way I do this is by using the edit all filtered channels box, to cut the end off make sure you're in branch mode with the action's window open and all of the keyframe types included in the action NOT filtered out, go to the highest bone in the action and click it in the PWS, then go to the frame in which you want the action to end and hit the make keyframe button, make the keyframe then edit all filtered channels (next to the keyframe buttons) and select everything after the keyframe you just made and delete all of those points. To cut the front off, you make a keyframe where you want the action to start then copy and paste it over frame 1, then figure out how many frames between the keyframe you made (not the pasted one, the first one) and the next existing keyframe, then use edit all filtered channels and select the keyframe you made and everything else up to frame 1 (do not select frame 1), delete this selection, now select the rest of the remaining information after frame 1, and nudge it so there's a gap the same distance as between the key you created and the next existing key. All in all using the crop range is quicker and has much less potential for unintended damage, but if you actually make an action a set length there's not a whole lot of things to remember to do to it after dropping it.

Matt Andersen

AMs instancing refers to the ability to drop multiple copies of the same object into a choreography and any changes you make to the base model affects all of the instances. This also goes for lights.

If you want to combine objects into a single object you can either:

• Import one model into another (permanent) or
• Import an object into another object's action using "action objects." (temporary).

Hope this answers your question.

ed Lynch

Likewise, changes you make to the instances do NOT affect the original model.

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

I think it has to do with the ease level of the fish constrained to a path. If you want him to stop at a spot on the path, look in the properties panel to see the percentage of ease at the frame you want him to stop and then put that same percentage in again at the frame you want him to start moving again. He should stay there during those two frames. If he doesn't check the channel of the ease on path.

I may not have explained it well, but this should get you started.

Jim Talbot

Create a new choreography, import the model and drag the dance action name onto the model shortcut name. Then check the properties panel for the shortcut to the action and enter the amount you want it to repeat in the appropriate space.

That is what stride length is for. You use stride length when a charcter is walking, running or dancing along a path. If your character is getting sliperry feet and he isn't supposed to be on a path, then you animated him wrong. You should use foot targets, bones to lock the feet to when animating.

Jim Talbot

Press the "M" key and hold down the control key and drag, the camera follows the cursor.. Same with zoom, press the "Z" key and hold down the control key and drag up to zoom in or down to zoom out.

This is on a Mac, I assume it's similar, if not the same on a PC.

Jim Talbot

Open two windows, one with a view from the top and one with a view from the camera. Then move the camera in the top view window.

Ugh. Not enough screen real-estate as there is! Hit 'T' and drag in the window to turn the camera. Hit 'M,' hold control and click-drag in the window to move (translate) the camera. Press 'Z,' hold control and click-drag in the window to adjust focal length.

Anyone know of a way to tilt the camera from the camera window.

Hold the Press 'T' and hold Control to tilt.

Tommy D'Aquino

You can scale the lengthof an action by selecting the action in the pws and going up to edit. Select move frames, type in the percentage you want to stretch it out to or shrink it down to and hit enter. Then do a save-as, to save it under another name. This works for me in MH3D ver 5.25k for Mac, don't know about any other version.

Jim Talbot

All you have to do for a simple "orbiting" action is go to the last frame of your choreography and set a value in the path constraint's "ease" field to tell it how many laps to do...for example, a setting of 12000% would cause the path the be travelled 120 times over the course of your choreography...

The channels don't realize to interpolate in a loop (i.e., they do not realize that their angle of attack passing through the control point at frame 1 must be effected by the position of a control point way at the other end of the action). You can bypass this problem by going into the Channels dialog, and using Gamma to twist the channels so that they have about the correct angle.

If there's an easier way, I'd sure like to hear about it.

-- Tony

i know some people wanted to know how to tweak their actions pace without having to overhaul the action. this might help....

make a tiny path in chor

assign your model to it

the trick is to set sride length for your action really small too

the program still eases the model along the path but it's so small that it doesn't appears to move.

the low setting for stride length makes it hard for the model to reach the end of the path, giving you adequate room to tweak you action. you don't even have to use the whole length of the path.

and because it has stride length and it's on a path, it use the ease channel to pace the speed of the action

Scott A. Young

Well, the first thing I would try is to go to the 6th frame of the action and choose "Action->Create Pose". Make sure that, on the frame-bar, you've pushed the buttons for all the types of pose you want to create (bone-translate, -scale, -rotate, constraint, muscle, etc.) and the bone-mode you want (full model, bone and descendants, single bone).

But I have to admit that I haven't tested that specific combination of actions to test if they'll work. If it -doesn't- work, here's a foolproof workaround. Create a new action. Go into your old action, go to frame 6, make sure the frame-bar is set correctly (see above), Edit->Copy, go back to your new action, on frame 1, Edit->Paste, Action->Create Pose.

-- Tony

It has some problem If you use copy & paste from old action to new action.

After u pasted the old action frame to new action you must press Clear Action, then Paste the old action frame again. I don't know why but it work greate for me.

And for muscle actions, make sure you group all of the CPs that you want to save the muscle information for. Don't group everything, just the points you need. Keep in mind that you may want to save muscle information on points that are in the default model position, but move in other poses (like parts of a mouth). You might still need a keyframe for those points. There's an example of this in the manual.

 \_ -Ken Baer. Director Mac Product Development, Hash Inc.
<[_] Usenet: baer@hash.com=# \, Office: (360)750-0042
Animation Master: Finally, 3D animation software an artist can afford!

And a couple of other cool things:

1. Set a "make pose" hot key and you can grab poses out of an choreography action and add them to your model file.
2. If you're combining both skeletal and muscle motion you can save time by not grouping the CP's you moved in muscle and just switching back to skeletal motion to save as long as the muscle key info option is activated in the frame toolbar. WARNING: if you forget to switch back to skeletal motion before saving the default is to save EVERY CP if you haven't selected a group of CP's! Thatsa lotta CP's! So listen to Ken Baer on that one!

Glen

Another fun thing to try is "Action Objects" Create an action like normal, using model1. Now right click on the action in the tree and select import model and select a different model like model2 . Now when you apply the action your second model gets loaded and applied to the first model. It can be constrained anyway you like.

This eliminates building multiple copies of your models. Like guy, guy-with-gun, guy-with-gun-and-hat etc... Remember figure substitution... Much easier this way.

The way to fix this is go to the blackbone in your action or pose, this will be the bone that starts with shortcut to and has the same name as the model, click on it then select the rotation tab, you'll notice it probaly say 0,0,100 this is correct default position for vector interpolation, however if your model fell over, you are in euler so change z=100 to z=0 and it should stand back up again. Hope this is useful to someone.

Matt Andersen

Why not just do this:

• Make the spheres. Add a bone in the center of the spheres, labelled "Center".
• Add a bone as a child of "Center" in the position you want the light, labelled "Light Position".
• In choreography, add a Bone labelled "Camera Position".
• Constrain the camera to Translate-to and Orient-Like the "Camera position" bone.
• Constrain the "Center" bone of the sky-sphere to Translate-to (ONLY translate-to) the "Camera position" bone.

If you did this, however you moved the camera around, the sky-sphere would keep the same basic orientation in regards to the camera. There could conceivably be some extremely minor horizon effects based on the fact that you are using a limited, non-spherical ground-plane, but that would only happen if your camera really went tremendously high. There shouldn't be any problem if you only translate horizontally.

-- Tony

Click the Path Constraint in the Project Workspace and look on the Properties Panel for the Ease field.

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

While it would be nice to have a good keyframe editor, I feel obliged to point out that there is a fairly simple procedure to do this already.

Go to the Channels window. Drag in each bone or Muscle group that you want to move the keyframes on (drag them into the graph-area, not the area where the channels are listed). Take Group, grab all the control points at that frame, and just drag the whole group to the right.

Likewise to trim frames from a section, just drag left.

-- Tony

Yeah, Randy changed it at the last minute (remind me to kill him :-). Every file now has new header information. I just grabbed this off the top of a dopesheet that works. The top of the file should look like this.

[DOPESHEETFILE]
[MATERIALS]
[ENDMATERIALS]
[OBJECTS]
[ENDOBJECTS]
[ACTIONS]
[DOPESHEET]

Excuse me now, I need to beat up Randy.

 \_ -Ken Baer. Director Mac Product Development, Hash Inc.
<[_] Usenet: baer@hash.com > =# \, Office: (360)750-0042
Animation Master: Finally, 3D animation software an artist can afford!

You must do this in a Choreography-local action (i.e. one that you make by moving a bone around in Skeletal mode directly in a choreography). This is because a Model Action is local to a model, and therefore can only refer to things within that model (so that you can transport it reasonably from one choreography to another).

When you are in a Choreography-local action, the 'Model' section of the (for example) Kinematic constraint property box will be active, so you will be able to choose bones from other models.

Remember, of course, that you can Overlay your model actions with these choreography-local actions. So, if you want two people to walk along holding hands, you just create ONLY the constraint in a Choreography-local action, and then add shortcuts for the walk-cycles from the model actions.

-- Tony

This is really easy. Add a Null Object to the choreography (right click the Object list, then select New/Null Object). Drag the Null object into the chor window and drop it. Position it where the piston should stop.

Right click the piston in the Project Workspace and select New Constraint/Translate To. Use the Picker to select the Null Object. On the Properties Panel is a Enforce % box. Key frame the value in this box to make the piston move. 0% on frame 1 will have the piston out, then you can advance to frame 10 (or whatever) and make the Enforce %100 to draw the piston in over 10 frames. Repeat this or edit the channel to keep it going. One of the channel interpolation options (I don't remember which) will automatically repeat the pattern for you.

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

That's pretty easy. The fan's roll axis should be vertical, which is sort of automatic in A:M (at least in V4).

Go to the channel, and make the roll equal to 0 at frame 1, and 5000 degrees (or whatever's right, but yes, many, many rotations of 360 degrees) at your last frame. That's right, only two points on the channel curve.

If you want flexibility for additions in the future, let it go more than your number of frames (at the same slope). So if you want to add length to the scene, it won't stop too soon. (Careful, the automatic render length might want to go too far).

Charlie

You could actually go to the final frame, and enter 5000 into the Roll value on the Properties Panel as well. This avoids having to deal with the channels....

Jeff, Hash, Inc.

Distraut over the poor look of a character's knees when squatting (nasty intersections and tearing at 160 degrees) I turned to constraints to solve my problem. And hey, I figured it out! I'm sure this is old news to ppl like Tony Lower-Basch (and perhaps everyone else), but...

I added a 'knee' bone (child of the thigh bone) and assigned the points that make up my character's knee to it. It points perpendicular to the leg bones. Then I added the constraints:

• orient like - thigh bone 50%
• orient like - calf bone 50%
• aim roll at - thigh bone

the 'aim roll at' keeps the bone from getting all funky.

So now the knee angle floats between the leg bones, and the joint looks fine even totally retracted. It's not the most realistic knee in the world, but I can add additional bones and 'weight' them by adjusting the constraint percentages. Rather neat. You can hide the extra bones with the 'j' key so that once you have them set up you don't have to look at them..

if there's a better way someone let me know.

now to get his bum to flex properly... :)

ken morton

OK, at a guess, I think that you've made the Calf a child of the knee bone, rather than a child of the thigh. Don't do this.

If you did this, then in order to calculate where the knee-bone would be, Hash would read the position of the Calf. Then it would move the knee-bone appropriately. This would change the position of the calf, and so the knee-bone would have to move again, which would again change the position of the calf, and.... well you get the picture.

Make the calf a child of the thigh, and make the knee-bone another child of the thigh. Now you should be able to establish the constraints.

-- Tony

OK, there are a few more steps. I'm not right at my computer, so folks should feel free to correct me if I screw something up.

Go to the choreography window. In the Frame-Scrub-Bar, in the text box (probably currently showing '1'), enter whatever the frame is that you want the guy to get to the end of the path.

Click on the Path Constraint in the Object-List thingy. Bring up its properties. Click in the Percent text box (probably showing '0') and change it to '100'. The guy should now move along the path properly, although still not sneak.

Go back to Frame 1. Drag the Sneak action from the -action folder- onto the -shortcut to the model- in the Choreography. The actions in the action folder are actions that the model (any model, in fact) =can= do. The actions on the choreography-shortcut are the actions that the model actually =will= do.

Bring up the properties of the shortcut-to-the-action and set the Stride Length to be on. Also, set its start and end frames to correspond with the length of the animation. The guy should now sneak appropriately along the path.

-- Tony

OK. First thing, you'll have to set make your path (the one he's constrained to) contain the whole walk action, from start to finish. Of course, that will involve changing the ease from being 100% at frame 30 to being 100% at whatever the -new- ending frame is, and 'whatever' percent at frame 30 (whatever puts him in the right place on the screen).

For the time in the middle when he's not moving, you should just go into the property tab and make sure that the ease channel is 'whatever' at frame 30, and then still 'whatever' on the frame he starts walking again.

Of course, once you've done that, you'll find that he slides back and forth on the path while he's supposed to be not moving. This is because the path-ease channel is a spline through time, and it doesn't automatically have a sharp crisp stop just because the overall spline is not moving over the course of the time-lapse. Go into the channels window and you'll see what I mean. You can alter that with gamma and magnitude and all those good things. What's more, it'll give him a nice 'slow-down' period when he comes to a stop.

Of course, just assign the walk action for the time that he's walking, again with stride length.

Last but not least, when you are moving the eyes (rolling etc) and moving the arms to point at things, is it best to do that manually.

You can do that in a seperate action (which gets assigned later) or just do it in choreography. Your call.

-- Tony

Well, you've gotten lots of good advice on how to manage the actual transition. Let me throw in my two cents: you should do it backwards.

Specifically, you should remember that you CAN lay out keyframes going -backwards- in time. When I did a test of the T-1000 blob-melting-into-a-person-shape thing, I modelled the person, made a muscle frame at 300, and then muscle animated from the complicated surface down to a little blob at frame 1. It works great, because (a) your model looks like your finished (more complicated) thing, rather than the less complicated beginning item, and (b) the transition shows the formation of large structure first, then details (assuming that as you animate backwards you rough off the details first, then break down the large structure).

-- Tony

Well, as the only self-proclaimed constraint expert that I've spotted on the list so far, I can say with some authority:

"Uh, I dunno."

This is the -only- situation in which I miss V4's old "Bend To Path" thingy. It is my sincere hope that "Bend to Path" is absent from V5 -only- because the Hash folks are planning (someday when the system is more stable) to implement a much more fully featured deformation tool, and they don't want some dinky, tack-on piece of work confusing people in the meantime.

Of course, I know that the Hash folks would not be foolish enough to confirm or deny such speculation (lest people be tearing their hair out saying "WHEN?")

In the meantime, I have tried to replicate this effect myself, in exactly the way you described (each cross-section attached to a bone). Believe it or not, I actually got it to look fairly good (although the more complicated your path is during the 'stretch' period, the more bones you need).

My recommendation is that you go with attaching every bone to the path, and then fiddle with the ease channel.

Each ease channel except the very last should -start- a little bit above zero (so that the cable is laid out on the path in the first frame). Additionally, each ease channel except the first should -end- on sections of (in your case) 5% (so that the cable is stretched out fully on the path in the last frame).

What -I- did was to drag ALL of the channels into one window (remember, you can drag and drop a channel marker into the graph-portion of the channel window (not the tree-portion) to add it to your display). Then I laid out the last frame by clicking down the list of channels and manually entering the numeric values. Then, I grouped that last frame, copied it, dragged it to the far left and scaled it down.

- Tony

Yes. A single channel for all the CP's of a muscle action. -(As well as each individual CP like it is now). I'm sure that Hash is aware of this and things like SHAPE-SHIFTER in Alias. For now the easiest way to alter a linear transition is to load two poses and advance through the frames until you get the combination position you want, then save THAT as a pose and drop it between the other two in time closer to one or the other pose to ease in or out. To create sudden or slow changes.

Glen

This is a little off-the-wall, but....

1. First, I presume that you want the wine to slosh around in the glass, not the TV cabinet, right?
2. Make one pose, in muscle, of the wine sloshed to the right, higher on the right, lower on the left, and almost as low in the middle, a curved upper surface in other words.
3. The other pose is "repose", the wine 'standing still', no muscle.
4. Apply two actions.
   1. go from 'pose' to 'repose' in, say, 200 frames.
   2. spin the glass (or the wine with respect to the glass) about 7 rotations (2500 degrees) in the same 200 frames
   3. if it works (I haven't tried it), you can later apply a little 'kick' to the glass to make it look like it's causing the wine to move.

Charlie

I am by far no expert in MH3D, but perhaps i can help a little.

First, Thom ended up floating on the ball because you constrained Thom as a whole to the ball. His individual hand bones are the ones to constrain. You can do this in Direction; go to the direction window, but select skeletal mode on the top tool bar. Select a hand bone by clicking on it in the direction window. Right click on it now, and a pop-out menu will appear. Select new constraint, translate to. In the properties box, under the general tab, there are two windows with dropdown menus which list objects and bones, respectively. (As long as the bone is selected (yellow)). Select the shortcut to sphere in the top window, and bone 1 in the bottom one. Thoms hand should move, in a peculiar way to the sphere...

A few things are strange here; for me, Thoms hands move to the sphere, but his arms don't follow; a better constraint seems to be kinematic, but the ball has to be placed within reach... try that.

Also, if you want Thom to carry the ball, kinematicly constrain the sphere,bone 1 to the hand bone...

The constrained bones will constrain themselves to the sphere's bone, but at the origin, which is the short end of the diamond shpaed bone, which is inside the sphere, and could cause undesirable effects. Perhaps creating two more bones (one for each hand) and placing them at the edges of the sphere, and decreasing the percentage of enforcement could stop the penetration.

I haven't successfully duplicated the book's example either, yet, but hopefully this will get you closer, or at least generate some ideas that will lead you to the real way, or maybe someone who does really know will read this, call it do-do, and set us both straight =)

Kerry

You can do it now. The trick is that you have to do it in the Project work space tree. Dragging a pose into the chor. window doesn't allow you to select which character you're dragging to. What you need to do is to drag the pose onto the figure's chor. action in the list view. Make sure you're on the appropriate frame in the chor. window before you do it. Currently this is suggested only for muscle actions. I think there are still some problems with skeletal poses.

 \_ -Ken Baer. Director Mac Product Development, Hash Inc.
<[_] Usenet: baer@hash.com=# \, Office: (360)750-0042
Animation Master: Finally, 3D animation software an artist can afford!

I presume that you mean "If you are going to fade-in and fade-out multiple Aim-At constraints in order to have the eyes look at different objects during the course of an animation, it's easier if you only have to deal with the channels in one place, and have the other eye automatically track."

Unfortunately, if you do an Aim-At and an Orient-Like, you will -always- have the "thousand-mile stare", because the eyes will be exactly parallel, rather than being slightly focussed. Because of our evolved (or whatever) skill at reading eyes, this is often readily perceived in an animation.

But if you create a Target Bone as part of the model, then create the two Aim-At constraints in the base pose, you can get the best of both worlds, by just fading-in a Translate To constraint bindng that target bone to the Choreography Object you want to have the character look at. You could even use a Path Constraint, and just draw your character's "Path of Focus" throughout the animation.

-- Tony

I dont want to get into specifics of Hash's software, since that is better suited for other places..

I've had others ask what I did in private email, so Ill try to kill many birds with one email.. Ill also try to generalize the process so that it applies to any package..

This is the same thing I described a few weeks back.. But here goes anyway..

1. I drew thumbnails of my character, and the poses I wanted him in.. And yes, I also acted out the motion (my cat thinks Im crazy)..
2. I create those poses in the 3D software every 10 frames. No regard for timing whatsoever.
3. Rendered all of those poses (every 10 frames)
4. Imported those rendered pics into a program to create the digital exposure sheet. In this case, I used Lipsynch.
5. Made my timing and made it work with the audio.
6. Output the exposure sheet that can be read back into the 3D software. Or if your software doesnt do that, just print out the exposure sheet and you have the scene timing.
7. Now I have the basic timing. Now I go in and tweak the timing and keyframes to get it exactly how I want it (or in this case, until I got bored and was ready to start a new animation).
8. Lip synching was done the same way, and just dumped on top of the body gestures.
9. Facial expressions and eye movements were dumped on top of all of that in the 3D software.. I didnt use the exposure sheet program for that.

This sounds, and is a strange and a roundabout way of doing things.. But, I found it to be much, much faster in the long run.. I had a presentable rough animation of the character to the audio within the first hour, for the client (me in this case) to sign off on.. This is what sparked this whole process of animating, after talking with Chris [Bailey] I figured there was a greater need for this (quicker way to see overall body timing).. The timing of the 4 seconds was pretty much nailed down after only an hour.. The rest was tweaking and facial animation..

My 2nd animation using this process (Ill post tomorrow) is 12 seconds long of that character talking. It was equally effective and I had a rough finished within a few hours.. The rest of the time (about 20 or so hours) was tweaking body movements, and then adding facial, eye movements, etc..

And to answer Jeff's question specifically, I made poses for the whole character, not individual limbs.

Rick May

you need to adjust the ease channel. open up the path and at frame 1 set the ease to 0, and at frame 80 set the ease to 100. Go into the channel for that path and adjust the tension if necessary.

Dale Carman

You are in luck, because this was exactly the first thing I figured out how to animate (I just figured this out 2 weeks ago, so bear with me):

1) Select "open model" from the File menu. Select PuttyDude or whatever model you want to use. This should automatically begin a new project with PuttyDude in it.

2) Open the "Walk.ACT" file. This should automatically apply itself to the PuttyDude model since he is the only model present. If there were more it would prompt you for which model you want to apply the action to. This is the tricky part. This only pertains to the action's main window. You haven't actually applied the action to your animation yet. You've merely opened a window in which to view the action itself, and it needs a model to act on. Get it?

3) Select "New Choreography." This will open up a choreography window with a default camera and one light. It should also default to a "top" view looking down, and you see the visible cone for the camera angle and the radius of the light. From the top view, select "add control point" from the toolbar and you should see a "path" icon for your pointer. Add a spline. You now have a 2-point spline for a path. In the project window under "choreographies" you should now see "Path1" under "Choreography1" in addition to "Shortcut to camera1" and "Shortcut to Light1." If you double click on "Path1" this will open up a window with just the path in it. You can modify the path here or in the choreography window by adding control points to it. A figure eight is a good first path because you can see your model walk from all sides and it can loop over and over.

Remember your viewpoint. If you click on Path1 to open up a window for it, you will be looking at a front view so you will see a flat line. Select the top view to see the path from above.

4) Drag your model from the project window under "Objects" to the actual choreography window. This will put PuttyDude in the choreography, and a "Shortcut to PuttyDude" will appear in the project window under "Choreography1."

5) Since you want PuttyDude to walk along the path, you must constrain him to the path. If you just added him, he should be selected, but if not, click on PuttyDude in the Cho window to select him. Right-click on him to open a menu with "New Constraint" and select "Path" from that menu. Over in the project workspace, you will see "General" attributes with a space for "target object." Select Path1 as your object. You should now see PuttyDude jump to the path in the Cho window, and the PuttyDude shortcut now has a whole bunch of branches that you can mess with. I haven't yet, but you can.

6) Now you want to apply the walk action to PuttyDude in the Cho window. From the project window, drag the "Walk" action from the "Actions" folder down to "Shortcut to PuttyDude" in the "Choreography" folder. Wham! You should now see PuttyDude in your Cho window take on the first frame of the walk action. You should now see "Shortcut to Walk(1-30)" under "Shortcut to PuttyDude."

The walk action takes 30 frames. This will default to your entire path, i.e. PuttyDude will take 30 frame to go from one end of the path to the other. If you drag the action to the shortcut a second time, this will add 30 more frames of animation, and he will take 60 frames to travel the path. This can be modified if you need to.

7) Now select "Camera1" for the view in the Cho window. You can now render this to disk. From the Render Panel, select your file name, resolution, quality options, etc. Select "Compression" to select your file format (e.g. AVI) and what type (if any) compression you want to use. For your frame range, let's assume you did include 60 frames of animation. To view the whole thing, render all 60 frames in the Start and End section in Steps of 1. For FPS, 30 is standard for video.

If you check the "Show Render" box, when you hit start you will see each frame as it is rendered. When the complete render is finished and you chose to output to an AVI file, an AVI viewer will open and you will see your movie looping over and over and over. Woohoo!!!

That's all there is to it. From there, you can add more objects. Try adding a floor of some sort. You may need to tweak the path to conform to the surface of the floor, but since the model is constrained to the path already, this is no problem. Try adding some reflective or transparent objects to the environment for PuttyDude to walk around. I created a shiny floor and some red transparent pylons so that light refracts through them. It looks pretty cool when he walks behind them. Also try moving your camera around to create dynamic sweeps. To do this, go back to the Cho window and move the frame slider at the bottom along to some frame other than the first frame. Move the camera (top and side views work well here). For example, if you moved the camera at frame #20, it will now sweep from one position to the other over those 20 frames.

I guarantee when you finish this you will be elated. Go to it!!

Jim Sherwood

Sure. Use the DELETE FRAMES dialogue in the top menu bar. ACTIONS in Hash are per object. Select the model or light or whatever and type in "delete 40 frames past frame 80".

You could also just Play a selection of an ACTION: Select the action in the PROJECT WORK SPACE and look in properties. There you will find the the CROP RANGE. enter in 1 at START and 80 at END. The last 40 frames will not display. (But your'e ACTION file is still intact).

Glen Crowell

You need to edit the Ease channel for the ball. Double click Ease under the ball object, in the choreography section of the project workspace to bring up the channel editor. From there its just a matter of adding and adjusting CPs to achieve the desired effect.

Bob Gruen

I've faced this same problem on the same kind of model. The short answer: You can't.

The Long Answer:

The problem with making a fast, circular motion is that you are dealing with frames of information. The human eye doesn't view it that way in real life, but instead receives the info in a stream. How does this affect anything?

Because it is frame by frame, you have to take your total rotation per second divided by your frames per second to get the amount of rotation necessary for each frame. Let's take an example.

Let's say you wanted your rotor to spin at 3500 revolutions per second. For the ease of math, let's say you rendered at a frame rate of 10 frames per second. To accomplish this, you would have to rotate the rotor blades 350 degrees for each frame. No problem, but without a visual cue (like blurring) to let you know that the rotor has travelled this distance clockwise, what your eyes are going to see is the rotor rotating COUNTERCLOCKWISE at 1 revolution every 3.6 seconds rather than forwards really fast.

There are several ways to fix this. Motion blur is the obvioius way (available for the lowly MH3D users in Version 5). Another way to do this is to fake the "rotor fan" effect. Make an even number of semi-transparent fan-shaped blades (2 or 4 works best) and rotate them slowly. This gives the illusion that it is actually a rotor spinning quickly. As a matter of fact, you'd be surprised exactly HOW convincing it is. And this also lets you mimic the effect of the "fan" blades slowing down and going backwards like they seem to do (due to the frequency of the light). Surprisingly, I've had people even tell me that they could slightly see the blur of the rotor blades BETWEEN the fan blades, even though there was nothing there for them to see.

Go into Bones mode and click on the model's icon in the worksheet, a black bone will appear. Orient that bone so that it is pointing along the axis you want your model to point in cho, in your standing-up-bat case, point it up along Y. The default is pointing along Z...

ken morton

Well, with v5, paths work slightly differently .. Oh and thanks to Jeff Paries for pointing out where the Ease was ... I couldn't find it.

Here ya go.

1. Create the path in Direction
2. Apply a PATH constraint to the Model
3. In the Project window you will find 'Constrain to path XXX' under the Model

+Choreography
+Shortcut to camera1
+Shortcut to light1
+Shortcut to model1
+Chereography Action
+Shortcut to Model1
+Constrain to Path "Model1"
 --+path1

Select 'Constrain to path Model1' and in the properties panel, Hidden away in the upper right corner is the ease.

To get the ease channel, At frame 0 enter in 0.00 or any other number (just select the number in the box and hit enter) ... the ease channel will then appear under the path constraint .... Double click on it to edit the ease.

Simple. :-)

-Glenn Wilton

You constrain to path. then you pull up properties on the constraints to path. You'll see an ease value. just type anything in (I'm sure there's an easier way to get to the ease channel but I couldn't figure it out) Then you'll have a channel for the ease under constrain to. Make sure frame 1's cp is at a zero value. Then on what ever the last frame of your excercize ad a new cp at 100 value. Then in between those two just play around with curves, adding cps, and you'll be surprised at how you can totally mess around with motion without ever having to touch the block.

-Armando Afre

The only access to "ease" is a little strange: In chor., constrain a model to a path. In project workspace, go down the tree for your model, 'till you get to the contstrain to path. Look, now at the properties box. There's a box called ease. Enter something there-- anything and hit return. Presto! Look at the tree again, and below "constrain to path" for the model is now an ease channel that you can edit graphically.

Kerry

The answer was right under my nose as usual...simply set up the choreography, apply the action to the object, and under the film export options, choose "export dxf sequence". VERY COOL.

This really helps, because I want to export just about every frame of the actions I've created...so this is perfect!

Zero Z. Batzell Dean

you've two main things to worry about: number of frames and percentage of distance traveled....important to remember is that zero% is the beginning of your path and 100% is the end(this wasn't obvious to me the channels let's higher values be used but where do you go after 100%?)...in channels, left to right is your frames length, bottom to top(remember 100% :)) is from start to end of your path...an incline means forward on your path, a decline means reverse, a steep incline in your ease curve means quicker motion...a valley means reverse then forward...a hill means forward then reverse...aflat line means stop....these are the basic shapes....where they occur and to what degree is up to you.

Scott A. Young

If you just need a fixed background, right click the camera in your cho and import rotoscope from there. Here you could also setup up your rotoscope as a front projection map and then build virtual set to project onto. That would allow your objects to be occluded, reflected in and cast shadows onto your 'background'

Gary M

Hello everyone. This is not a question. Just wanted to share some info I found out, for those that might find it useful. Some of you are going to say, ya ya, duh!

A few days ago I posted a question concerning changing the roll in Mr. Bee so that he banks when he turns during flight. In the old days, I could make these adjustments manually while he was on his path by increasing or decreasing the roll. With V5, it seems like I couldn't do it the same way, could be me. What I did was...create a null object, constrain Mr. Bee to the object using the 'roll like' constraint, then simply roll the null object on the appropriate frames, viola', Mr. Bee rolls. Thanks to a couple of people that suggested the null object, that gave me a great place to start!

~Sean~

This sounds like you have the wrong default interpolation. Try this:

In MH3D right click on a channel > rt click on a single channel, such as "X-orient" > under properties > general > change the type of default interpolation from HOLD to SPLINE.

Glen

This was another of my please for a feature that should be brought into v.5. I really wish they put it in. I do the bulk of my animating directly in channels. I'll put some extremes in manually, but when I'm setting good inbetweens, instead of manilpulating the model, I just add points to the channels to get things to move were I want.

I like animating this way because if gives you 4d vision, as in you can see at once how well a keyframe eases thru time, (future or past keyframes). Whether there are any unwanted spikes, or a sharp jump where there should be a snap.

I was pleading for multiple, user selectable channel views. I would have liked to be able to show the bicep, forearm, and hand in one window. Then you could tell at a glance where and how much overlap you would need in the follow thru at the extreme of the arm's natural motion arc. This would also be good for timing breaking action for the joints in complex motions.

OK, here's the basic deal with stride lengths:

*** What Stride Length Does (a slight simplification) ***

You assign Stride-length actions to a character constrained to a Path.

The program calculates the length of the Path.

The program divides that length by the Stride-Length that you defined, in order to figure out how many repetitions of the action will be required to Stride across that distance.

The program places repeats the action that many times.

The result is (if you built your action correctly) that the creature moves without foot slippage or ugly things like that.

You should -never- have to assign two identical Walk-cycles with Stride Length back to back: Just increasing the number of frames that the walk-cycle is active for should do the same trick, only much better.

*** What Stride Length Does Not Do ***

Stride-Length no longer -cares- how many frames the action takes. If your character has a 1-yard stride length walk cycle, and moves two hundred yards in ten frames, the program will repeat the walk cycle two hundred times (not that you'll be able to -see- that).

If the same character moves one yard in two hundred frames, then a single walk-cycle will be stretched out over that long period of time.

Also, if you want the character to move along a path in X frames, walking the whole way, you have to make sure of two things:

1. The Ease-Channel of the Path must go from 0 to 100 percent in those X frames.
2. The frame-length of the Shortcut to Action in the Choreography must be set to X frames (otherwise the character will take a few steps, and then float the rest of the distance along the path).

-- Tony

You -can- use constraints, but it's going to be a bit of a pain. Basically, you want to add several Aim-At constraints, all at Percent 0 (that's Zero... no, not the person, the number). Then you go into channels, and at the frame that you want the Aim to focus on an object, you bump the channel for the Aim-at for that object to 100. Make sure you leave plenty of bell-curve on the sides, so that the Aim-Ats blend properly to get a nice pan.

I gotta say though, you'll probably be better off with a Path and Null setup. If the "moving object" that you're aiming at is following a really complex path, and you want to give the effect of a total camera lock-on, you could make a Path and Null, and then add two Aim-Ats, one at the null and one at the object, and then blend their percent channels so that you stay on the path for most of the time, but focus on the object during the specific set of frames.

Anyway, sorry this wasn't more clear... I've got a bad case of fuzzy-brain this morning, but I figured that fuzzy advice would probably be marginally more helpful than no advice.

-- Tony

Yep, most constraints focus on the Start-point of the bone, rather than the End-point. There is a quick and easy way to get around this, however. In fact, there are TWO easy ways.

QUICK AND DIRTY METHOD

Make the bone that rotates the control yoke run along the axis of the yoke, from the rotation point all the way to the top. This will make your animation much easier.

Go to Bones mode in your model. Click on the bone that rotates the yoke. Press "a" to add a new bone. Drag from the tip of the yoke a few pixels away, making a teeny tiny bone (or a huge bone for all I care, it just doesn't matter). Make sure that this bone is attached to its parent, the control yoke bone. Name this bone "Control Yoke Tip" or some such. Click "j" to hide the bone. You'll never have to touch it again.

What's the point of this new bone? Well, the Start-point of this bone will always be the End-point of the Control Yoke, so it provides a way to connect constraints to the End-point of the Control Yoke rather than the start-point.

Of course, you probably want the hands to rest somewhere near the 80% point up the yoke. To do this, you will need to blend some constraints.

Instead of one Kinematic constraint, you should create TWO Kinematic constraints on the same bone. One should constrain the bone to the Control Yoke, the other should constrain the bone to the Control Yoke tip.

Now bring up the property panels of the Kinematic constraint targetting the Control Yoke. Set the Percent to 20%. Bring up the panel for Control Yoke Tip constraint. Set the Percent to 80%. Now the hands should be Kinematically connected to a point 80% of the way between the base of the yoke and its tip.

INSTANT AND FILTHY METHOD

If you don't want to be bothered with actually having a decent, reusable bone structure, you can get away with doing this even quicker.

In bones mode, click on the Control Yoke. Create a new bone which has its start-point at the place where you want to constrain the hand. Note that this can be on the axis of the yoke, or far away from the axis of the yoke, whatever you want. This bone will be a child of the parent bone, but it will NOT be attached to the parent bone. It will just float freely, maintaining its relative position as the yoke rotates (which is just what you want). Name this "Hand-Target-Bone" or some such. Click "j" to hide.

Instead of Kinematically constraining the hand to the Yoke, constrain it to the Hand-Target-Bone. There, you're done.

-- Tony

I haven't done it myself but yeah, I think so. You have to have a numerically incrementing sequence in a single folder (i.e. map01,map02,map03). You just apply the first map to your object, this defines the rect for all of the maps, the position tab gives you the exact coordinates in centimeters of this rect. Then go to the sequence tab on the decal you just applied, start is 1 and end is the last map in your sequence, mess around with the other fields, I think they are fairly easy to figure out, but if you have any questions, I'll try to answer.

Matt Andersen

Sorry, I've no total solution, just wanted to let you know I too have the same problem during animation where just the upper body moves and the feet are supposed to stay still just like you describe. jumping, walking, ect it is never noticed.

You can fix this most of the time for bi-ped's like putty dude if you add a TRANSLATE TO constraint from the foot bone to the foot target of Putty Dude's existing foot constraints.

(TIP: When in SKELETAL hide the foot bones and animate with the foot targets. And make sure your foot targets are exactly in the same spot as your foot bones before you add the TRANSLATE TO constraint).

But even this is only a partial solution. Four legged characters can really get "dancing" while your moving the rest of the body. Hitting the space bar will often cause the SW to recalculate the redraw of the feet and move them around. The target bone itself stays still, it is the feet and legs that jump.

I find it helps if I write down all the foot bone position numbers and by keeping an eye on it. I you click on a foot bone that has shifted it often pops back into place.

Glen Crowell

I think the problem might be that Hash uses splines for animation (not really a problem - very useful actually). If you make a key for a foot, then copy that key 5 frames later (or whatever) then 20 frames later you move the the foot, again. Theoretically, between frames 1 and 5, the foot (and thus the rest of the leg) should keep still, but it doesn't because it is animated on a spline, so it moves slightly in those 5 frames. The way to solve this is to click on the first of the 5 frames in channel mode, first for X, then Y, the