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Ian Ross has just released a book on Anim8or. It's perect for a beginner and a good reference for experienced users. It contains detailed chapters on every aspect, with many examples. Get your own copy here: "Anim8or Tutorial Book"

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Messages - Alpha2

Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 8
61
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Pose annoyance
« on: December 03, 2009, 02:16:13 am »
Ugh, unfortunatly it doesnt  help the way I thought. Ensoniq5 hit on exactly what I really need; a "Key all bones" option in scene mode. My method has always been to skip the sequence mode unless I specifically wanted to create a repetitive motion like walking, if it's just a conversation shot or something complex like a fight scene it just feels ridiculously slow and inefficient to have to do all my key frames in sequence mode and import them into scene mode, it kills my momentum not only in the process of making animation but also the character's movement. It's not a very intuitive process. :(

62
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Pose annoyance
« on: December 03, 2009, 12:00:27 am »
Thanks for confirming Johnar. I'll try it now.

63
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Pose annoyance
« on: December 02, 2009, 11:22:47 pm »
RudySchneider: I've tried this and I always find that even though I moved a bone on the X and Y axis the Z axis isnt recorded so when you DO move that axis pasting over it doesnt always fix the problem. So you still have to make sure you moved every bone on every axis before you can copy it.

Mak: I rarely use the sequence mode but I guess in this case that's probably my best bet, still it seems like the problem may still bite me if the sequence doesnt record every axis, here's hoping.

64
General Anim8or Forum / Re: How to turn max models into 3DS models
« on: December 02, 2009, 10:13:08 pm »
Last time I used Gmax I recall it only exporting Gmax native files not traditional .obj, since it was never meant to be a full fledged 3dsmax.

65
General Anim8or Forum / Pose annoyance
« on: December 02, 2009, 08:41:23 pm »
I've got maybe 18 or 19 bones in my figure and while I understand the way they move and know that if I want a character to stand still and then move I have to copy the pose from the start of his stillness and paste it on the frame just before he starts moving. But there's an annoying issue I run into every time I start animating with Anim8or:

In the scene editor, if I dont move a bone the first time early on in an animation there's no key frame for it's axises, so when I go to move it later and then scrub backwards in the timeline that bone maintains that position backwards in time forcing me to have to find the start point of the animation and reposition that bone to where it should be. Usually I solve this by moving as many of the bones as I can on every axis but that's a lot of moves to do for the beginning of every scene and god forbid I have multiple characters.

While this might not be a problem for a single bone when you have more than a dozen and several of them suffer this at the same time it snowballs really quickly. Is there a way to assign positions to the axises of all the bones at one time so that I dont have to try and move every one of them on frame zero just to make sure they dont give me this problem again?

66
General Anim8or Forum / Re: So outdated
« on: December 01, 2009, 02:29:51 am »
For the most part the site works fine, While I dont think it needs to be rebuilt or anything a few touch ups to the graphics would be nice like a new front page artwork and loosing the little Animated "Enter", I mean really, no one ever clicks that first do they? I always find myself clicking the image because thats the way most every other site does it.

But otherwise as long as the site functions and isnt causing errors and page faults it's still suitable.

67
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Production planning
« on: November 30, 2009, 11:57:36 am »
Yeah The browser is useful but it only works for the individual parts, not things like the bones. What I mean is when you look at the Object menu, you can have a huge list of parts in a short time. It'd be nice if you could group the objects under one "folder" for lack of a better word. This way you'd have all the parts for your character separated from other elements and also this way the bones wouldn't cause conflicts since they'd automatically be associated with a specific model sort of like how materials can be assigned to an object. As is stands now I'm naming everything this way: Character.part.left/right

As for materials it's not so much about the name (although I name those too), I try to put them in the "file" tab that way they're available for all of the objects instead of having to remake them over and over.

68
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Production planning
« on: November 29, 2009, 10:04:57 pm »
yeah I'm thinking I'll just import them then. I'll make a copy of the first character's file as a reference for each new character. Is there a way to access the names of all the elements easier? I mean it's good that you can name everything so it avoids conflicts when importing but with so many variables I keep missing some, it'd be nice if there was a way to check them.

Actually what would be better is if all the elements could just be stored together under the character rather than having to rename everything, but that's just one of the many tweaks I wish we could see made.

69
General Anim8or Forum / Production planning
« on: November 29, 2009, 04:40:26 pm »
Do people generally build all their assets for an Anim8or animation in one file or do you build them seperately and import them into a final project file? I have one main character and a weapon, I plan to build a second and a generic badguy as well as the sets and what ever other props I might need but I keep getting the nagging feelings that I should split them up into multiple files and import them into one file later.

Anyone have thoughts on this?

70
General Anim8or Forum / Re: Problem Running Anim8or
« on: November 28, 2009, 03:57:30 pm »
I guess the first question anyone would ask is which version of anim8or is it? I used to have .95 on a SP1 (refused to upgrade to SP2) WinXP laptop, now I have it on a Vista laptop and while there are issues it still runs.

71
General Anim8or Forum / Re: bone xyz coordinates
« on: November 28, 2009, 03:54:26 pm »
Yeah unfortunately while it fixes the example to some degree, the over all situation still causes the lock up with other poses. Using Ensoniq5's solution helps a little, still not a perfect fix but I'm getting the animation I was aiming for, I suppose only time will tell if there are any further limitations I'll encounter.

72
General Anim8or Forum / Re: bone xyz coordinates
« on: November 25, 2009, 02:27:51 am »
I can do it and it's not like I'm double jointed or anything. Wrists locked in position from T pose to forward to sides, all the movement happens in the shoulders. But the description I used was only to illustrate where the failure of the bone's movement occurs.

The original problem cropped up when I wanted to move my characters hand from resting on his hip to pulling the hand away and rotating the arm forward to a Hand shake pose. This was simply impossible without some wild swing out to the side of the body instead of just moving forward because the axis constraint I used to keep the arm from clipping through the body while the arms were at it's side suddenly kept the arm from from lifting above his waist.

I will try your suggestion though, it sounds like my best bet. Since I dont use a solid body mesh for arms anyway (spent many hours trying to get arms to not deform at the shoulder and just got sick of it) it should suffice to get the arms moving the way I want.

Thanks for your suggestion!

73
General Anim8or Forum / Re: bone xyz coordinates
« on: November 24, 2009, 07:43:21 pm »
Okay thanks that helps me understand why it happens. But it still leaves me with the problem because as far as I know there's not way to adjust the hierarchy in an8, which means the character's motion will have to end up unnatural looking regardless of how I want the limb to move.

74
General Anim8or Forum / bone xyz coordinates
« on: November 24, 2009, 06:47:48 pm »
Using version .95 (02-apr-07)

My problem:
Let's say I've created a bipedal character. He's built in a T pose and the bones have been attached in the usual manner. Once all the influences have been assigned, I take the characters arms and rotate them forward toward the camera "zombie style" on the X axis. The animation them calls for me to drop the arms straight down to his sides putting his palms facing away from the camera along the Y axis. At this point there's no way to rotate them up from this position into a T pose again because the rotation disks for the X and Z axis are in exactly the same position like a sandwich or something.

Likewise if I turn the arms so the palms are away from the camera first and drop them to his sides it's impossible to lift them straight forward from this pose for a similar reason.

Am I doing something wrong or is this natural human movement simply impossible for the XYZ set up? Or maybe has this been changed in a later version of Anim8or?

75
General Anim8or Forum / Re: did steve die?
« on: November 24, 2009, 06:02:03 pm »
understandably designing this program is a hobby for him but at the same time a lot of people would look at how far the thing has come and feel like with a few tweaks it could fully rival some programs that cost hundreds of dollars. Over a year of silence on the development side of things is just kinda depressing when you see so much potential in something.

If he's simply moved on to other things, I wish him luck and health, but it'd be nice of him to say it so some of us can stop hoping for those little tweaks to eventually come.

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