Anim8or Community

Slex: I have a mouse with a slow-down button at the thumb, which is incredibly useful for this type of work.

Assuming the root of the bone is the origin and the bone moves in the positive z direction, the obvious center for x and y scaling would be the line where x and y equal 0, i.e. away from the center of the bone.  The trick is what to do with vertices that are influenced by the bone that have a negative z value.  Do they stretch behind the bone?  That could throw the joint off.  Do they not stretch?  That could throw off the proportion of the limb.  Do you take the most negative z value vertex influenced by the bone as the 0-stretch point and stretch out from there?  That might cause joint problems as well.  I don't have a good answer, I think you'd have to experiment to see which works best.

The trains are too convenient for me.  Start a vacation thread when you get back and let us know where you went.  My family's Venet, so we tend to stick to the north .

I always default the bones -179 to 179 to make sure there aren't any weird pathing issues, i.e. going the wrong way round to get there.  I'd personally prefer that as the default, but that's just me.  I'm not sure if that's even a problem anymore, though, as I never set "no limits".

Has anyone else noticed problems trying to select vertices on subdivision models with smooth shading enabled?  I find it works in wireframe mode but not smooth shading.

I'm also finding the non-uniform scale tool to be a bit erratic when only selecting vertices, particularly when trying to bind it to a specific axis.  I'm finding that it sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, and is consistently ignoring the xyz axis buttons.

I'm a pretty weak programmer, and of course haven't seen Anim8or's source code, but there are a few extra brains here at your disposal if you want any help if you want any help with the IK logic.  Just let us know what you need.

Getting nice-looking joints that work at all angles is the hard part of this game.  To start, I'd recommend minimizing the number of vertices right at the joint.  For the parts of your model that stay fairly static you can load up as much detail as your system can handle, but at the joints the fewer points you can get away with the easier your life becomes.

Another common issue with the shoulder (even amongst professionals) is to place too much emphasis on the upper arm bone, and not enough on the clavicle.  You will notice that if you keep your collar bone down you can't raise your upper arm  much more than parallel with the ground.  The same is true with your modelling: if you spread extremely high motions of the upper arm over both bones you will significantly lessen, but not entirely remove, the difficulty of getting uniform volume in the joint.

The last thing is to bias the shoulder opening on the body and the upper arm to favour a forward motion with the arm, since the arm rarely goes very far backwards.  I hope that makes sense, as it's a bit hard to describe.  Basically if your body was a rectangle and your arm was a rectangle coming out of the side, then where they meet the back vertices go out to the side more than the front vertices do, and you will keep more volume in the shoulder as the arm swings forward.

As I said, it's tricky but hopefully this will at least get you started.  And I, by no means, consider myself an expert on the subject.  There should be some tutorials out there on the web, somewhere, as this is a very common problem.