Anim8or Community

Alpha2: I've updated the way these settings work in build 1382. See if they work better.

Okay so far IK handles no longer appear in renders unless you were last using the IK tool, so this at the very least makes me happy! They still appear when rendering an image or movie if you had the tool selected but, I guess I'll just have to remember to switch off of it before a render. A locked camera is locked period, yay! I tested by locking both together locking it's properties and individually placing it on a locked layer, scroll wheel or other accidental camera movement does not result in a key frame in either case, thank you!

While testing just now:
I ran across an instance when after a render the scene mode GUI became locked for lack of a better description. I couldn't scrub the timeline and the keyframe button was unresponsive. I escaped this frozen state by rendering an image after which it was fine. My theory in that moment was that maybe I'd tabbed out of a video render while typing this post and when the render was done it got stuck switching back to scene mode, but this seems not to be the case on a attempt to replicate. Might be nothing but thought I'd mention for the sake of thoroughness, and I'll keep trying to repete it.

Also, I don't know if it's ever been brought up: when rendering a range of frames, the Movie spec editor never seems to remember the first frame number even if it's just frame 0. It will remember the last frame, but you always have to re-enter the starting frame number otherwise you get the error "start frame: malformed number". It's not an issue if you always render all frames, just when doing a range. The video resolution also defaults back to 640 x 360  rather than the last resolution I entered for some reason despite the codec setting. If I recall it used to only default between sessions, but it's doing it after every render now.

Okay, so if I understand correctly, as long as I stay off of the rotation or IK manipulation tools when I render it should not reactivate then? This is probably what I needed to know to avoid complaining and rid me of the assumption that it was a bug. My apologies. I do very much appreciate your patience with me in explaining this. It makes the difference between flailing in frustration and directed towards growing with the program. It wasn't so much that I couldn't understand as it was that the time saver just bumped against the makeshift workflow I'd built up over the years.

Basically I wanted it to work a certain way because these are the first figures I've worked with for an extended length of time that have had any IK so I wasn't aware of the newer features tied to them. Up until the beginning of this year everything I'd done with Anim8or had been done with the Bone rotation tool.

Excellent.

...Okay so I've run into another bit of weird behavior, which I think I might be tied to why I was getting annoyed with the IK handles showing up in renders. I usually use scanline for simplicity, but today I had an image where the draw distance seemed to be cut off way too close (and I wasn't using fog,) so I was testing the other renderers to see if they extended the the draw distance in the image and after each image render I noticed the IK handle visibility kept getting toggled on when I returned to the scene mode. Every time I turned it off so it wouldn't show in the render, when I returned to the scene it was back on again.

Hope I'm not bugging you with all these.

That seems to have done it. thanks again.

On a side note I notice it still makes a keyframe on a locked layer camera if I use mouse wheel scroll in camera view. Not pressing, but I just noticed it now while testing 1381 and thought I'd let you know just in case.

Alpha2: if you enable "Show IK Controls" (hot key "I", or click on the lower IK button in the left-hand tool bar) then the IK handles are visible in both the working views and in the renders. If you disable it then they shouldn't appear in either.

Can you send me an example of the morph target issue?

Okay, in the video link you'll see:
-I demonstrate the morph on the "wacom tablet" object.
-In scene mode I show how the morph works on the model by adding a key frame which hides the tablet in the character's hand.
-I touch the arm and the tablet reverts to zero(visible) despite the key frame.
-The key frame is still active and the tablet shouldn't be appearing.
-I move the arm to show that it's still visible while animating.
-Scrubbing through the timeline for a frame causes the key to activate.
-But the tablet re-appears the moment I try to move the arm again.
-Also note that the "hover board" beneath the character wasn't there when I first entered scene mode because it was hidden until I tried to animate.

If I don't scrub the timeline they will appear in image renders and you can imagine when you have a character holding several items in preparation for later parts of a scene it gets hard to animate things like the fingers properly because so many elements keep popping into view despite being hidden, and they didn't have this behavior in earlier versions.

As for the IK handles: I understand that the button hides the handles. As I said, they do vanish when you manually hide them (by hitting the button), but I felt like the bones or even the axis that are visible outside of the body don't show in renders even when their buttons are active in scene mode so it stands out as odd that the IK handles show. Like I can understand the the camera is visible if you render in other views because usually that's the position you render from so you shouldn't see it in a shot normally, but all the other things seem to know to hide automatically when using the camera view.

Wish list seems to have been neglected lately. some of the features like IK have already been implemented and Some one suggested it should at least be moved to the 1.0 forum since .98 is pretty old now.
I wasn't even sure if I should post a suggestion in it... heck, even this thread is a little long in the tooth.

Thanks for the reply! I'm trying it now and this ...seems... to do the trick, for the time being at least. I still need to finish the hands on this model and test poses before I can really decide.

In earlier versions, when I create a model I was usually okay with the default size of the bones until I get to doing hands and fingers at which point I'd just adjust the length, diameter and limits as I created them because you need to be so fine with placing them inside the digits to avoid them looking like they were mangled when you bend a finger. I feel like having the bones connected directly at the ends made positioning them a little more precise. Less visual clutter to see exactly where the pivot points were inside the figure. The spheres seem do make it easy to grab and manipulate larger limbs in scene mode, like it's an easier target to click than the bone itself somehow, so that's a plus.

I see some merit in this method of adjusting the bones in figure mode. It's fast and depending on how you make characters it could increase work speed, but I'm not fully on board yet. It's hard to explain, but I feel like the rolling and twisting the axis discs do as I move the bone forces me to have to reposition everything and makes me hesitant to use it.

I was tinkering with OBS for streaming my 2D art on Twitch for a bit and I thought about potentially streaming some Anim8or sessions. But I couldn't get OBS studio to play nice with the software. Normally I'd use the "Window capture" mode and have it to just display a single application's window, but with Anim8or the best I can do is get it to see the user interface, it ignores the actual 3D portion of the screen or just duplicates the interface inside the area where the 3D would be. I can get it to broadcast Anim8or if I use Screen capture mode which copies the whole screen regardless of software, but that seems to be more hardware intensive and actually causes my Laptop to overheat not to mention I risk showing information I don't want to accidentally since screen capture shows anything/everything that appears on my screen and not just an application's window.

Anyone have any experience with OBS and Anim8or together? I noticed there was a Twitch channel devoted to it and followed, but it hasn't been very active.

Also for reference: I'm using Win 7 and the most recent release of OBS studio.