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[CoriDavis]

Yes! I am making a sequel!  I was sick of watching the ugly one I made as my first animation, and that run cycle that makes me cringe.  I just started work on a new one with new cycles.  My first animation was before I knew a lot about Anim8or, so I had a lot of things to fix up.

1. I didn't know how to merge faces and most of the objects were halves grouped together.
2. I went with the Robin tutorial and made every single bone of the skeleton a seperate object! Arg!
3. I had to touch up a few things, especially the skull. Some parts were SO messed up that I couldn't fix it without making it worse, so I just said "Whatever" and left it.

So after doing all that, I decided to skin my model. Except.... It's not turning out as accurate as it did the first time around.

As you can see in the attached image, the front hooves and tail pieces are detaching from each other.  Can someone tell me how to fix this?

Edit: Just figured it out. I needed to adjust some bone lengths. Well, now you all know what I'm up to.

[davdud101]

Lookin good so far, Cori. Kepp going!

[ADSohr]

Something you might want to try, rather than having everything be 100% weighted to one bone, is to have a progression of influence.  Like on the spine you have all but two ribs as red, so when you move the bone that controls the yellow ribs there will be a rather nasty looking gap in the ribs.  If you take the rib that is right at the joint and paint it 100%, the next one 90%, the one after that 83%, etc., you can get much smoother deformations.  On the jaw, you will need another bone in order to open the mouth. Have a joint go from the base of the head, to where the jaw would hinge, then another bone to where the jaw bends.  Usually it is better to have more control in animation. 

[CoriDavis]

Yeah, but the thing is, bones don't deform. They're solid things.  The spine doesn't move very much at all so the gap shouldn't be a problem. Also, I used a morph target to move the jaw. it works very smoothly as you can see if you clicked the full view GIF image.

I also have many more tricks up my sleeve. instead of making the individual trees like in my first video, I made a transmap of the trees and made many squares.  The trees may look a little flat, but it's not very noticable. Way more trees, far less polys.

I even added some Spanish Moss in there too.  I couldn't find any Alphas out there, so I got a picture and made my own. Also attached if anyone wants it.

[ADSohr]

If you have an entire rib painted as one influence then it won't bend.  So rib 1 = 100%, rib 2 = 90%, etc.  It will not bend the ribs, just move them less with one bone, the spine would curve as you rotated the yellow bone.  But if the spine does not move then there is nothing to worry about.

If I'm not mistaken, morph targets only work in a linear fashion, which means your jaw is shrinking and growing throughout it's rotation.

I notice the trees are all pointing the same direction,  all have the same branches, and all look exactly the same.  Most trees look very different form each other.  Also it looks like your texture is slightly stretched.

I know, I'm a bringer of bad news. 

[CoriDavis]

Yeah, I know.. I did rotate and resize both the trees in the alpha, and the polys I used to make the forest, but it doesn't seem to be making a difference I guess.

And about the bone influences, I didn't know that. I could never really figure out how to use the bone influences skinning in the first place, sorry.

As for the morphs, I thought it worked pretty well, I didn't notice any resizing at all.  I use them a lot, even for making swiveling cat ears.  With the exception of the unreliability of using them for eyelids, It seems to work just fine.