CompuServe Messages

Gary, >> I'm trying to do a ribbon coming in from off-screen – sort of "snaking" its way behind a logo, and then bend its way into its final shape. << thanks for refreshing my memory on the original project. Now I remember it, I think it'd be faster in skin, because you'd loft a ribbon, slice up the sections, have one be the leader and the copy/tracks to all the other objects following and offset them in time. You could do some pretty elaborate moves and because they are splines you'd have LESS objects than you'd need with the bones approach, IMHO. I just tried this and in 10 minutes I had a 10 slice ribbon doing really fancy moves (a triple loop helix) with very smooth curves. If the path is elaborate I think the bones approach would require a huge number of bones to get a smooth move and every time you make a change to the animation you'd have to go back to the bones dialog and save the data again. With skin, when you make a change you can render right away. In Mike's dinosaur example, bones wins easily. I can't say this with a great deal of certainty, but it's my gut feeling. It's nice to have both and this one sounds like a good one for skin. However, if you only can afford to buy one I think you'd get more use out of Bones Pro and could use it for this project.