CompuServe Messages

What!? No Profound Principles providing scintilating splinatic performance? No rules that carve away hours, nay, weeks of arduous animation effort? …rats… In addition to the wireframe preview I've been using quick shade at full video resolution to preview character animation. I missed the fact that the arms were going thru the weight bar and the weights weren't following the arm path in the wire preview. Saw the problem on a quickshade render to the PAR. It was relatively quick, but I've only got one character, one object, and a floor in the animation so far <plus one texture map that is seen by only a small section of the screen>. Unrolling a map with bones sounds like a nightmare, next time make the pirate have his map in a laptop computer. :^) As far as adding nulls, it allows you to separate the motion of an object into more than one spline set. An object has 6 degrees of freedom …x,y,z, & rotation x,y,z <or H,P,B for Lightwave>. These motions are independent of each other but Lightwave ties them togather with its tension, bias, continuity spline controls. The keys remain independent but by using tension etc… to tune motion in the x, you can mess up the between key motion in the y, z, etc… and even the stretches. By adding a null as a parent to your object you can assign important motions to the null, handle the rest in the object, and the tension etc… adjustments in one won't affect the motions in the other. Another perhaps more important use is an addional null can help cut down on the confusion in character joint rotation <or so I've heard>. Bruce