CompuServe Messages

Lee, Thanks for the interest, but over the weekend, I got it all worked out. There was only one name for the mesh, "meta". All the bones are named meta(something) as in metaLjaw, metaUjaw, etc etc. I just scrapped my brilliant idea with the dupe jaw bone, and went in and put trianglular shaped boxes in. I'm still not real clear on why that didn't work. The sentence on page 5 of the Bones manual, in the adding bones paragraph, still is a bit unclear to me. "Since only the bones' bounding box is not taken into account, you should use very simple objects, such as boxes made with create/box in the 3D editor". Is that a misprint? Should it say that only the bones' bounding box "is" taken into account. This seems to be the way it behaves. I know I don't have to use "boxes", I have spheres and other odd shapes in the head that work ok. Anyway, I did a test render last night, and all bones (around 120 of em) worked just fine. I did however notice something that I wasn't expecting. I had at this point painted in some shading on the hands, arms, and legs to highlight the muscle tone. Once the object was animated, I noticed that whatever I had painted, had carried over onto the hidden geometry. Let's take one of the hands for example. I do some shadowing to highlight the tendons on the back of the hand. I see during the animation that this same shadowing appears on the back of the other hand, and the palms of both. I am thinking that maybe I am caught up in an "instance" rule? To make the limbs, I would sculp em out with the metaballs, then do a create/object/copy/selected. Then do a modify/object/mirror/selected on that copy to put the outside/inside correctly. You, know, so I wouldn't have a palm on the outside of one hand. I sat down in front of 3D Studio for the first time about 5 weeks ago, so I still don't know all the rules. If it's treating the copied limbs as an instance, I could understand the paint being applied to the back of the other hand. But, why the palms? If I try to paint a line in the middle of the forehead, Meshpaint want's to cover the whole head. If I resize the brush down, the paint still covers the whole (just the top of actually) head, only now it looks like the rings in a tree. It almost acts as if it is going to get paint on whatever is on the same elevation or plane as the spot I am trying to paint. If I try to paint in the shadows between the shoulders and the neck, I will see a perfect ring around the front, back, and outside of the shoulder. The ring will also carry over to the back of the object where the thighs are at that same elevation. I've checked pref's and have wraparound set to "none". Gee, sorry, didn't mean to carry on so. I'm expecting World Builder to hit the door any second now, so I want to wrap this creature session up. How bout that, my wife just this second, handed me WB. Anyway, any Meshpaint pointers will be greatly appreciated. I hope you can derive some idea of the problem from all that muddle up there. Thanks, Terry