CompuServe Messages

No, it was just my system. I finally tracked it down last night. Now I'm at least back to where I was a week ago. I have been able to render my regular stuff at night, though. I know one could say that this was my fault, but in my own defense, I'd like to say I had an awful lot of help. About a week ago, I told you I was having problems with the relationship between the 3 dummy boxes and the ability of my skeleton to walk. So I took your advice and changed the position and orientation tolerances to what seemed to be a reasonable tweak considering the range of 0 to 9,999,999. Now I never saved anything I did to disk, so from my 3D Studio experience, I didn't think I was getting myself in too deep, and messing up the example files. Boy, was I wrong. Out of frustration, I sat here watching the interactive screen and moving my mouse, and watching nothing happen but screen flash. When a thought occurred to me that maybe the computer couldn't keep up with what I was asking it to do. Back to the manual, and I was able to find a somewhat obscure statement, in relation to its importance. "A lower value causes the orientation of the end effector to be more accurate, but may require more time to calculate. If you lower the tolerance value, you may need to raise the number of maximum iterations required." That's when it occurred to me that this thing (IK) is saving to disk, and no matter what you do, loading animation after animation, or even project files, it has no effect. Every file is going to be screwed up, unless you have the forethought or are aware enough to go in and doublecheck constantly. Now maybe I'm spoiled from 3 generations of excellent documentation (although I did say something to Jack about the indexing in R1). Later editions were of the highest quality. I would like to encourage those who did the IK documentation to perhaps redouble their efforts and perhaps come out with an interim edition. Considering the complexity of the topic, it seems as though a person of average intelligence could have more than just a few problems with these docs. Thank you for your effort. Earlier on, you mentioned that for a walking human, you would use paths. Are you creating your paths in 3D Studio or in Autocad? What I'm trying to accomplish is taking a Viewpoint skeleton, having him walk over, open the door, and get into a automobile. I've been working a lot with paths, without much success. You also mentioned that you wouldn't use the interactive screen to do keyframing. Is the only way to accomplish this with this version of IK to become a scripting guru? I'm really hoping I can work with this program interactively. I mean all the work since the Xerox lab days has been about trying to make the computer understand what the human's trying to tell it. Venturing off into programming kind of ventures off into a different mindset, don't you think?