#Help, Bones
6 messages in this thread
I have a few things happening that I don't understand. I am trying to put bones
in a charactor's face to get mouth and lip movement. The mouth is shaped kind
of like a beak, or a turtle's mouth. I originally had about ten bones in the
mouth and lips, trying to make the lips to a degree, independent of the jaw
bone. I could not get around the bones in the upper jaw influencing the tip of
the "beak" on the bottom jaw. So I had a great idea. I selected the faces in
the lower jaw and copied them out to a seperate object. Now I have an exact
duplicate of the mesh around the lower jaw. I 3D scaled it down a couple
percent and put it back inside the original jaw. Thinking this oughta be as
good a jaw bone as I can get, I name it metaLjaw and go to Bones. When I do a
visualize MIA, I get nothing, no red, no where. I'm also getting,"metaLjaw has
no bones data chunk". Why is this OH so perfect plan not working?
Before this I had bones in the ears linked to the skull, as was the original
jaw bone. Now, during render,I get a warning that metaears01 is not a valid
file name. ?!?!? Where'd that come from? Nothing in the jaw was directly
linked, or shared a name with the ear bones. I went back to an old save, and no
warning. I delete the jaw bone, and the warning appears during render. I am
clearing all data from bones and starting over after the delete.
And, when does 3DS decide to call a FLC and FLI. The first test render I did
was named Mouth. FLC. I kept going in and making minute changes to the bones
around the nose and mouth and rendering and rendering. I *thought* I was
writing over Mouth FLC each time, so *that's* what I was viewing each time. I
found out later that I was rendering to Mouth FLI now. THAT made me want to
climb something very high. Now I can't get a file with a FLC extension, makes
me wonder how I ever did.
Anybody, any ideas, I all ears.
Terry
I can't help with the bone thing, but the deal with a fli or flc is that a fli
has a resolution of 320 x 200, whereas a flc can be any resolution. So, if you
render at 320 x 200, you automatically get a fli extension, otherwise you get a
flc.
Hope that helps…
Matthew Samia
Matthew,
Thanks for the reply. I noticed this the other night when I went back to
rendering at 1024 x 768. I first thought that the FLC extension only came if I
used "default" for the config. But, I see what you say is true.
Thanks, Terry
Can you send me a breakdown of the names of the mesh parts and their associated
bones? I can probably help you with this problem but I need more info.
Feel free to send me the project file.
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