lock mode AM's ik setup is unique in that it is always on unless you tell it otherwise, and it doesn't require an effector or upvector handle to work. when you get used to it, its a powerful way of working, but sometimes it can be cumbersome to manipulate. It's similar in feel to posing a plasticine character using only one finger; if your gentle you can get the skeleton to pose the way you want, but if you push it too hard it'll quickly go out of whack. For example, here's a typical 3 bone arm chain. [pic] Without any extra effort, you have a pretty useable setup. Rotating the hand bone will just rotate the hand, but as you start rotating it beyond it's limits, it'll pull the rest of the arm along with it, like an IK chain should. Same goes for the rest of the chain, however the higher you go, the more sensitive the chain becomes. If you rotate the bicep or forearm too much, the arm will twist itself into all sorts of bizarre shapes. I found myself doing this a lot when I first used AM, which was unfortunate because it seems to make AM unstable. So how do you avoid this? For a temporary override, use the rotate manipulator (R). It will put the chain into FK mode, allowing you to make quick corrections, and as soon as you turn off the manipulator, the chain will go back into IK mode. If you need a bone to stay in FK for an extended period, use lock mode. I'd say this is one of the most useful features of AM apart from setting keyframes, so I have it bound to the backtick key (`), where I can easily turn it on and off. Lock mode is a bit of a bad name, it really should be named 'toggle IK', as that's what it really does. For example, generally in the aforementioned arm setup, you want to pose the bicep and forearm freely, but you want to pose the hands seperately without affecting the rest of the arm. Quickest way to do this is to select the hand bone, toggle lock mode, and now you can push and pull on it all you want, and it won't move the rest of the chain. There is another way of doing this that's quite popular, which is to turn off 'attach to parent' in the bones options [pic]. This works fine, but I prefer lock mode for several reasons: -if the hand is not attached, you can pull the hand away from the forearm accidentally, which you don't always want -if you want to constrain the arm to something else (another character for example), you can't constrain the hand directly, because again only the hand will move, leaving the arm behind. This too can be worked around by constraing the forearm as well as the hand, but the motion tends not to look quite right. -it's a 'permanent' change, whereas lock mode can be easily toggled. ik, advantages, disadvantages -comparison to upvector/effector system in soft/maya As mentioned, AM's IK system is unique. It's closest comparison is biped in max, that is a hybrid IK/FK system. What's nice about AM's IK system is that you can set it up to emulate the more 'traditional' IK setup of packages like softimage or maya, and be able to override it at any time. Upvectors and Effectors First, a little back-story. While IK in it's purest sense means a system where you can move child bones in a hierachy and have the parents follow, normally it also implies a system where the child can move entirely independant of the rest of the hierachy, and expect the rest of the system to follow it. In other packages, this 'totally independant' child is called an effector, if you read any softimage or maya docs you'll see this term crop up a lot. Normally the effector isn't constrained to anything, meaning that you can position it somewhere in space, and the chain of bones will touch it if it can, but if it can't reach, it'll point at it as best it can. (example pics) The other thing is an upvector. With an IK chain, if the effector falls within reach of the chain, the chain may be able to find many ways to touch it. Most of the time, this is undesirable. An example is an arm reaching for a door handle. Normally, you'd expect most of the arm to be pointing down, with the elbow facing the floor, however an IK chian doesn't know this, and could easily have the elbow facing up, bending in reverse, poking through the body... anything but what you want it to do. Enter upvectors. An upvector give an IK chain clues as to the best way to bend. In soft/maya, it's a null or handle that sit's halfway between the top of the chain and the effector, and indicates a plane you want the bones to try and stay in. This makes more sense with an example. If you touch the top of your head with your hand, chances are your elbow is pointing out to the side. In that case, the 'plane' of the chain is left-to-right, and up-and-down. You could rotate this plane to face forward-and-back, in whcih case your elbow could be facing in front of you, or rotate it 180o, in wiich case your elbow is now facing somewhere out your back (if you're that flexible!) [pic]. Upvectors are an important part of any IK system. (www.animfound.com has a tutorial with videos on this, take a look) Doing the same in AM Using AM's powerful constraint system, you can create the same setup. First, you'll need an effector. You can use anything as an effector (even another character), but generally people use another bone, or a null. Create a null, position it near the end of the chain, then select the last bone in the chain, create a kinematic constraint, and select the null. Now you can move the null, and the chain will try and point at it, and you can even move the parent of the chian, and the rest of the chain will rotate and shift to keep pointing at the null. To add the upvector constraint, create another null, and this time select the first bone in the chain, add an 'aim at' constraint, and select the new null. This now gives the IK chain more information about how best to reach the effector. You'll see that you can move the upvector constraint, and the chain will rotate around to try and point the elbow in that direction, but still try and reach/touch the effector. Why would you want to do this? Chicken dance for example, or a scared character, or pivoting on feet for a sports move. Its a very important control for a fully expressive character. pws -blue bars probably the most annoying part of the AM interface, they're confusing as hell and serve no purpose that i can see. They seem to control the 'used' key range of an object. If you want an object to appear in your cho for 30 seconds, even if you haven't set keys for that long, you drag it's blue bar out for 30 seconds. What is annoying about this is it's behavoir when you set keys _outside_ the range of the blue bars. You'd assume the object would dissapear, instead it goes back to it's the center of the world space, generally blocking the camera, other objects, lights, and making a nusance of itself. This is doubly annoying when it happens to cameras and lights; you won't notice anything changing in your viewport view, but if you set it to render, lights will suddenly move, camera views will change, and you'll yet again scream at hash for such a weird feature. Other oddities is that it can put multiple blue bars on the same object, seperate by empty spaces, even though there are keyframes in there. There's no way to delete these extra rogue bars, and worse, sometimes they'll just expand themselves to the maximum lenght of a cho (360000 frames), and because the frame slider width is linked directly to the cho's blue bars, the slider will often reduce itself to a sliver, even though the part of the cho you're working on may only be 30 frames long. (lots of example pics here) Anyways, the longer-than-needed blue bars are mildy annoying, but the shorter-than-needed bars can do crazy stuff to your render, so rather than do what I've been doing for ages (seleting each individual bar and lengthening them), there's a quicker way; drag a bounding box that starts above the bars in question, and away from any keyframes, and ends below and away from keyframes. The horizontal position needs to start about 1/4 from the beginning, and end past the end of them. You'll then get a bounding box that will only affect the blue bar ranges, but leave your keys alone. Be careful though, if you do this wrong you'll start scaling your keys, which you don't want! Update: Seems I've not been able to get this to work since I wrote it down here, instead just shift-click each blue bar until you have them all selected, then scale them out. Red bars -order is important (lower = override, reverse of layers in photoshop) The red bars are your actions, similar to bars of video in a non linear editor like premiere. Having the properties panel open while manipulating the red bars will make understanding what you're doing a little easier. click once on the red bar, and you'll select the entire action. if you drag it left and right, you're moving it's start and end points similtaneously, ie, you're sliding it back and forth in time. If you grab one of the handles at either end, you're scaling it's overall playback time. Pulling the end handle towrads the starting handle is speeding up the action, while pulling it the other way is lengthening the action. The pink bar that sometimes follows the action bars shows that that action has 'hold last frame' checked. It just means that the character will stay frozen on the last keyframe of the action, rather than snapping back to whatever pose it was in before the action started. This can be very important for layering actions. Things to watch when using actions: -Actions have an extra channel that is usually hidden, called the ease channel. It's like the jog shuttle on a vcr, it determines the direction and speed the action plays back over time. AM sets up a default ease of 0 to 100% for the length of the action range, which will update as you move the action, but it is immediately overridden once you set an ease key, and the ease will _not_ move with the action bar. This means that the action will suddenly seem to stop working. All that's happeing is the ease channel has the action on permanent pause, so you need to add a ease channel key of %100 at the end of the action range, and any other keys in between to control how it plays. -AM uses spline interpolation by default on ease channels, so if you have lipsync, it can drift out of time unless you change interpolation to linear -Note that setting negative ease values doesn't work predictably. Ideally it should lock the action to frame 0, but it often doesn't. Another good reason to switch to linear interpolation for most action ease channels, it avoids spline interpolation overshooting past zero. -Action ease serves an extra purpose when using actions with stride length that are moving along a path. It controls what frame of the walk cycle the character starts or ends on. ie, if a character needs to end a walk with their left foot forward, get to the frame where the character is at the end of the path, adjust the ease slider so that his left foot is forward, the walk cycle will now be offset to suit. note that you can only set the starting pose or the ending pose; for AM to do both would force the character to start sliding. -transitions must be staggered and directly beneath each other, otherwise use cross blend AM has a powerful non-linear editor, that is poorly explained in the manual. You can do blending, transitions, and additios of skeletal animation, most of the time it works quite well. transitions are the easiest to do, and most useful. say you have a character you want to go from a walk to a run. drag the walk cycle action onto the characters shortcut first, followeed by the run. notice that AM will put the run cycle beneath the walk cycle, and after it. this gives you clues as to how AM order of precedence works; if you have two actions that aren't set to blend, the one that's lowest will win. To setup the transition, select the first action, go to its properties, make sure 'hold last frame' is off, and turn on 'transition to next action'. you won't see any change, because AM's transitions only work where there's a gap between actions. Select the run cycle, and drag it away from the walk cycle, you'll see a half red half pink rectangle appear between the two actions. as you scrub past it you'll see AM interpolates from the last frame of the first action to the first frame of the next action. (pics here). Because AM does a straight spline interpolation, it's best if you keep the transition short (under 10 frames), otherwise the transition will be too obvious. Don't make the mistake of pulling the 2nd action 'into' the 1st rather than away from it, in this case the 2nd action will immediately override the 1st and you'll see a snap when it kicks in. To make that last type of transition work, you use a cross-blend. Again, say you have a long action that you like, but you need to insert something in the middle. You can create the insert as another action, drag it onto the character in the cho, position it where you need it to be. Select the first action, go to it's blending tab, and select cross blend. A percentage slider will pop up. 0% will be the first action by itself, and 100% is the 2nd action by iself. To do the transition, create a key at 0% at the start of the 2nd action, a few frames later key at 100%, then towards the end of the insert make another key at 100%, then at the end of the insert create a final key of 0%. For doing small corrections to actions, the 'add' mode is handy. An example is adding a scared shake to a character that has already been animated. Rather than cluttering your original action with lots of keys that would be difficult to edit later on, create a new action that just has the limbs and body vibrating. You can then drag this action onto your character, move it so that it overlaps the original motion, select it's blending mode tab, and set it to 'add'. It will then overlay the original motion while keeping it intact, very handy. There are some things to watch out for (like constraints) that I'll explain later. -note that muscle motion doesn't blend a big disadvantage of action blending is that it only blends skeletal motion properly. muscle motion will be added, often with disasterous resulsts. Say you have a pose which opens the eyes. if you have it at 100% (full open) for 2 actions, and you attempt to transition between them, AM won't interpolate the pose value during the transition, instead it will simple add them, thus setting your eye blink to 200% during the transition, looking really really weird. The only way to get around this is to only do skeletal motion in your actions, and do all your poses in the cho, or make sure each action has its own range of sliders that it uses; one action for lipsync, another for eyes, that way they'll never overlap between actions. Note that skeletal pose motion will transition fine. update: sometimes you can use this to your advantage. if you need a muscle pose to hit greater than %100, create another action that has the same slider keyed, but to a lesser value (say %20), when you overlay the two together you'll be 'overdriving' the pose. Creating two actions is a bit convoluted though, it's easer to add the extra pose as a cho action. -scaling key ranges, going to non-integer values scaling keys in AM is a big problem at the moment. it's easy to do, but the results are best avoidided. To scale keys, simply drag a bounding box around them, then drag one of the handles at either end of the boudnign box. The problem is that AM will scale keys into non-integer values, which makes editing them inordinately difficult. The frame slider is stuck on integer values, and it's not easy to pull the fraction keys back onto whole keys. The 'move frames' dialog is supposed to be able to fix this, but it works intermittently, so generally you're better off not moving keys at all. In case you do however, this is how the move frames dialog is supposed to work: -select the mode you want (trs), and the bone level (bone, branch, object), select the bone/object in question, and choose edit->move frames. -set the start and end values to the range in question, make sure scale is at 100%, and check 'integers'. -AM _should_ pull the keys back on to whole frames, but often won't... if that doesn't work, the only thing you can do is open up the channel view, select keys, and manually type in whole frame values into the properties. you don't want to be doing this for lots of keys, believe me! update: I've been using the move frames dialog a bit more lately, and it works fine. It's still not as clear as it could be, but it definitely works. [need a mini-tut on move frames here....] spherical limits, avoiding and why In my opinion, spherical and euler limits are more a hinderance than a help. Spherical limits are hard to figure out, and euler limits will often get in the way of your characters movement. Euler limits are ok for mechanical objects that need their movment strictly limited (telescoping objects, vehicle controls etc), but for characters you're better off using a good effector/upvector system, and eyeballing your character. A lot of times you may need to pose your character in a way that it anotomically shouldn't be capable of, but needs to be done in order to look correct from the camera's point of view. In these situations, you don't need limits stopping you from hitting those poses. No matter how wide you set a characters limits, you'll _always_ hit some position where you need it to move just a little further. turning grid off for interface speed hash's interface isn't as slow as you think it is. It can handle dense spline objects just fine, but what it hates is drawing splines over splines. Surprisingly, the object that causes the most slowdown in terms of drawing lines-over-lines is the default grid itself! For certain scenes, you can almost double your frame rate just by turning the grid off. Thankfully there's a shortcut already bound for doing this, shift-3 toggles the grid. turning off as many things as poissible in the cho Of course, the more you can turn off the better. Lights also slow down hash a lot, and most times once you set them up you don't touch them, so you may as well set them invisible. Select the light, and in it's properties turn both solid and wireframe buttons off. Same goes for any other objects you don't need to see; select them and turn off their wireframe and solid boxes. For the camera, turn off the 'camera visible' option, it takes off the pink border. The boudnign box mode is quite good to for speedy display; it will draw a bonding box around each bone and it's cp range. If you have a well segmented object, you may even be able to animate it completely in this mode. I believe the old animatied 'running man' gif from 3dark was done this way. Proxy models are also good for speeding up redraw, and are easy to create. Make sure your model is saved externally (always a good idea, it seems to make AM a bit more stable), find the model using your normal file browser, and make a copy of it. rename the copy '[modelname]-proxy'. Import the model into AM, and then tear apart the splines until you get a low res-non-textured version of your original character. To swap between the proxy and hero models in a cho, select the shortcut, and on it's properties open the drop down box, and select the other model. Easy. rotate and trasnslate manipulators, when to use The 'advanced' rotate/scale/translate manipulators are very useful, the rotate one moreso. As mentioned earlier, it allows you to temporarily disable Ik for a chain, and it also allows you to rotate objects in purely x y or z, or freely rotate them with a trackball style interface. Selcting the red green or blue handles rotates purely in a single axis, while dragging anywere else within the sphere rotates freely, but with more control than just dragging the bone directly. update: prior to 8.0m(?) the rotate manipulator wouldn't update properly if the bone it was rotating translated beneath it. You'd need to tap R twice quickly to make it work correctly. It was a cunning bug in that it updated visually, but the actual center-of-rotation wouldn't move. The translate manipulator is semi-useful, but generally you get the same results from using the 123 shortcuts (constrain to xyz respectively). The scale manipulator is handy, allowing you to do linear scaling in 2 axis. If you want to proportianlly scale in x and y for example, rotate the view until you see the red/green handle midway down the edges of the scaling box, hold down shift, and drag it. animate mode, very useful! of the things i missed most from max was the 'animate' mode, that allows you to either set implicit keys the way AM does, or just move things globally, adding offsets to all keys at once. As it turns out AM DOES have this function, it's just well hidden. On an objects properties, there's a checkbox for 'animate mode'. If you turn this off, any changes you make are applied equally to all keys for that object. Why would you need this? Say you have an object that needs to centered on screen, but it has a pose motion that means it starts small, and ends up in a fully extended pose. You can key the pose slider as you normally would, then turn off animate mode, go to the frame where it's fully extended, and drag the object into place. Offsets will have been added to all position keys equally, so it should hit it's mark exactly [launch sequence screen dropdown example pics] dope sheet for breakdown (now for full speech too) the dopesheet is a nice feature. i don't like the way the auto-breakdown tools convert words into poses, but it's still a useuful visual aid for analying sound. Create a new action, and drag the sound you'll be using onto the action. Right click the action and choose new dopesheet. Right click the dopesheet and choose 'add dialog'. Type the sentence that your character is saying. When you're done, AM will create bars (similar to action bars) for each word, rougly sized according to the length of each. If you click on a word, you'll hear AM play the section of sound that it's length covers. You can then drag it left and right, or drag it's side handles to resize it into the correct area of sound for that word. As you do this, AM will loop the start or end of the word your editing allowign you to easily recognise where the word starts or stops. Do this for all the words, and you now have a nice visual breakdown of your sound. To use the breakdown feature, first make sure you character has the preston mouth shape set created for it (a set I personally don't use, so I can't really use this feature), then right click each word and select 'break down'. AM will consult it's dictonary of words and add the poses in sequence it need s to create the word. Do thsi for each word, and you'll get a roughly blocked out lipsync of your speech. I still think doing it by hand using a limited set of poses (explained in that other tut) gets better results though, and it's normally faster, and less complicated... adjusing sound using gui tools you can adjust sound in an action the same way you adjust actions. You can slide it back and forth to change it's total playing range, and trim the start and end by dragging on the left and right handles. This is a mroe intuitive way to trim a sound because AM will loop that point of the sound your dragging allowig you to hear where your're trimming. using new timeline-doesnt-hold-focus behavior with copy/paste Early in the Am2000 betas hash fixed a bug that allows me to work a lot more efficiently; previously if you clicked in the pws timeline area, it would also grab keyboard focus, meaning that your keyboard shortcuts (including copy paste) wouldn't work. It now doesn't do this, which makes copying and pasting keys very easy. To insert a double-key hold for example: -get your selection mode into the right state (translate rotate scale, bone branch object) -select the thing you interested in, move your cursor to the pws timeline, drag the time cursor to the start of the hold, hit ctrl-c -drag the slider one frame forward, ctrl-v -quickly drag the slider to the end of the hold (say 10 frames ahead), ctrl-v -drage forward one more frame, ctrl-v again working this way allows you to set double key holds very quickly for many objects at a time; as well as quickly retime motions by copying a value in between keyframes, and pasting it closer to either one of the keys surronding it, similar to ed's timing tut (find it at sherwoods forest), but all directly in the pws view. [video example] simple key setup for blinks i've got a simple keyframe 'recipie' for doing blinks, looks pretty good to me, thought i'd share it: -start of blink, double key the eye open pose (100%) -very next frame, 0% -2 frames later, double key 100% again for a quick double blink, i use -start of blink, double key 100% -next frame, 0% -2 frames later, 100% -next frame, 0% -2 frames later, double key 100% for a double-take style of blink, shift the middle key and hold the shut pose for longer, so that you have -start of blink, doubel key 100% -2 frames later, double key 0% -next frame, double key 100% for that pixar style of blink, setup seperate sliders for the left and right eyes, and also for the last double key, seperate the double key by 1 or 2 frames, that way the eyelid overshoots slightly before settling down again, watch buzz in toy story 1, he does this a lot. update: The more I animate, the more I twiddle with the timings on my blinks. And I thought I'd found a solid never-let-me-down rule for character animation... ;) Of late I'm tending to leave a single frame space between the open to shut keys, and maybe two frame for the opening again, and maybe up to 4 frames for an overshoot between the final double key. decals off for speed decals also slow down the view a lot, if you can get by without them, disable them. Options->rendering->realtime, check 'all views', and turn off 'show decals'. it's also good practice to turn off 'show back facing polys'. Although the final render always renders patches double sided, thigns like particels and collisions rely on the normals direction, so by turning off this option, you'll instantly see when objects aren't aligned properly, and you'll be compelled to fix them. update: there's now a keyboard shortcut to toggle this, ctrl-/ I think XCV shortcuts for translate/scale/rptate and bone/branch/object because of the way i use double keys and the copy-paste method using the timeline to create them, I'm often changing filter modes for keyframe operations. By this, i'm referring to the row of toggle buttons next to the default frame slider. These buttons affect what information is copied and pasted, as well as what gets affected by the move frames dialog. They're pretty self explanitory; the translate/rotate/scale buttons toggle whether trs information is copied and pasted, note that they're not exclusive, so you can have both translate and rotate on, but not scale, or just rotate, or all 3 turned on. The key bone/branch/object mode affects how much of a chain's information is copied and pasted. If you're working with an arm, if you select the forearm and are in 'key bone', you'll only copy information from the forearm. If you're in 'key branch' mode, you'll copy information from the forearm, hand, and fingers, if they have channel information. And if you're in 'key object' mode, it will copy keyframe information from the entire object, including anything not in that bones chain, liek the head, other arm, legs and torso. because i change these filter modes so often, i've bound shortcuts to them: x = key translate c = key rotate v = key scale shift-x = key bone shift-c = key branch shift-v = key bone the other filter modes (muscle, etc, pose) aren't as useful, so I don't bind these. creating a big slider i've always found the default slider too small, turns out you can actually make a larger one (thanks to noel(??) at hash for this) Go to options->customise, select toolbars hit new, name the new toolbar 'bigslider' go to the commands tab, select frame drag the slider from the collection into the blank toolbar now the tricky bit; if you move your mouse over to the right edge of the slider (not the toolbar, the slider), the cursor will change to a resizing handle. Click and drag to expand the slider. To make it full length, you need to butt the left edge of the toolbar just off the screen, and drag the right slider edge as far as it'll go. You can now dock this to tbe bottom of your screen. You can delete the smaller original slider if you like, but I prefer to have both, one for fine movements, the other for larger movements. dissapearing bones, hiding bones (in poses), controlling bones handy thing I learnt from the hash tapes is that poses also store bone view modes, even though there's no channel for that data. This means that if you have a character that has lots of bones you won't touch until you get to yoru final pass of animation, you can just hide them, savign you the frustration of trying to not select them, as well as speeding up viewport redraw (less lines on screen = faster interface). to do this, create a 'hide bones' pose, select a bone you want to hide, and in it's properties select 'override default bones mode', and turn on 'hide bone'. if you don't need to see the geometry associated with the bone (say it's a tongue bone for example, and you don't wanna see the tounge while you're animating the the basic movements), also turn off the wireframe and shaded mode buttons. Do the same for the rest of the bones you don't want to see, then when you're animating, just turn the pose up to 100%. A slightly annoying part of this setup is that turning the slider back to 0% doesn't turn the bones back on again; once you touch the pose, that's it, those bones are off permanently. Well not really; you can actually turn them back on quite easily by deleting that pose from your action/cho. It's not elegant, but it works, and is faster than turning bones on and off by hand. A variation on the above trick is to turn off geometry you don't need to see, leaving just bones. If you see footage of pixar's in software as used during toy story, you'll noticed they use this 'exposed skeleton with hands' view a lot [pic of setup in AM, and screen grab from toy story video] update: moving bones/poses that move bones will generally override the hide bones pose, to fix it you need to delete the hide bones pose, then reapply it. tab for selecting interesecting spline, child bone/parent bone AM's default behavior for selecting object/bones in the viewport isn't optimal; because there's no way to make bones or object unselectable (apart from hiding them completely) often means you'll furiously click away at a bone, and select everything BUT that bone. More often than not though, you'll be selecting bones that exist close together in a heirachy, flipping back and forth repeatedly (bicep - forearm - hand - foream - hand - bicep etc..). A quick way to change selection this way is to use the tab key; tab will select the child of the current bone, shift-tab selects the parent. Sometimes this falls down if you have a branching heirachy (like going from hands to fingers, or bicep to spine), but mostly it works well. Mostly. The shortcut works similarly when modelling; often you'll want to select a spline, but whenever you click the cp you're interested in you select the spline that intersects at 90o the one you want. If you hit tab, AM will cycle through the splines that meet that cp. update: tab is also meant to cycle through all the objects that were beneath your last mouse click, it works fine. Strangely I've not had problems with AM doing one tab behavior or the other, it just seems to _know_.... attach cameras to characters This is a common technique used in a lot of packages. Generally when animating characters you'll do the body movements first, and animate the face last. This can be difficult to do though if the character is moving around a lot, forcing you to constantly update your viewport orientation. An easier way it to create a new camera, and translate/orient-like it to your characters head bone. That way you can just hit '1' on the number pad a few times to cycle views to your character. I've skipped some steps though, so here's the full sequence: -create a new camera -right click the camera, new->constraint, translate to, select your character, then select it's head bone from the dropdown box in properties -doing this will snap the camera right inside the head of your character, so change to a top view, select the camera, and while holding down 3 (constrain to z-axis, the direction the camera looks at), pull it back so that it's a reasonable distance away. -right click the camera, new->constraint, orient like, select your characters head bone. -things will look _very_ wrong, easiest to fix by typing in values. x=0, y=-180, z=0. You should now be able to switch to the camera and see your characters face. You can adjust position through the camera by going into pan/orbit view mode, and hold down control (pan) or shift (zoom) to adjust the view. This isn't limited to just faces however. You could constrain the camera to the root of an object, or just the hands, or the torso, so that you have as much control as needed. You could even bind multiple cameras for top, front and right views, so you never lose your character again. You'll probably want to hide all those cameras, as the pink lines that denote the view frustrum tend to slow the viewport a lot. Another nice feature of this is that if you're working with multiple characters of similar proportions, you can just change the constraints target, and the cameras will flick to the new character, keeping all the offsets you created earlier. If you wanted to get _really_ tricky, you could [create the cameras in an empty object/] bind all the cameras to a null, and just constrain the null to the character, thus requiring you to only bind the null to the character, rather than 5 seperate cameras. blending materiasl and decals although it's not as easy as it could be, it's quite possible to mask materials as applied to an object using decals, and vice versa. It just requires an understanding of how 'empty' material properties and alpha channels of decals interact. Texture properties apply in a set order; decals always override materials, and materials always override object properties. However there are ways to create 'holes' in decals and materials so that whatever is beneath them can be seen. If you create a new material, and apply it to an object without changing any properties, the objects surface will remain unchanged. If you stack seperate materials, or even attributes within the one material, anything you don't touch will become a 'hole' showing either the material beneath it, or the object properties beneath that. With decals, the alpha component of a colour map determines what will show through or not. With this in mind, you can use some creative layering to mix textures. For example, say you wanted a printed circuit board with pulses of electricity moving along the traces. For the pulses, the easiest way to animate them is to use an animated material, made up of fine lines. A perlin noise or spherical combiner is perfect for this. Using a black and a bright blue/green, change settings until you have sharp thin bright lines on a black background. Apply this to your model. Now create a panel decal in photoshop, but when you do so, copy the basic line pattern into the alpha channel. Anything that is white will be solid, anythign black will be transparent. When you apply this to your model, the black lines of the alpha will be transparent, thus allowing the 'pulse' material behind to show through. Assign a glow to the material, and animate it, and you're set! To get the reverse effect, simply invert the alpha channel in photoshop. using rotoscopes for simple compositing Rendering in layers and compositing afterwards is probably one of the best ways to cut down on render time, as well as allow you flexibility to quickly change elements of a shot with minimal effort. AM's rotoscopes work fantastically as compositing tools, as most of the time your composites are usually little more than sequence A over sequence B, using an alpha channel as a mask. To do this, render your foreground elements with alpha as an tga sequence, then either render your moving background elements, or just have your still background image ready. Open a new cho, right click the camera, new->rotoscope. Select your background element. Create another rotoscope, find your image sequence, be sure to check the 'image sequence' box. The quickdraw display should use the alpha to give you a rough comp. Click the render to file button, select the correct dimensions, turn on flat shading, turn off filtering and oversampling if you rendered your fg and bg elements at the same rez as yoru final render, and render away. AM is pretty quick at compositing, on my PIII650 it can do maybe 5 seconds a frame with 3 D1 PAL elements. Unfortunately, particles and alpha channels don't agree with AM's compsiting methods, (tend to halo and fringe), so you'll need to comp them in after effects or similar. -black bars over renders/flickering objects = not visible objects in PWS Make sure you set all your objects to visible and smooth shaded, even if you've got their active channel turned off, otherwise they'll flicker randomly in your final render, which is HIGHLY annoying. -don't use 'clear constraints with pose', creates too many channels, clutters the PWS If your fancy shmantz IK setup involves 300 bones ala some of raf's extravaganza's, you really don't want to put that pose into the 'clear constraints with pose' dropdown! Doing so will mean that all those bones you've set keys on in the pose will get their own channel, filling up your PWS with channels you've never edit. However if you drag that pose to %100 instead, all those channels stay hidden behind the pose, so you don't have to see them. Ideally, 'clear constraints with pose' shoudl give you an option to be activated by channels or by poses, but until that feature slips in, just drag the pose slider to %100, and save yourself some PWS scrolling effort. -right click doesn't always work properly (brings up stupid docked tools menu instead) Ugh, this bothers me a lot... if you right click in empty space in the pws, or if you right-click it when it's not ready to receive focus, AM brings up the toolbar selection menu instead, which is utterly useless. Don't be confused when this happens, just curse stupid microsoft MFC behavior, click somewhere else, then try bringing up the menu again. A better option is to left click the entry you're interested in first, then right click, however if you left click twice within 2 seconds, AM thinks you want to rename the current item, and changes the display accordingly... annoying! -rake lights to bring out surface detail (engine panel detail on that model) i read in a maya manual somewhere that bump maps have an ideal angle of 30 degrees to the camera, and 30 degrees to a light. This ideal setup isn't always achievable, however it's simple to just rake lights close to the surface of a model. The falloff area on klieg lights also looks swish when hitting a surface at a shallow surface, much more intersting than hitting it dead-on. -photoshop actions and batching for processing frames (add alpha, glows etc) If you have photoshop, you can do lots of groovy things to image sequences, especially if you've rendered an alpha channel as well. Find the book 'photoshop channel chops', filled with great tricks, and they work even better when used in an action to a range of images. -delete first key, then last key to quickly fix a misplaced initial key Often I'll be on frame 600, add an object, then move it, only to realize that it's now got a slooow drift from wherever it was added, to where I dragged it at frame 600. Easiest way to correct it is to select the object, go to frame 0, delete it's translation/rotation keys (you won't see it delete at first, but if you update you'll see that AM actually copies the very next keyframe to frame 0), then you can delete the end key you don't need. If the object needs to stay put, also turn off animate mode. -sing axogons virtues to the heaveans, everyone must have this Yes, it looks ugly, yes it's free, yes it's poorly documented, yes it's made by those darn ruskies (kidding!), but it's great if you can't get access to after effects. You can fix the ugliness by setting it's display fonts to a more reasonable MS Arial, thus bringing it up to speed with the rest of the win32 world, but the documentation side can't be worked around apart from just playing with it. Actually, now that I think about it, it works kindasorta to the action blender in AM; you add tracks from top to bottom, the lowest track having precedence. Actually, it gets a bit wierder than that, but it's really not that hard to use (I'd wager it's easier than AE!), it's fast to work with, and has a pretty speedy render. Quick example, to do a comp of two layers with an alpha channel, you drage the background into layer 1, forground into layer 2, then a compositor effect into layer 3. Double click the effect layer, set it's sources to layers 1 and 2, and the alpha to come from layer 2 too. Hit ok, and there's your comp. It also comes with good chromakey tools, lumakey, audio support, masks, titles, RGB switching, colour correction, and a bunch of other stuff. Probably the best feature is the 'find files' dialog. It has a folder listing on the left, and a preview window on the right, and will open up just about any image, video, or audio format you throw at it, instantly, in the preview window. This also includes image sequences, which are conveniently disaplyed as 'filename[0-340].tga' in the folder window (this can be turned off), and can be scrubbed through. If they just sold the file browser on it's own, I'd buy it. Add a compositor too, and it's too good to pass up. I heard recently that they no longer offer the free version on their site, which is a bummer. It should be floating around shareware archives though, it's really worth finding. -upload that funky hose setup, show examples Nothing special really, set of unchained bones on a path constraint at various percentages, with all of them set to orient-like the first to stop it twisting out of control. You then hide all the bones, give the path maybe 4 points, add controller bones over each of these points, and you have a pretty solid bendy hose setup. -dual monitors, yes you need them Having your PWS and timeline full-screen is a pleasure that I'm sure is illegal in a few states. It's almost wrong, I can't animate at home anymore because I find working with a single screen too constricting. I'm sure you have a spare crappy 2mb non-accelerrated vid card lying about somewhere, find a crappy 14in monitor to go with it, stick it in your machine (you ARE using win98/2000 right?), and share the bliss with me. It's handy for just about everything else too; photoshop, web browsing, email, excel... just do it! -seperate render passes for glow elements, particles, reflections, how to add glows in AE/Axogon, advantages, steps bah, too much effort now, I'm tired... try all the other tips first, then when you're sure you need me to flesh out this one, lemme know... =) -4 sided lathe is enough detail for most tasks, show examples It is, trust me. Anything mostly tubular can be done using a 4 sided lathe. Megaphones, pens, the trusty wine glass, tyres, buttons, cd's.... 4 sides is plenty round. -using vim/text editor to make changes to AM files, when, why Gotta update a file reference, but don't want to listen to AM complain 30 times that it can't find file blah, even though it's clearly over _there_? Want to change a light from raytraced to mapped shadows, but you don't want to affect other lights that point to the same shortcut? You set that ultra-mega object visible and now AM won't load that cho? Just wanna play around with your AM files because your that bored? Fire up that text editor!! The AM file format is pretty simple to understand for the things that matter, ie file references, shortcut references, display settings, and other stuff. A good search/replace tool is your friend here. Vim has one (www.vim.org), although it's got a steep learning curve. Wordpad has a pretty good one, notepad's one is kinda sucky. It's easier if you 'prep' your cho for editing. Make sure you save it externally, and it helps if you can name the object you want to edit something that'll be easy to find, eg 'FINDME_shortcut_to_car'. Search for that name, directly beneath it will be the bulk of the options you wanna fiddle with. Just make sure when you finish that you save the file with a different name in case you need to go back to the original later on. This has saved me on many occasions!