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jamesvanderbeek

12-15-2003, 11:58 PM

hey guys

I've just been playing around with the messiah demo for a little while and I'm pretty keen on purchasing it when I get the money. Before I do, I just have a few questions regarding the workflow and other stuff which I hope you can shed some light on.

I've been pretty amazed by the rigging videos I've seen and the results I've had myself, but I was just wondering if how you tweak your riggs to get the best deformation. I know you have that weighting tool (meta effector?), but do you need to use this often, or is there some other way like putting more bones in, I also read somewhere that they use the bloat tool to get good shoulder deformation. I guess what I'm trying to ask is what is the most commonly used way to tweak the deformation of your riggs?

This one isn't going to put me off buying it, but I wanted to know if there was some kind of stretch tool for the dopesheet, something similar to the scale to you can use on the dopesheet in maya? This isn't so important, but it would be nice.

With the auto rig feature, I have some kind of problem. Placing the bones using the armature is fine, but then I go to the animate tab and the right shoulder goes weird. I've tried this about five times and it does it every time, I watched the video and followed it closely. I recall reading something about bugs in the auto rig when v4 first came out. The demo is just version 4, I know that some updates have been released, is it fixed in these updates?

The last thing I wanted to know about is scripting. Is it very easy to do scripting, and do you guys use on most projects. I use lw atm and I really only use the expression builder, maybe I'm lazy and I hate coding. Do you think this might change if I get messiah, I'd like to do some scripting and I just wanted to know if messiah made this a little less painfull.

cheers
bigears

Qslugs

12-16-2003, 05:00 PM

well, since no one seems to want to answer, I think I'll take a shot. Anyone feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

1. The amount of weighting with weights needed and also extra support bones depends on your setup. For the most part though, the bones work the way they should and you would expect them to work. As for using the metaeffectors, I personally like to use thoes as well as extra bones (when the need arises) and they are easy to setup and use. Actually, I don't know how much you have read about the metaeffectors but they are a multi faceted tool. You can use them as alphas for texturing (in studio of course), as a way of localizing an effect, and also as a weighting tool.

2. Not sure about the dope sheet, I dont use that all that often. I would suggest downloading the documentation and looking in there. If I remember to look later when I get home, I will post my findings.

3. If you get weird shifting while switching from setup to animate, while in setup press enter and set a keyframe for everything at zero. This may be causing your problem. Then switch back to animate and maybe your problem will go away. I haven't touched armatures all that much either, so I am not positive that will cure your problem.

4. As far as scripting goes, I haven't done much of that. Actually I haven't done any of that in messiah. I do work in maya on a daily basis and the only thing I usually script in there is the more repetitive tasks. From the examples that I have seen, I wonld assume that this level of scripting in messiah is possible.

And as for you wanting to do scripting if you used messiah, well that all depends on what you want to do with messiah and if what you want to do happens to not work quite right. So with that said, you'll have to figure out what messiah can and cat do for you in order to determine that one.

Julez4001

12-19-2003, 12:42 AM

manual comes with demo - look up key transformation.

You can scale by group, selection or hierarchy.
This is a keying thing rather than dopesheet but justas effective.

jamesvanderbeek

12-19-2003, 05:57 AM

thanks for the replies dudes
Yeah, I found a solution to the autorig bug on the yahoo forums. You have to make the back bones arch forwards, I'm sure this has been fixed in the updates.

I also had looked in the manual about scaling the keys, I suppose it's more powerful to do it in the graph editor. I just know that working on multiple items in the graph editor in lightwave slows it down a lot and I wasn't sure if messiah did this.

cheers

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