tidbit on CS 4

[3DMadness]

All I want in CS 4 is to stop crashing my machine every 5 minutes... :rolleyes:
Cheers!

Flávio

[thinKer3D]

:: 3DMadness, maybe you need to build a better machine! ::

[3DMadness]

I don't think the problem is my machine, I'm used to build machines and mine is rock solid with everything but character studio. Everytime I've got the message of "Illegal Operation" or sometimes 3dsmax just close without any warning. It seems to be something related with footsteps and several layers of freeform animation because if I coolapse the layers it seems to get better, but it mess with my animation.
Anyway, it is still the fastest way to make a character walk altough I hate the way it walks! ;)
BTW, here is my spec:
Athlon XP 1600+
512mb DDR Micron
Shuttle AK31 v3.1 VIA KT266A
Leadtek GeForce2 Ultra
Maxtor D740x 40gb
Sound Blaster Live 5.1
Wacom Graphire 2
with:
Windows 2000 Professional with SP2 and all patches and drivers up to date. (via 4in1 as well)
3dsmax 4.2
Character Studio 3.1

Would you say CS is stable?? Can you work all day long withot a single crash?
Thanks for your input!
Cheers!

Flávio

[sam]

Character Studio works really stable here. I don't think I ever had a crash.

Using several layers might be reaching some kind of ram/scratch disk limit. Montitor your usage of ram. You should see if you can reproduce the error and maybe find some kind of threshold limit and then post the bug and seek guidance on the discreet support forum.

I am curious, how many layers are you trying to use exactly?

Btw, you are not using the most recent version of CS. You should update it and that could very well fix your problems.

sam

[sam]

Also, looking at your other posts, where you describe discovering a method of using motion layers to blend clips, I think you might be trying to do something with motion layering that it is not intended for.

To make transitions between clips you should use the motion flow editor. The motion flow editor is simply the right tool for the job of handling transitions.

Motion layers should be used to make enhancements to clips non-destructively. Typically, after you create some footsteps, you can use motion layering to add the upper body animation into distinct layers like "arms", "head", etc.

You do not edit the footsteps themselves with motion layers. If you are trying to adjust lower body animation with layers on a biped with footsteps or collapse layers that have lower body keys on a biped with footsteps you can cause errors because a biped with footsteps is controlled by the footstep physics and those footsteps need to be edited while in footstep mode and according to the footsteps physics. If you want to use layers to non-destructively edit lower body animation then you will need to covert the footsteps to free form animation.

sam

[3DMadness]

Hi Sam, thanks for your help! :) Let's see if we can solve my problem:

Using several layers might be reaching some kind of ram/scratch disk limit. Montitor your usage of ram. You should see if you can reproduce the error and maybe find some kind of threshold limit and then post the bug and seek guidance on the discreet support forum.

I was checking this possibility but it never use more than 330mb of RAM, there is still some ram left here... BTW, the Character Studio forum from discreet seems to be almost dead... :(


I am curious, how many layers are you trying to use exactly?

I'm using 4 layers here, is it too much? ;)


Btw, you are not using the most recent version of CS. You should update it and that could very well fix your problems.

Sorry, I said the wrong version, I'm already using the latest 3.21


Also, looking at your other posts, where you describe discovering a method of using motion layers to blend clips, I think you might be trying to do something with motion layering that it is not intended for.

I'm not using layers to blend clips, I'm using the layer "original" to do the footstep animation and the other layer to do some actions like open door, grab a box, and things like this. Is this correct?


To make transitions between clips you should use the motion flow editor. The motion flow editor is simply the right tool for the job of handling transitions.

Motion layers should be used to make enhancements to clips non-destructively. Typically, after you create some footsteps, you can use motion layering to add the upper body animation into distinct layers like "arms", "head", etc.

I agree with you, motion flow is great to create transitions between several animations, but now I think it's better to use only one animation and do as you said, that's what I'm doing now.


You do not edit the footsteps themselves with motion layers. If you are trying to adjust lower body animation with layers on a biped with footsteps or collapse layers that have lower body keys on a biped with footsteps you can cause errors because a biped with footsteps is controlled by the footstep physics and those footsteps need to be edited while in footstep mode and according to the footsteps physics. If you want to use layers to non-destructively edit lower body animation then you will need to covert the footsteps to free form animation.

I can see I can't edit footsteps, that's why I don't collapse the layers so that I can edit the footsteps in the original layer when I need it.
I work with animation in max for 2 years but now I need some simple animation with a character walking and I though this would be the fastest way to do it. I've studied CS before but this is my first real job with it and it's when the troubles show up. :)
I'm also using a simple character in low-poly modeling with physique but hiding the mesh doesn't seem to make it more stable.
Well, thanks a lot for your help Sam, hope you can give me some more tips, that's what I need now: some tips from people that work with CS. :)
Cheers!

Flávio

[Nahaz]

Yeah, Fcurves for Quats!

Hopefully A|W will copy them, getting rid of Eulers for good :)

From unrealpictures.com:

"Some animators prefer Euler Angle rotation to quaternion-based rotation because they are able to see the "Fcurves" that correspond with eulers. What they may not realize in that they are paying a heavy price to do this. First, the interpoation of eulers is fundamentally "gimbal distorted" in that it will not travel the shortest (or smoothest) path between rotational keyframes. Extraneous swings are introduced. "

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