Metasequoia modeler tutorials and Keynote translated plugins

[airflamesred]

Well I've been using meta for about 8 years now and stuck with it , through belligerence initially, and more recently cause it has mesh painting - my favorite! I thought $45 dollars was cheap for that and now the keynote........And the funny thing is if you look at people who are really good at modelling and using maya, they use very few tools. Metasequoia is well worth the money.For modeling I wouln't swap for anything I digress.
The morph, In conclusion,  works for small movements ideally in a straight line move rather than large scale rotate - explode for example.
The select tag I mentioned is not what I thought yesterday, but more of a multi-hide function if that makes any sense. The example I've deciphered is for a series of hair-do's. As you know keynote shows every object (bones and anchors excepted) and you may not want this.  So long hair, short, pony tail etc you can turn these off individually for your animation. Morph and select could be used ad-infinitun but it just increases your file size and so may not be that beneficial.
Ther appears to be a way to, (and this maybe relevant to Todd's post above) alter the bones so that they stay connected and add constiction to all three rotation handle. If you think of restricting the knee joint - once you reach a certain angle it will pull the rest of your leg or break! Very realistic though I have'nt fully tested it yet.

[airflamesred]

Ok
You don't need to do anything to the bone as i first thought. If you select the relevant mat (which covers the bone and anchor) open it up and in the bump channel at the bottom you can put these sorts of figures for example.
H(45, -12);
So 'H' or 'P' or 'B' refer to the bottom right on keynote (head, pitch and bank) followed by the maximum rotations on positive and negative. You can add figures for all three if necessary. Operation is by using the handles on the tail of the bone. simples!
I can't make any sense of the constrain bone (the pink one), in particular, what the two numbers that go, once again, in the bump channel refer to.
I aiming to put all the discoveries into a sort of tut once I can get some consistent results with anchors and overlapping. Its not really a problem for separate meshes but a single mesh gets a bit tricky.

Anyone found any useful plugins ?

[Verdite]

Eight years of metaseq! Interesting... I really like meta and ive only been using it a year. I got quite good at blender (if you can ever get good with it - memory has to be pretty big to store everything) but much prefer meta with its easy to use interface.

I didnt expect the meercat to come as far as the SoM boards 

[Verdite]

Do you think its possible to create a flying enemy with the new bone structure?

[airflamesred]

Ok we seem to have come to the end of all this stuff with keynote. I have spoken (and I use this very loosely, as googla translate was used ) to mqdl and both the pink bones and the bump channel stuff I mentioned are all about constaint. Most of it is, I guess not that relevant for SOM but on a personal note I would like to nail this. He sounds very friendly and there appears to be more stuff on the way.
My wish is to get this in some sort of tut, though only when I'm fully clear on things. Theres quite a big difference with using one mesh as opposed to many - and hence the bone influence which is where a lot of the mystery is.
All good stuff and happy easter to everyone.
Mark

[dmpdesign]

I am 99% sure there is a prf that controls whether or not an enemy can 'fly' and I was fairly certain way back when you showed me where that flag was in the prf lol.

The thing is, the idea of leaving the root bone at the bottom and moving the model up may be a better way to do it in the long run because the 'flying' enemies SOM currently has put the root node way in the air and when you kill them, their coins/drops float in the air where their root node is.  So if your root for a flying enemy were at the ground but the enemy were way up high i think the dropped items would appear on the ground instead.

One thing to think about though...where is the hitbox for the enemy?  I am not sure how this is controlled but if your floating model is above the hitbox, it could really mess up the way som interprets combat interaction and its ability to see you above/below itself as it moves.

[dmpdesign]

I would tend to agree the hit 'box' size is controlled by the prf as well as the enemies hit range.

My knight for instance uses the living armor prf and he can hit you a bit further away than his attack animation indicates he should be able to.

[Verdite]

Thanks for addressing that one wolf! I noticed that the zombie's hitbox is terrible with attacks - you'l stand way back from it, and it'l hit you with the sweep of an arm. I got mashed in maunstraut many times because of a zombie in the caves (first level).

[Verdite]

Help please  

So ive often wondered if you could stop the knife tool from mapping a new line adjacent / near to where you cut with a straight line... I'm using "cut with a knife" to get a single line on a face, and meta maps a line near to it, which i dont want ... Can i get around this?

[airflamesred]

I'm not quite clear what your image is showing there Verdite.
' cut with a knife' : a merciless cut through everything in its path - deadly!
'cut straight face' : drag across opposing sides of a quad and a cut will be made. this will continue across the quads adjacent as far as it can, in either direction.
'erase chained lines' : The reverse of the above.
Meta has done that because (and rightly so) it doesn't entertain n-gons. This is why it creates tris that you don't want.