Keynote Reference Guide

[airflamesred]

Oh yes the sheep. I got sidetracked with John Barry.
I was hoping to pose - freeze - then save as blah blah .mqo (that should be bah bah!) and then start again with the original. Now you got me thinking.

Cloning a flock of sheep would make the object and mat panels unweildly.

Hmmmm.

Maybe I do a walk cycle and copy and paste frame to sheep no2 and so on.

[Verdite]

Yeah i had to redo a few models because of this!

[HwitVlf]

I thought of something that the 'constraint' setup in your tutorial should be good for- on creatures with multiple legs (like the wurm model) you should be able to bind several  legs together so they move in unison. On the wurm, I had to manually move each leg in each keyframe.

I going to try the constraint setup on the model I'm making now. . . for its teeth mwaaaahaaahaa 

[HwitVlf]

The  constraint label "C(1,..." seems to work very well for multiple legged critters. But I'm using the "C(5,..." setup to vary the bone motion in hopes it will look less mechanical.

Not sure we you knew this, but you can link multiple bones to turn with a single bone by including additional bone-materials to the end like so:
C(5,50,Bone1MAT,Bone2MAT);
I hope to set up some 20 appendages to all move with a few 'master bones'- Thanks again for all your effort AirFlamesRed- Nice!

[airflamesred]

That sounds interesting. I thought I had tried that before without success but I shall take another look.
C(0....) I thought was an on/off switch - just to save having to take out the whole equation. Theres a right click cut/copy/paste, which I don't recall seeing before, in that panel.

[HwitVlf]

Nrrr, I should really read what I'm typing before I post it ;)
It was  C(1,.. worked. C(0,... doesn't work. I'll edit that so I don't confuse people.
Attached is a sample of how I'm linking multiple bones.
Is the semi-colon at the end necessary? It seems to work with or without it.

I wonder if there's a constraint setup that makes bones mirror each other. Might be useful for human walking animations even.

[airflamesred]

Ah I see what you mean now.One bone controls one or more C5 bones.
What I was hoping for was that
bone1 C(5,.....bone2)
bone2 C(5,.....bone3)
bone3
which could have (with negative numbers) given a lot of choices.
Cross posting!
I'm not sure about the semi-colon in this case - just good practice.

[HwitVlf]

AirFlamesRed, where did you post the tutorial on using 'constraint' setup to limit a bone's rotation? I can't seem to find it.

I think I discovered something new- when you limit a bones rotation with by covering it with a "constraint" material, you usually need one material per bone (as far as I can tell). But if you cover 2 bones in the same material and add "[]" to the end of the material's name, it creates a mirrored setup. Good for apposed limbs. I still can't figure how Keynote decides which bone is primary and which bone is mirrored though.

Example is attached. It's supposed to be a setup for shoulder/arms and you'll notice the left forearm isn't 'constrained' even though it's covered in the same 'constraint' material as the right forearm. If you add [] to the "forearm" material's name, it starts working correctly.

[airflamesred]

The H,P,B stuff is at the end of the scissors tut. I'll have a look at your findings tomorrow.

Here's just a quick one I did with morphs. I first thought this would be easy just to squash a spring by scaling it. That turned out to be a cheap option cause it not only scales the pitch but also the spring itself.
So as an experiment I used a portion of the spring, cloned to make the morph and moved the verts. Then cloned the spring section with the correct offset and merged them back into one object. Then cloned the morph with that offset and merged those down. Much to my suprise it worked. Nothing really new but the morph thing seems to be a bit more resilient than first thought.

[airflamesred]

I'd seen that mirror tag with the square brackets but I don't really see any advantages to it beyond saving you a mat in the material panel.

If you mouse over a bone theres some info in the keynote panel. The id seems to be the 'first born', 'second born' etc. It also shows the Left and Right if the brackets are used.

Your constraints are good HwitVlf. Can I just ask why the bones are not joined?

The semicolon, you mentioned earlier is needed if for example C(........); H(.....); in the same mat. I guess its sort of end of command.