Rigging - A documented workflow in trueSpace

[Draise]

Must be a setting somewhere in my trueSpace setup... But good to know!

[Tiles]

Hm. I remember some problems with characters that were rigged with an older version of the bones system. Seems that you stumbled across one of them

[Draise]

I had some slow weighting issues.. but later found it was because the texture had to refreash (as if you painted an object). If you have large maps and a lot of detail or lighting, this can slow things down a lot. The following tips are just UI and memory efficient tips for a number of things. You don't need to follow them, but they help me out.

!	Tip 12 If you are finding your skin weighting to be slow, try do the weighting on a blank DX shader. Complex shaders will refresh each time you select or highlight a bone, causing not very fun waits as you weight (pun).

!	Tip 13 If you have many objects or an object with heavy detail maps or shaders, delete the shader ball from the Default tab in the object node. The shader ball will refresh each time you select the object and this takes a long time sometimes.

[Draise]

I've been working on my rig today and found the Morph controls to be very powerful. But I did find something strange happen for a moment, and found a fix.

!	Tip 14 If you create morphs into a rig and modify the node structure for morph controls later, then find your rig to appear like it lost all rigging envelopes: Don't panic! Just activate the weight tool and this will reactivate the rigging envelopes.

[Draise]

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Tip 15 When you animate morphs, make sure you have a default pose track, and then a few morph tracks with "pass through" disabled and "additive" also disabled. Animate your morph animation in those tracks, then add "Additive" tracks for the skeletal animation. after the morph animation. If you do not do this, the morph animation in tracks within any additive track or tracks after an additive track will corrupt your scene and rig, with no way of recovering unless you reload the scene or object.

[Draise]

Interesting.. you can offset any animation using a parent object, for example if he is walking in a cycle, you can use a parent object (clintons parent script) and move him around without having to pull the rig (thus cleaner rig movements).

But you cannot layer rotation animation clips to offset rotation. The matrix keyframes are world based, not object based.. so absolute in 3D space. I assume...