Subject: Re: Bones Tutorial
Date: Tue, 17 May 94 07:52:00 PDT
From: Stethem Ted              5721 <TedS@ms70.nuwes.sea06.navy.mil>

Lesk,
    Thanks for the detailed tutorial.  This is the real value of this 
mailing list when another user can do all the head scratching and then take 
the time to pass on his hard earned experience.  I was struggling with Bones 
for the past few days and your step-by-step tutorial really opened the 
window of understanding.  I thought your tutorial format was also well 
thought out and very concise.  I made it through the Impulse tutorial OK but 
I didn't understand the subgroup settings (and still don't completely but 
getting closer). The problem to me is that the Impulse tutorial was already 
all set up and the learning is in the setup.  Also, I was missing the step 
of selecting the object just prior to Bones Update.
   I still have some funny things happen when using the State animation 
sometimes.  If I use Default as the initial position, go through the next 
bones states, and then back to Default zero frames, the bones part of the 
object will shrink down to almost nothing and then return to the Default 
state.  This doesn't seem to happen if I make a duplicate state and call it 
something like Start or Initial.
  I set up an animation project for the Bones object and ran into a few more 
quizzical situations.  I would think that since the Bones object was already 
a States object, it would be only necessary to enter it once in the Action 
Editor, but Imagine once again demonstrated that intuition does not apply 
where Imagine is concerned.  I am puzzled that the Detail Editor has a 
States animation preview where you can set the number of frames between 
states but this has no bearing on the setup of the object in the Action 
editor.  It appears that the Bones object has to be set up the same as a 
Morph object.  I also found out, as somebody else pointed out, that the 
Transition frames setting is gone from the Action editor.  While this is not 
missed with States, I don't know what the impact is to a Cycles object 
unless the routine has somehow been rewritten to somehow smooth out the 
transition between different positions.
    Only wish I had a 100MHz '060 accelerator to try all this stuff out that 
much faster. 


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