Bone morph dials script

Moho allows users to write new tools and plugins. Discuss scripting ideas and problems here.

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DarthFurby
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Post by DarthFurby »

Sorry I've been away guys, haven't had much time to post, things should calm down after this weekend.

Rudiger, I will definitely experiment with all kinds of wacky tests with the bone morphs script, including facial expressions and post the results in this thread. Building all the different angles is time consuming, but once it's done, animation is FAST. Great for longer projects.

Funk, I also had that same problem, that's why I do fbf sticks without thinking about the rig at all, then try to make the rig serve the animation rather than vice versa.

neeters, you nailed it on the head. Stick figures are basically gesture drawings and Walt Stanchfield's stuff is amazing. I've learned that gesture is pretty much the most important thing when drawing and animating.
kefen109
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slow down the project

Post by kefen109 »

hi everyone I tried this script and It is awesome.but I cant find the solution to make it work faster.I mean you can make your animation faster.But If you have 2 or more characters in your scene.The project get slower.You cant even control the camera.Camera react so slow.

Is this problem only happens to me?
and is there any solution for this problem?
Rudiger
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Joined: Sun Dec 18, 2005 2:25 am

Re: slow down the project

Post by Rudiger »

kefen109 wrote:hi everyone I tried this script and It is awesome.but I cant find the solution to make it work faster.I mean you can make your animation faster.But If you have 2 or more characters in your scene.The project get slower.You cant even control the camera.Camera react so slow.

Is this problem only happens to me?
and is there any solution for this problem?
Well it will depend on the speed of your computer, but yeah you will eventually get to a point where you can no longer do the morph calculation in real time while maintaining the normal frame-rate. Every time you change the frame or click the mouse every point has to be processed for every action, so the more points and actions you have the slower AS will run.

I highly recommend that you try out the bake tool as this will convert all of your morph dials into conventional keys, and you can disable real-time morph dials.
rogermate
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short term multicore fix

Post by rogermate »

funksmaname wrote:totally fine in AS6... its a multicore rendering bug - AS7 only
Obviously we'd want the bug fixed, but there is likely a way around the problem. You can set the "Affinity" for a process - in other words define which processors a program would be limited to run on. In this case you would select one processor core.

In XP, from Task Manager select Processes. Then Right-click on the process for Anime Studio Pro. From the menu, select "Set Affinity". There will be check boxes for each core that you have. Just uncheck until you only have one core enabled.

good luck
Rudiger
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Re: short term multicore fix

Post by Rudiger »

rogermate wrote:
funksmaname wrote:totally fine in AS6... its a multicore rendering bug - AS7 only
Obviously we'd want the bug fixed, but there is likely a way around the problem. You can set the "Affinity" for a process - in other words define which processors a program would be limited to run on. In this case you would select one processor core.

In XP, from Task Manager select Processes. Then Right-click on the process for Anime Studio Pro. From the menu, select "Set Affinity". There will be check boxes for each core that you have. Just uncheck until you only have one core enabled.

good luck
Thanks for the suggestion rogermate, but I think funksmaname has already tried that (see page 13 of this thread). It seems that as long as AS starts up with all cores enabled, you will still encounter the bug, even if you confine AS to a single core before rendering. I'm wondering if there is some sort of special launching utility that could fool AS into thinking the system only has a single-core right from the start.
rogermate
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Re: short term multicore fix

Post by rogermate »

Rudiger wrote: Thanks for the suggestion rogermate, but I think funksmaname has already tried that (see page 13 of this thread). It seems that as long as AS starts up with all cores enabled, you will still encounter the bug, even if you confine AS to a single core before rendering. I'm wondering if there is some sort of special launching utility that could fool AS into thinking the system only has a single-core right from the start.
Caught reading the thread backwards!

Actually, I'm pretty sure there is a way to launch a process on a specific CPU.

It's possibly with a third party app called TaskAssign

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ban ... k,815.html

http://images.tomshardware.com/2004/05/ ... assign.zip

I haven't tested it myself. Also, I'm not sure that it will cure the AS7 bug.
Rudiger
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Re: short term multicore fix

Post by Rudiger »

rogermate wrote:
Rudiger wrote: Thanks for the suggestion rogermate, but I think funksmaname has already tried that (see page 13 of this thread). It seems that as long as AS starts up with all cores enabled, you will still encounter the bug, even if you confine AS to a single core before rendering. I'm wondering if there is some sort of special launching utility that could fool AS into thinking the system only has a single-core right from the start.
Caught reading the thread backwards!

Actually, I'm pretty sure there is a way to launch a process on a specific CPU.

It's possibly with a third party app called TaskAssign

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ban ... k,815.html

http://images.tomshardware.com/2004/05/ ... assign.zip

I haven't tested it myself. Also, I'm not sure that it will cure the AS7 bug.
Thanks, rogermate. I tried both TaskAssign and a command-line based one called RunFirst, but still got a crash. It's weird that AS7 always displays a progress bar for each core even when the affinity is set to a single core. Might be a bug in itself.
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

Wow, just noticed that 7.1 has been released, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to address this bug. I guess I reported it too late for the bug fix to make it into this version. I've PMed Mike directly to request that he release a patch similar to the switch layer interpolation bug fix, that would at least allow you to disable the multi-core rendering in the hope that it fixes the problem.
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funksmaname
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Post by funksmaname »

nice one Rudiger - keep us posted if you get any news! :)
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madrobot
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Post by madrobot »

Bugger. I was kind of hoping the update would resolve this. Disappointed but not really surprised.
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cheyne
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Post by cheyne »

Hi all,

Haven't really introduced myself to the forum yet, but here I am - and I'm bumping a thread that I have been following intently!

Well I must say I am quite sad about the rendering issues. After much reading through the forums and playing a with a friends copy of AS 5.6 I decided to go ahead and purchase the software. I thought how cheap for what it does, and with the all the awesome scripts floating around I figured this would be a powerful little package to get back into animating!

Didn't want to start my existence here on a rant but I wish had a copy of ASPRO 6 so I could actually test this stuff AND render it (I guess I didn't read around the forums enough before my final purchase).

Hopefully there will be a fix by the time I finish my first short (a month you here me Smith Micro! I want to render in a month! nyuk nyuk nyuk)

Oh well, I'll have to work with the basics and pure patience, for now :D
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

cheyne wrote:Didn't want to start my existence here on a rant but I wish had a copy of ASPRO 6 so I could actually test this stuff AND render it (I guess I didn't read around the forums enough before my final purchase).
Hi Cheyne,

Did you know that you can buy AS Pro 6 for really cheap at the moment?
http://my.smithmicro.com/promo/75184300.html
It's even cheaper at TigerDirect if you were interested in the Physical version:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... &CatId=994

You can also get around the bug in AS7 Pro by removing the layer scripts and baking the effect of the morph dials to keys on the main timeline using the Bake button.

Anyway, welcome to the forum, and glad you like the script!
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cheyne
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Post by cheyne »

@ Rudiger,

Thanks for the link - I am unfortunately not in a financial position to purchase (boo-hoo) Thanks to Mum (loves ya) I got ASPRO 7 for Xmas :D

Ooh goody goody! I didn't realise there was a workaround (obviously haven't read as much on these forums as I thought!). Can I bake MeshInstance with Selgins head turning awesomeness with ? Haha, I wish - I saw something Funksmaname said, I need to merge the scripts??

So I haven't tried out the "Bake" function - do you use Photoshop? Could I liken it to "Flattening" layers in an image? I hope my comparison makes sense - I mean is to "Bake" it is to finalise and no further editing using MorphDials?

EDIT: Thanks for the welcome by the way! Didn't want to appear ungrateful, tee hee hee
Rudiger
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Post by Rudiger »

Actually, you can bake as many times as you like and still edit the morph dials in between. To carry on your Photoshop analogy, it's more like saving your layered image as a copy to a flat file. You can overwrite the flat file as many times as you like, but still edit the layered image.

In the latest unreleased version of the script, I actually made it so you could bake and un-bake the morph dial keys by simply toggling a button. There's also an auto-bake function built into the move bone tool so you can get real-time feedback without the need of layer scripts at all.

Sorry, but the Bake button only works on morph dials. It might be possible to make it include the mesh instance keys as well, but that wouldn't be a trivial change.
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funksmaname
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Post by funksmaname »

Morphdials are working in AS8!
I don't know if multi proc is on though? I can't see the setting anywhere... but YAY!
:P
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