Re: Not too much activity here...
 

I think that's simply because rigging is HARD. Unless you're doing something super simple, you can't just drop in a skeleton. Each bone has to know exactly what it's affecting and how, or else the limbs will skew oddly when you try to move them.

It's the most dreaded part of my animation course. My teacher has showed me the basics so many times but I haven't gotten far enough to ever feel like I've gotten the hang of it.

And my team is also going slow. I'm mentoring a team and this is their first year on the animation. We just got their old computers updated enough to install 3d this week, so we're going to race to get something put together on time.

Re: Not too much activity here...
 

rigging... shutters... I hate rigging... I can get rigs to work, but it's awful, every time I try to make a rig do something new or different, I get something wrong with it... though to be honest, I much prefer modeling to animation... maybe that's why I'm a mechanical engineering and not an an art major...

In reference to asking for help, asking questions or watching dementrasions often makes learning easier. Of course my only experience with that would be w/ BuddyB over aim a few times...

Compile a series of power points, tutorials, and youtube videos from around the internet and that we make ourselves would be an excellent off-season project. I would have loved a source of information like that when I was first learning... still would actually... and it would be very helpful to any schools starting classes, or any heads of teams needing to teach their younglings(that's an affectionate term btw)...

Re: Not too much activity here...
 

aw come on, rigging not THAT hard. First you look at the character and decide what is the best approach to rig it. Either bones or some other kind. Then build the internal skeleton with bones, geometry, and/or helpers. Then apply 100 different constraints to them to build the external rig that you control. Some scripting here and there. Then skin modifier, skin deform modifier, then about 100 morph targets. Character rig tests to see everything works right. After reworking it 3 times and 100 hours later you done! whoo hoo! on to the next character!

Re: Not too much activity here...
 

Exactly. That's why I'm with Fireball on preferring modeling to animation. Although even better than modeling is lighting: when handled well, it is your best friend and secret weapon.

Re: Not too much activity here...
 

Ah yes, but even better than lighting is layer rendering which produces this result. You cant get glowy highlights in max.

Re: Not too much activity here...
 

Yeah, it looks great. I've heard of the layering stuff but never tried to work with it. I feel like every time I get the hang of one aspect of 3d, then I learn about three more that I don't understand. And the Appliance animation is really awesome, by the way.