AAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!

I hate to use expletives here……… so I won’t, but the situation really is calling for it. My school kid is giving me so much grief. I did a whole load of animation with him and noticed a bucket load of errors that I shall now bore you with. It started with the morph tool not working which I assumed was due to the large modifier stack.

So I set about trying to reduce it by collapsing it down, turns out this had to be done in a very precise order or I got more of those polite crash reports I have previously mentioned. So anyway I have now collapsed the stack but it turns out that has caused vertices to weld to things they shouldn’t have, particularly in the hands. This led to things not separating/welding whilst trying to sort it. This led to most of the faces being deleted and redrawn, to the tune of ‘Illegal new face’ every 2 mins from Max’s apparent new found sense of humour. After hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of messing about with that I got it all working. Now the problem is this:

Now I am still not entirely sure what is going on here but it seems to be something to do with un-welded vertices that just will not weld stopping the turbo smooth from doing its job. More deleting pollys and recreating them to solve the problem. Finally to top it all off now when I smooth it he gets some massive holes in his chest that I can not for the life of me find the culprit and fix.

Also when applied to the original walk cycle the verts in the arms go all over the place and it all goes wrong

When I try to cut the verts about AGAIN it crashes every time. I can’t take this anymore. I am going to render out the animation that I had to start with and be done with it because I am out of time. Here is the preview scene I created, I know the running in the middle is a bit long but bear with it.

How’s this for a critical evaluation:

What’s wrong:

The arms are too rigid

The stride isn’t long enough

He is bald

The belt deforms with the legs

He has no facial expression, ever

He doesn’t appear to be breathing

When he is sitting down the cuffs have gone wrong

The arms swing through the body

The spine and head done move during the run

Whats right:

the scene looks prety good