[Simon Carlson-thies]

Practice makes perfect… find the method that works best for you…

I like to use the bone tool to draw the bones, and then the move tool and rotation tool if you need to, for fine adjustments.

In all honesty I would get a different program if you are interested in character animation, unless your working with MoCap, since Cinema’s IK tools are a bit weak.

If you are really interested in understanding bones and IK… and how to get realistic deformation, the best advice is to read read read…

for example ligwww.epfl.ch/~baerloch/papers/thesis.pdf read this its only a 150 pages,
wscg.zcu.cz/wscg2003/Papers_2003/G61.pdf

these two papers will get you started, if you want more look on google, or I can give you many more suggestions I have many boxes of such papers.

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

Did you try switching the cables? Run disk utility on the drive that appears, then also check in the enclosure make sure there are no bad connections, check the PCI-x card to make sure it has a good connection.

post back with the results…

Hope this helps…

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

Find the parent bone of the skeleton that is controlling all of the other bones spatial positiion and adjust that bone the distance you want to move the character, but since your looping you will have seperate out that track so that the characters spatial position is no longer looping, and you control that.

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

How old are the monitors, and have you checked the connections, or tried replacing the cables?

Best of luck

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

Try running disk utility, both repair permissions, and restart off of the disc and run the repair disc option, and see if that helps. If not, if you haven’t moved all your data back yet re-install the system. Also think back what you installed the day before it stopped working.

Best of luck

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

HD MPEG 2 encoded DVD is still a standard DVD its just higher bit rate (19.0mb/sec), the real revolution with HD-DVD is h.264 which allows better quality using less space.

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

Look on google… there are so many of these comparisions you shouldn’t have any trouble finding one that works for you.

In my opinion either is fine Maya is more expensive, and without an external render, its render quality is not very good. Cinema is cheaper and is easy to use and its got good quality renders with advanced render.

Best of luck

Simon Carlson-Thies

[Simon Carlson-thies]

If they aren’t using QT7 that might be the problem, it would also depend on the quality of the H.264, because PCs require faster processors to play them then macs do.

hope this helps

Simon Carlson-Thies

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation

[Simon Carlson-thies]

then you have to buy a Quicktime 7 pro key, though how you manged to stay in QT 6 is odd with 10.4.5.

Simon Carlson-Thies

[Simon Carlson-thies]

So you never wrote down the key for the software? I would talk with apple…

Simon Carlson-Thies,
Digital Light Graphics And Animation