Cool - just the ability to use walk paths longer than 30 frames has got me thinking - there's room there for some very subtle animations I suspect. Don't let us hurry your scourge. Any time in the enxt 30 minutes for the full, finished, debugged code will be fine :) Cheers, Cliff

Oh crap! Only 30 minutes time left for the next release! I'd better activate some more brain cells quickly...

When it comes to the walking animations this version of the script offers pretty much the same as the Walk Designer. So you can make pretty cool moving animations (not necessarily walking).

The next version will support, as promised, flying animations and also an additional following algorithm. Hopefully I'll get a better grasp of the GUI library for Python too, the current GUI sucks.

Tip Of The Day: use a negative speed to have the character walk away from the target =)

Attached Link: WDragon_Fly.avi (572KB)

Attached Link: WDragon_Fly2.AVI (385KB)

Cool - I can't check out the anims right now but have downloaded to view later. Have some lovely animations to test this with (some flying, most walking) and - wouldn't you know it? No TIME to play! Great stuff m8 :) Cheers, Cliff

Thanks. You can't test the flying anims with the current version of the script, but I should be able to upload the update in no time. I feel the pain... actually I've got the same problem, only 24 hours in a day.

Ya guessed that - tho I have some "level flying" stuff that I might try if I find some spare time in a corner of a pocket somewherwe :) Cheers, Cliff

Those flying animations are really really great! I hope you find the time to get the script uploaded soon :o)

Attached Link: WDragon_Fly3.AVI (393KB)

Oh wow! That looks so totally COOL, Scourge! cheats and breathes a little thru a straw

Well I'm not gonna cheat, I have faith in scourge (starts holding breath)

Attached Link: http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/Follow_Fly.py

As usual, your generosity astounds me. Sincere thanks for the effort you've put into this, which I reckon could benefit ALL Poser animatiors :) Cheers, Cliff PS or at least all who find this thread.

I'm glad that people find the results of my work useful. When the time comes I'll upload the final product to Free Stuff, at least at PoserPros. So it doesn't matter that this thread can't be easily found anymore. Any questions about the script? Everyone may feel free to ask and I'll do my best to give a good answer. If anyone's willing to modify/develop the script, go ahead. But the code can be difficult to read because it's all chopped from a larger bunch of code and there's no comments in the uploaded scripts.

PHEW** It got pretty hard breathing thru that straw.... Kiitos, scourge!! :o)

Oh and the people who ORIGINALLY followed this thread wil get the e-bots :) And for those who DIDN'T follow this thread from the beginning.. well... their loss ;o)

I see that you know the basics of Finnish. Now you just need to learn some undetermined muttering and put a miserable expression on your face, and you can fool any Finn. You're a Dane, right? Do Danish people understand Swedish or vice versa? I'm curious because I can understand written Danish pretty well but when I hear a Dane talk I have no idea what he/she is saying. "Oh and the people who ORIGINALLY followed this thread wil get the e-bots :) And for those who DIDN'T follow this thread from the beginning.. well... their loss ;o)" That, I think, is a good thing. I've got just the right people here following the thread, those that don't get bored watching as I slowly make progress writing some stupid script, occasionally reporting something like: "Woohoo! After weeks of hard work I got the figure's right toe to bend correctly!" Thanks for your support

:o) Kiitos is about the only word I know in finnish - at least where I (hopefully) know how to spell it too. Danes and swedes in general can unnderstand each other, but I agree it is far easier to READ swedish than to hear it spoken, and since danish sounds even more different from how it is written, I would think it is easier to read danish than to listen to it. Many danes (myself included L) speak rather "sloppy" and swallow half of the words, making it close to impossible for other people to understand. Finnish on the other hand... no offense, but are you SURE it's a real language? ;o) It looks and sounds so unlike everything else. Except estonian, I've heard that finns and estonians can understand each other? and one more, possibly hungarian? Now I'll try out this new script. Not that I usually do much animation, but I love to play with python scripts and like see what they do :o)

I agree - you've got some of the best here watching you work. BTW, given the tests I plan to put it through over the next few days, don't forget that swiming is practically flying, but in water. Cheers, Cliff

"Finnish on the other hand... no offense, but are you SURE it's a real language? ;o)" Well, I've heard someone describe Danish as a throat disease, not a language =). Seriously though, I don't know about the logic of Finnish grammar but I think the pronounciation is very close to how it's written. In LOTR most of the names (like Saruman, Sauron etc.) are pronounced like Finns would pronounce them. Finnish is very different from other European languages because it doesn't derive from languages like Latin or French. And the writing is somewhat similar to German because Mikael Agricola (the guy who invented written Finnish and its alphabets) used German literature as base for the ABC book. The Estonian language is just weird. It's pronounced like Finnish and they use many same words, but most of the words are strangely swapped, like if they had copied our language but wanted to confuse us. An example: - In Finnish "kirja" means "a book". In Estonian it means "the Bible". And vice versa, in Finnish "Raamattu" means "the Bible" and in Estonian it's "a book". That can't be a coincidence! About Hungarian, I doubt we could understand it. Hell, it's sometimes difficult for me to get a grasp of some Finnish dialects. The same goes for other languages as well: I can almost perfectly understand spoken English but when I hear some redneck from the southern part of the US talk I'm having hard time trying to figure out what he/she is trying to tell. The Swedish-speaking Finns also speak very clear Swedish but the real Swedes just can't speak it right ;) who3d, Yes the script works also for swimming, of course. The movement is just slower and smoother. Please report us the results of the tests when you're done, I always like to get feedback so that I can make my products better. I bought Poser solely for animation purposes in the first place and I'm glad I'm finally beginning to understand how to animate. That's why almost all of the scripts I'm working on are for animation.

I agree about the swedish spoken by finns. If only all swedes would speak like that, it would be a lot easier to understand swedish :o) Norwegian is worse. "normal" norwegian (bokm) is very close to danish and the written bokm is so close that manuals ect usually are the same in danish and norwegian, with only some words written in both languages. That is of course far too simple, so the norwegians had to invent Nynorsk, something closer to icelandic or oldnordisk (not sure or the english word for that) Oh and it is DUTCH which is a throat-disease, not danish ;o)

I stand corrected, the throat disease was Dutch. When I was younger I thought Dutch was the language people speak in Denmark, that's why the confusion. Of course, the description matches other languages pretty well, like arabic languages and the language some people speak in Wales. Why do they punish their throat like that??

Uhm well apparently danish and dutch sounds rather similar to foreingers. I've often been mistaken for dutch when I am in England. Of course we all know that danish is a much nicer language L But you're right, there are some languages where you wonder how they can evolve such strange sounds. And of course some sounds are totaly impossible for people to pronounce if they haven't learned them from their childhood, like the clicking sounds in xhosa and similar african languages.

Apparently we're born with the ability to learn a huge range of phonemes - vut we quickly concentrate on teh phonemes that we hear around us and actually lose the ability to pronounce and possibly even hear "correctly" phonemes from unfamiliar languages. The more you can subject your child, when young (sorry no idea what age) to a variety of languages the better the chances they'll be able to do well with languages (if they want to) later. Apparently. Cheers, Cliff (and I mean the actual languages - not the "pidgeon" version spoken by idiots like me, but native speakers of other tongues. E.G. My French is limited to "Allo Allo" and my Spanish to "Grassyarse")

"Grassyarse" LOL! I agree, children learn new languages a lot faster than grown-ups. I have a few Swedish speaking friends and I envy them because both their Swedish and Finnish are flawless. They also seemed to learn English and French faster than I did. I'd say I'm pretty good at English and moderate at Swedish and French but learning is a lot harder for me than it is to those particular friends of mine. God natt, mina vner. Jag ska ervda i morgon.

Well at least you written swedish is better than mine G I'm better at understanding swedish than writing/speaking it coz I can't remember which words are the same and which are different from danish. In danish, that sentence would be: God nat, mine venner. Jeg skal vende tilbage i morgen. (and in english: good night my friends. I'll return tomorrow)

That's kind of the same situation when I have to deal with Danish (happens very rarely); I can read it but not write because the words are slightly different. I could have also used "komma tillbaka" instead of "ervda" so it would had been even more similar to Danish. Don't worry who3d, I'll get back to the original topic (the Python scripts) soon =)

Sadly I have to report I've failed abysmaly so far at my end - I'm occasionally getting SOME movment in the figure I am making follow Figure 1, but so far I'm always getting an error - such as: Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:Program FilesCurious LabsPoser 5RuntimePythonliblib-tkTkinter.py", line 1292, in call return apply(self.func, args) File "", line 71, in mainProg File "", line 135, in Follow ZeroDivisionError: float division Err... help? Cheers, Cliff PS have used Don as the figure to follow, and a couple of different animals - latest was an elephant - as the figure to do the following.

Don't worry about the language topic - I've avoided saying that anyone outside the Home Counties is unintelligable to me :)

BM

Hmm. According to the error lines and the error the problem is that the following character is at the same place as the target (the distance to the target is 0 and that's why the division by zero error occurs). What have you typed in the text fields? I assume you selected the figure that will follow the target before running the script. You should always position the figure that follows the target by using the dials of the Body actor, not the Hip. Also, if you position the target with the Hip dials you should also set the target actor as Hip, not Body.

...and looks like you're using the flying script for Don and the animals. Are you sure you want to do that? Or are they swimming?

I seperated the two objects by moving the Body along the X axis with the appropriate dial. The target was at 0, the follower at... possibly not enough? Let me try again and increase the seperation to make them several bodies apart (I'll do this later). The aim was for swimming, actually - I have a "swim cycle" that I want to make, but I need to fine-tune how I'm going to be able to apply it. This script should be significantly better for my purposes than Walk Designer, but I need to make sure that I can make it work first :( I'll report back, hopefully tonight. Cheers, Cliff

Attached Link: http://www2.lut.fi/~pihlajis/Follow_Fly.py

OK, here's a test run...

New scene in Poser 5 SR 4.1 (v5.0.4.325). Contains a Don.
Add a ball (ball_1)
Change zTran to 5
Change animation frames to 200, then go to frame 200
set (ball_1's) zTran to 15 and xTran to 10.
Select Figure_1, Body
Start newest Follow_Fly script. Set Pose File to:
C:Program FilesCurious LabsPoser 5RuntimelibrariesPoseWalkDesignerWalk.p2z
Set Frame Count to 200
Delete Target Figure text
change Target actor to ball_1
Click Apply

It comes up with what looks like an error screen, but this just contains:
Do you wish to add frames to your scene to import the complete animation

and nothing else.
Close the "error report".

play the animation, Don is catching up with ball then flickering around it. Change final ball position to z=150, x=100 and retry
completes no error message. Try animation...

Yup, that seems to be working great. It's going to take some time and practise to get the hang of the speeds etc - but I think I'm ready to move on to slighlty more daring/interesting tests (Bwahahaaa!)

Cheers,

Cliff

Message edited on: 06/08/2004 18:36

Good. That "Do you wish to add frames to your scene to import the complete animation" message should be there. If the animation pose has 30 frames it will be applied 7 times for a 200 frame anim. 7 times 30 is 210 so there will be 10 frames extra, that's why you get the message. The script deletes the ten additional key frames, leaving them empty. The figure flickers around the target because there's no turning radius yet, so the figure can turn a whole 360 degrees during one frame. This will be changed soon. Ilari

Attached Link: Follow7.AVI (241KB)

I had a ball animating a mil dragon flying around a castle (OK, I used a huge box to start with but I slapped a castle in afterwards). Looks great, wish I had time to do the camerawork and rendering that I'd like to finish it off, but I've got to move on to my swimming animaiton and see what I can get going. At least - when I can find time for Poser. Time is a vanishing commodity lately :( Love your work, Cliff

Attached Link: WDragon_Fly4.AVI (470KB)

Attached Link: http://www2.lut.fi/~pihlajis/Follow_Fly.py