Ok well I’ve had this happen before and I just have no idea what is going on.
I have a model with some nice armatures and everything and all you have to do to make it crash is select something… sometimes it doesn’t crash until you’ve selected a new mesh like 10 times and it seems like it’s extremely sensitive to armatures or objects that have a track to constraint as well.
I’ve reinstalled blender a couple of times. Went for faster draw, took out the draw names… removed some subsurfs. I just can’t find out why this is so unstable.
The only error I know of is the:
‘import’ site failed; use -v for traceback
sys_init:warning - no sitedirs added from site module.
But that has something to do with python right?? and i’m not running any python on this machine. Not installed and not in this .blend file, so that can’t be it right?
Unrelated to your problem, but why are you using all those Empties as solvers when you could be using bones as targets? And why are you building your armature in multiple parts instead of one skeleton for the whole character?
BTW every time it crashes (which it still does) the win2000 system I’m working on here tells me it’s creating an error log, but I have no idea where to find that and if it’d do any good to find it.
are you running on a system with an intel video card (integrated)?
update your drivers
(try it even if you aren’t)
selecting empties, armatures, objects with draw extra: axis or some other draw extra things have crashed the opengl thing on some (2000 and xp) systems
ok yeah that’s neat… read that a while back… reread it now.
But the only reference in it for using bones as targets is this: For most constraints, a target must be specified in the appropriate field. In this field you must type in the name of the desired target object. If the desired target is a bone, first type in the name of the bone’s armature. Another box will appear allowing you to specify the name of the bone.
Which is wonderfull (learn something new every day)
But how would that help me or be an improvement on using Empties for IKA & tracking my armature in a hand mesh??? I mean what object should I put what constraint on to target which bone and why???
I’m feeling both incredibly stupid and incredibly curious. Am I missing something here?
In the end it comes down to… apparently there’s a better/more practical way to animating armatures in stead of my old Inverse Kinetics armature using empties… but what is it? Remember though that I am animating for a bit of video, not game production.
Ok so you’re saying use bones as IKA solvers? But how do you build your armature for animating a character doing that? and then how do you animate it? With pose mode in stead of inverse kinetics?
I don’t see how you can use Inverse Kinetics without empties… and I don’t really see pose mode targets as a viable alternative.
And what the *&^ is NLA???
My god am I that stupid? Theeth i love you for trying to help man, but right now you’re just frustrating me. I want to get on with work on my models but before I do I really have to get my bone system setup done. And if there’s a way that’s a lot better than how I usually do it… well hell then I’ll have to figure that out first.
I know the tut list out there, but can’t find anything that seems to relate to what you’re trying to say to me.
Is there a tutorial out there that shows how to setup & animate a bone system the way you mean???
O and btw… When I resize an entire armature, the bones that have a track to constraint don’t seem to resize along with everything else? (bug?)
quick answer (which you may have figured out) use the bone targets just like you’d use the empties- the only differance is that you have to go into pose mode to do it. you can key them, rotate them, constraint them, etc…
the advantage as theeth said is that their ipos are part of the action ipos now, so you can use the nla to mix motions.