hey all, 1st time poster here, wanted to see what help was available for CTA. I bought CTA for a work project and had to learn it on the fly to meet a deadline, video turned out quite well for an out-of-box project, now I have some time to dig deeper into the program and fine tune my next project. I'm looking for info, tutorials or whitepapers on a few technics to get a better animation.

I saw a video on youtube where the presenter showed how to make a charactor walk and wave at the same time by disabling all the body parts that he wanted to maintain the walking motion and just enable the arm to wave at the same time, i can't find that tutorial anywhere again.

I would like to make my charactors have a more fluid movent with their heads by making them look left and right without flipping the body at the same time. or be looking forward then just turning their head left or right, I tried making a head for each position i wanted but it doesn't save(or i don't know how to make it save) a head as a whole with all parts and props that i can just swap out in stage mode, anyone have a guide to that.

I also tried to download the whitepaper in the developers resources section on how to prepare a charactor for front and side view, but it says i must be a primary developer? How do I do that to get that white paper?

thanks in advance

There are many tutorials on YouTube as well as a many users here in the forums who can help with questions and issues.


You can first make the character walk and then modify the hand/arm to wave. Your motion edits will replace any others for those sprites you modified.


In the Composer Mode you can save your characters head or replace it but they will replace it for your whole animation, not at a specific point on the timeline.
What you are looking to do will be available in the next release of CTA. Currently you can only flip the entire character, not specific parts.
There are several ways to make what you want to do happen but requires a bit of work.


Go to the Developer Center and sign up: Developer Center

Jeff



Get my Plugin Manager and TaskNotes plugins for iClone.
Check out EZColors and Other products for CTA/CA. EZColors: the easy way to change Render Styled (RS) colors!
See my CTA Tutorials on the YouTube channel CTAStepByStep

Jeff,

thanks for the info and quick response, I figured I was pushing the boundries of what CTA could do in this version, but finding the limits helps plan a project. I would imagine that a rotating head would be quite involved, but I've been doing after effects and video design and editing for almost 20 years, so I'm used to very complicated tasks and time-based editing, looking forward to the newest version...thanks again