This new version (2.2a for messiah:studio and 5.2a for messiah:animate) is a maintenance update that also contains lots of new features and modifications.  The list below will fill you in on what's new.  More info will follow soon.

 

 

Features & Modifications

 

Armatures

Cool Samples of Armature/Script:  Box Controllers

Each of the following samples make use of a messiah:script that illustrates the use of scripts with Armatures.  There are three scripts included with this release:  boxcontroller.msa, boxcontrollermulti.msa, and boxcontrollerquad.msa.  If scripting is your thing, take a look at the scripts and see how easy they are to create.

Sample 1
Load the BoxController_Sample.mpj scene and press play.  What you are seeing is a character that was animated using a  "box controller" to control the morphs (using MorphBlender).  The box controller is on the bottom left of the World View.

Many people like this type of controller better than sliders, because it "feels" better.  Of course, when you use a box controller you automatically have sliders too, so one setup can please different people!

Now stop the animation and drag the controller in the box (the arrows) around.  As you can see, each direction that you move the control goes to a different morph.

By the way, those of you with messiah:studio should press F9 and look at a render.  This is a scene created by Taron, and he used his Basic Shader (with sub-surface scattering) on the character.  It looks quite nice!

Sample 2
Here's another great new feature:  Morph Target Portions.  What this allows you to do is pick certain regions of a morph target to use rather than using the whole target.  In other words, it lets you use less morph targets (see Morphblender below for more info).

Load the MorphPortions_Sample.mpj scene and press play.  What you're seeing is just one object and one morph target!  What I've done in this scene is split the morph into six different targets by setting six different portions (on the Portions sub-tab of the Cluster Value block in Setup mode).  Each slider is tied to a different portion of the morph and the sliders are tied to a box controller.

The left, middle and right mouse buttons each control different pairs of morphs.  Drag from top to bottom to activate one target, and left to right to activate the other.  Anywhere in between will blend between them.

Setting Up A Box Controller
There are two ways to create a Box Controller for your own scenes (besides creating everything yourself).  The first way is to load the BoxController armature and set it to use the sliders in your scene (to do that, see last line in this box).  The second way is to use the Setup File.  Here's how to do that:

1. Load & select your base mesh.

2. Double-click on the MultiMorphControl setup in the Setups palette (press F5 to open the palette).

3. Add your morph targets to the already created cluster slider. (Select Cluster in the list, load your morphs, select the Morph_Slider and use the pulldowns to assign the targets to its channels.

You're good to go!  Go to Animate mode and try it!

This gives you just a little idea of the power of this feature.  For example, another thing you can do if you want to is have one box controller operate more than one slider.  In other words, the left button would operate Slider_1, the middle button would operate Slider_2, etc.  (To do that, set the box controller handles, which are the last items in the Armature-- with the blue dots-- to whichever slider you want.)

 

MorphBlender

Groups

Script Editor - Right-click on a script in the tray (F5) to edit the script.   We are most concerned with how the edit window itself performs, we're not so much concerned with the rest of the windows stuff at this point. Please focus your testing on editing scripts.

 

Script Editor Features:

1) Syntax highlighting (i.e. comments, keywords, preprocessor directives etc.)

2) Built-in function and keyword highlighting (so you know you typed the right name)

3) Auto-indentation (so your code is nice and clean)

 

Bugs/Issues:

1) File->Close doesn't work.

2) File->New and messiah's Edit->New Script... are different (File->New will conform to Edit->New Script...)

3) Window->* doesn't have check mark next to open script (however, you can look at the title bar)

4) Splitter bar between edit and output windows does not work

5) Output window is not hooked up yet

Scripting

Action Script define:

Script Functions

Commands

Palette item names - When item names are clipped, a popup displays the full name.

 

List/Palette item highlighting

 

Particles

 

Graph curve resolution

Global Draw Mode Selection - The top right corner of the World View now has a global draw mode selector (=).  Click it to turn on, then choose the draw mode.

Item List Expand/Collapse

Groups

Miscellaneous

Functions

Fixes

API

Features

Fixes

And don't forget to check out Zoogono for the latest goodies from other users-- there's some great stuff there!

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