Anim8or Community

This is some good work! Keep it up!

When you say reduce polys are you talking about a certain tool within anim8or? As far as I know there is maybe a script that does that? I don't use scripts though but that might be what you mean. Otherwise, you can always manually reduce polys (it's more fun!) on the model in Point Edit mode. With some know-how you could reduce the polys you have on that model to 1/4th of them manually in about 10 minutes.


Unless you mean you are unable to interact with your model. In that case, you could be working with a subdivision. Or this could be a Group (you cannot edit Groups in Point Edit mode). Or the model could be on a frozen layer.

But if you're looking for an option to just click a button to "reduce polys" then you won't find it within anim8or. Even so, programs that have a function like that still advise that you touch up areas of a model to keep the topology clean, so it's best to learn the old fashioned way of poly reducing.

So I don't want to spam the forum with many topics, so I hope Steve won't mind if I continue this thread with my other works for this topic (anim8or is just darn fun!). Here is the entire unown alphabet modeled in anim8or. And there's a special little animation at the end too!

Also made this guy. It's one of the many enemy designs I've had for a while. (Lowpoly of course)
And a vid of me making it.

So I've been diving deep into this program and getting into the gritty rigging and I have found certain things that are buggy, and some others that can be frustrating.


• The mirror bone function can be uninuitive. Rather than mirroring along the global axis (like the mirror tool in object mode) it seems to create a mirror copy around the bone pivot. Which means having to tweak it by manually adjusting the bones rotation. Not easy to apply when mirroring many bones at a time.
• Editing your model while rigging or when a rig is finished with weights has unexpected effects on the figures bone influences. Basically, if you edit a mesh by extruding, deleting parts, or adding polygons, it will destroy weight painting that you have done in figure mode. This doesn't apply to moving, or scaling in Point Edit mode (verts, edges, faces) but if you do anything that changes the surface of the object, then it will ruin the weights applied to the figure it's associated with. In short, you should Never make any surface changes to a mesh once it has been fully rigged.
• Editing joint limits in Sequence mode makes the bones bend at extreme angles sometimes. This would happen more frequently when i would hit undo, then try to reposition another bone.The previous bone would then instantly snap into an undesirable angle (usually the joint max or min). This would even happen with bones i moved 2 or 3 steps prior. When i tried to remedy this by adjusting or limiting the bones rotation,  it would still occur when moving on to other bones. Basically means although you have the option to see and change a bones limits (min-max angles) in Sequence Mode, it is not advisable to do so. Edits to bone limits should be done in figure mode exclusively unless bones have free or no limits.
The weight paint brush is not as accurate as it seems. Even when maximizing the diameter to 50, as well as putting the strength to 1 (which should give full 100% influence to vertices), the result will still not completely give verts painted over full influence. I find myself dragging my mouse over a loop of verts about 3 times (like a Scrub motion) with the Max brush and Strength settings, and then go into Sequence Mode to bend my bone to see the results, and about half the time it still isn't enough. I realize the closer the + mark of the brush, means more of the influence, but even when zooming in and getting deeply close to a few verts, it takes about 3 paint-overs, check in Sequence mode, not enough influence, return to figure mode, paint over again 2-3 times, go back into Sequence Mode, still not enough influence, back to Figure, paint over again, back to Sequence, much more influence now. Also in between these operations involves having to select the bone over and over again then right click to get the brush out again. This is a consistent issue and makes the weight painting process very tedious. It makes a workflow very stunted.



• Sequence mode can be laggy. I like to make low-poly stuff but even when working with a model with <4000 quads while rotating around the model it will get choppy. It is slightly reduced when not viewing the Bones and The objects at the same time, but having them both visible in the rigging/animation process is not only convenient,  but expected. It is definitely not a graphics issue, it seems to be the program itself. (Ive tested on multiple PCs and laptops). This seems to also happen in scene mode. Especially when having the graph editor open which is a very important thing to view when dealing with animation. Whether it is polycount, Bone count, Object count (although i doubt this) the viewport in Sequence can and will get choppy. Even when working with just 1 active viewport.

I apologize if this seems like I'm ranting (I really like this program). I intent to make tutorials and in the process of applying my amateur skills there seems to be some irregularities. I recently had to redo an entire rig because of the destructive practice of Editing my object after applying weights (which would not be an issue in other software). I'm figuring it all out and am having fun doing so.

I didn't want to make a new post so I'll also add this.

I think I'm going to start posting more anim8or content on YouTube. I remember over a decade ago there were so many users on YT with anim8or stuff. Now it's very dry. I'm going to be the change I want to see for this software. Since it was what made me get started in 3d.

Very simple models (lowpoly) that I put together quickly so that I could practice rigging. I used this program a long time ago but I never got into rigging inside anim8or. However the weight painting is actually very useful! Although somewhat a little too basic, it can still get the job done for simple rigs. Let me know what you guys think!