United3dArtists

Phase 2 Draft 2
First 99 pages up to chapter 5 - Surfacing

Several links were added but they point to pages beyond the 99 pages here.

There have been recent changes to the Unofficial Update that have not been updated in this section of the manual yet.

Phase 2 Draft 3
First 131 pages up to the New In UU section starting the Red toolbar section.

Just grinding away at it, fixing errors, adding clarifications and making it slightly prettier. Also some detours to improve some of the scripts added in the UU.

Phase 2 Draft 4
First 159 pages finished the Red toolbar and into the Gold toolbar up to point clone
About 70 pages to go before Phase 2 pass is complete.

Phase 2 Draft 5
First 184 pages - constraints, particle system, deformers, mirror matrix, locks and rectangle select
46 pages to go

next up is the layers. I'm going to try to rewrite the layers system so it does not need to clear history

Phase 2 Draft 6
ran through to the end of the manual and then started over from the beginning again because of multiple changes to the UU
most recent updates are up to page 115, the start of the character editor section

There was a style change for the manual so some labels and text will be blank after page 115 because they don't fit in their boxes anymore.

The new workspace layers system is started and maybe it can be added by the end of Phase 3 of the manual. Phase 3 will involve looking for places to add more diagrams and examples and start planning the links to other files. The final step will be integrating it into the existing manuals via the html index and links to the various chapters files.

Phase 2 Draft 7
all pages included, up to date pages up to page 204, start of nurbs section
total of 231 pages

started from the beginning again, adding in a bunch of notes from trueBlue

Phase 2 Draft 8
phase 2 is complete now, last few pages are junk pages that will be removed at the start of the final phase of the manual
I think the next step is to start integrating it into the existing manuals and start editing the html index page to include it

Artist Guide
Object Navigation Widget

"Ctrl + LB click opens the selected object in the Link Editor"

This should be removed

"i + drag any surface = Opens the widget's Additional Shortcuts Help floating panel"

i + drag may be a little misleading
Not sure of a good one word replacement of Drag
To open the Widget's Help panel, you press and hold the keyboard i Key and move the cursor over the widget's mesh

The Object Navigation Widget image used in the document does not have semi transparent triangles

Starting the final version of the manual.
This is meant to be placed inside the PDFMan folder and the ts76_manual.html replaces the original file. The manual works best if the pdf files open in the browser instead of the pdf viewer. This new file has a size of 5Kb, the original was made with MS Word so it had a lot of extra nonsesne and is 65Kb size.

I missed the note.
"Ctrl + LB click opens the selected object in the Link Editor"
This should be removed

Will get to it next time.

Updated up to page 117 which has a video link.
The html file is the same as last time, so no link attached here.
The new video file needs to be placed in \PDFMan\resources\chapter8
The video is a demo of the transfer skinning process. It has no sound and was created by one of the developers during the beta testing cycle.
For me the video won't play from the browser. It just gets downloaded. When viewed from a pdf viewer the video plays in an external player.
I'll need to check to see if there's any way to force it to play from the browser.

I did some research and it looks like the transfer skinning tool would be useful for things like adding clothing to a skinned character or modifying a character to give it a different shape and using the old skinning to produce most of the new skinning. I plan to get some sample cases for the manual and maybe make a video for the manual showing how it all works.