Character Animation: What Bones features we DO NOT have?

[fxgogo]

I think it is the relationships you set up between your bones. You can do it with coffee, but packages like Maya and Animation master have good set of constraints to set up these relationships.

There is also the deforming of your mesh according to the angle or position of bones. In animation Master it is called smartskin, and is a massive help in getting rid of bad creasing or making muscle movements.

You can do what they do, it just takes a bit more work.

[Grey]

! Okay, that does make a difference :D

Do you know if Gollum has any of those features?

[MJV]

I have Golem and can tell you that it's no solution to Cinema's miserable CA tools. Wait and see what Maxon does in V8.

[Grey]

what exactly does Gollum add to the character tools?

[Caravaggio]

*Still hoping for FK here*

(Just hope if I talk about forward kinematics enough it'll actually happen)

[Grey]

What's FK?

god I feel like a bloody novice these days...

[MJV]

FK is rotating bones down the chain from the anchor to the toe to reach a target, and keyframing the results.

[LucentDreams]

gollum is more for making it quicker and easier to set up the rigs, anyone with some basic scripting abilities can do a lot of what it helps with anyways, btu overall its more of an efficiency thing rather then effectiveness. You can do just as much with or without golem, but it is quicker (and a little less frustrating) with, but overall its not really adding new CA fetures at al. It won''t deal with any of the issues mentioned really.

[Grey]

So with FK you rotate one bone, and the bones down the line rotate the same amount in relation to the first bone?

I'm not sure I understand...

[Caravaggio]

Say you have a sting of bones, A B and C, where a is the top in the heirarchy. With the current IK system, you grab C and move it and the others move accordingly, but the axis of a is an anchor that doesn't move. With FK, you grab A and the end point of C (at least from what I undertsand) become the axis/anchor that you move everything around, this is good for when you want to move a body, but don't want to move a foot that may be on the ground or a hand grasping a cup. So you can go back and correct posture and balance of characters quickly and don't have to worry about thinking ahead to much. Very nice.

[Grey]

I think I'd have to see an example in order to completely understand.

I haven't yet set up an IK chain in cinema, I guess I better because it sounds like the end of the IK Chain won't anchor anything? I don't understand the point of IK if this is true.

Here's how i'm used to setting up IK:

Having a "Body" bone which is the center, then comes the hip which is the IK anchor for the each of the legs to the feet..

Move the hip, the feet don't move, move the feet, the hip doesn't move. Move the body, everything moves.

Are you saying this isn't currently possible in Cinema?

[Caravaggio]

Are you using the rotation tool or the IK tool? If you move the foot the hip should move - unless you've got an anchor tag on there which need buffer bones to keep the whole thing from going imobil.

[anobrin]

MAXON should take a hint from softimage3D
and include some prebuilt rigs ranging from simple to complex
in the primitives menu

and slider based controls for character movement like
animation master, and lightwave




http://66.70.166.29/promo/DinoAE.mov

[Grey]

Does Softimage have those controls built in?

There's quite a bit of control we have now, and other than my huge complaint about endpoints on the bones (I hope MAXON is listening :D) the weighted vertex tag gives a lot of power to bones. It's mainly a matter of getting settup right in my very humble opinion.

There's also a lot to be said for using numerical values for rotation.

The slider based controls you spoke of, BTW, are mimicked quite well with the rotation handlebars if you're used to them.

One of the things I really love about Cinema is that those handlebars instantly show you which value you're changing... so if I'm unsure which numerical value I need to change, all I have to do is rotate it a bit, then enter the value manually.... very cool.

[fxgogo]

Grey...

I might be leading you down a strange path, but have a look at some of the tutorials for Animation Master and Rigging. I remember there being a lot of theory on rigging, which helped me.

http://www.hash.com/sherwood/main/links.asp?id=7

Good Luck. Are you clear on the difference between FK and IK now?

[Grey]

DOH forward kinematix!

I didn't understand what F stood for :D

any rigging link will help! Thanks.

BTW, can you take a look at the rigging forum? Just posted something there I hope to get answered.

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