Character Studio question...help needed!

[AnimBot]

I had this exact same problem when I had to animate a character for work. As far as the movement in the Z I don't have an answer on how to fix that. I had posted this same exact problem on discreets sight and never recieved a good answer on how to fix this problem. As for the rotation of the character it's going to take some testing on your part to get some good results but I'll try to lead you in the right direction. Grab the select tool in your motion flow graph right click on the transition arrow. It should bring up a window with tools to adjust the interpolation between clips. On the top left corner there are you should see length and angle. Length is the amount of frames for the transition (Since I do game animations I usually set that to Zero since I make my own transitions). Then there's angle this is where you can adjust the rotation of the of your character. One thing I've found with motion flow is the more clips you have in the script the more your character rotates. So adjust these numbers sometimes you may have to use negative numbers. The Last thing is the Source Clip and Destination clip. The start frame in Source Clip dictates where you want the transition to start based on the clip you are transitioning from. The start frame in Destination Clip tells where the transition will start in the clip you're transitioning to. In the end I actually ended messing around with all these parameters and linking my COM to a dummy and animating the dummy to snap him in place from the wierd Z movement. Hope this helps you out a little.

[AXE]

thanks for your help! My worst problem was the "bad Z axis movement", but your post was helpful. I hope someone else who knows of this problem comes out and tell us how to fix it.

byez,
AXE

[sam]

On the bottom of the Motion Flow Script panel there are several useful spinners for correcting this sort of thing.

Start Position X

Start Position Y

Start Position Z

Start Rotation

With those you can put the biped initially wherever you could possibly need him.

Another option: If you want the first motion in the motion flow script to "stick" in space and define where the biped starts, you should make sure there is a key for all of the COM tracks in the first frame of that motion.

Additional tip: For games you sometimes need motions stacked one after the other that snap back to the same starting position and orientation. You can do this by adding a one frame "correcting" key directly after each motion which is basically a neutral standing position at the world origin. Each motion is then normal except for the last frame where over the course of a single frame, the biped zips back into a standing neutral position at the world origin.

You can now take any of these modified motion clips and stack them with any other modified motion clip to have the motion flow scripts play with each new motion snapping back to the world origin.

sam

[Sinistar83]

Hmm every time I try motion flow mode and mess around with the transitions, I still get the "rotation issues". Sometimes I get the rotation to work between transitions, but the feet and ankles are usually twisted 90 degrees, It's really weird & frustrating at the same time. :(

[AXE]

I know...I hope they fixed it in the soon-to-be-released version 4 of Char. Studio.

AXE

[Sinistar83]

Thats great to hear!! Another good reason to upgrade. :D

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