CGTalk - flex motion and IK questions

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ernpchan

07-20-2005, 01:29 AM

I'm new to Messiah and I'm trying to put a rig together. I have flexmotion on a chain of bones and when I switch from setup to animate it looks like my model gets shrunk in Z a little. When I disable the flexmotion effect my model keeps it's shape. What's causing this?

Is there a way to have the bone chain fade between FK and flexmotion influence?

Is there a way to get the geometry to stay stuck to the bones? Right now the geometry runs through the curve when you pull the control points far off. I'd like to have the end of my arm stay connected to the end of my curve. Think of an arm like Doctor Octopus. I'd like to keep the claw end stuck in a place in world space as the body moves around.

Is there an equivalent as match goal orientation for Messiah? I come from a LW background. Using messiah's ik is great but what's the equivalent for match goal orientation. I have Joe Cosman's videos and they're great but I don't like how with his ankle setup you can pull the ankle off of the foot. Is there a good alternative for this?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer. I'm really looking forward to using messiah more for animation.

Ernest

ernpchan

07-22-2005, 01:29 AM

Does anyone have any hints about the flexmotion questions? I'm trying to use flexmotion and it either makes my object shorter or longer depending on what I change the Match Tool setting to.

Thanks.

Ernest

ThomasHelzle

07-22-2005, 11:07 AM

When you activate the Flexmotion effect, the bones are aligned along the curve, if your curve-points aren't aligned perfectly in setup they will move a bit. I would call that normal.
What would you expect to happen? If there is more to it, please provide some images or even the scene file to make it possible to understand the problem.

You can't normally fade the flexmotion effect. I don't know if there is a trick to do it. I don't use Flexmotion often. In the current version of messiah, I have the very strong feeling that it is mostly broken - all the buttons in the interface don't do anything here.

Since Flexmotion deals with the full Hierarchy you assign it to, you would have to make the Hand or Claw a separate bone structure that you move to the end of the spline with an expression like MoveTo. Then it will no longer be part of the Flex thing.

There isn't a pre-made match goal orientation button. You would need to use an expression like Align or maybe even better CopyChan. Other than in LW, Expressions are easy to use, and blazingly fast - until you use several hundred of them you may even fail to notice any slowdown... ;)

LockToGoal and LockedGoal are the two expressions who deal with the goal behaviour.

The sooner you dive into expressions in messiah, the sooner you will start to have fun :)

I hope this helps you getting along,

Cheers,

ernpchan

07-22-2005, 04:17 PM

Thanks Thomas.

I'll recheck my flexmotion setup. I thought I had my points and bones all lined up numerically but I'll double check.

Do you know if you can have the flexmotion control points sit in world space? Since the effect is attached the hierarchy they sit in local space.

Ernest

ThomasHelzle

07-22-2005, 04:56 PM

Just drag the points to wherever you want them to be... that's the beauty of messiah...
Cheers,

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