CGTalk - Mirroring Poses

Cthulhu

01-31-2003, 03:03 PM

Hi all!

I ran into a problem while animating my character within MAX5. I always used character studio for my character animations, but for our new project, we decided to use a normal bone skeleton because cs has too many limitations. But now i found one big thing missing.. in cs, i can copy a pose and paste it mirrored to the biped (ie. the left arm gets the motion of the right arm), which can save a lot of time, but i haven't found a way to do this outside of cs. my character is completly controlled by helper objects with IK and stuff, so the bones have no motion on them, just the helper. I found a great script (attrKeyer from CometCartoons) which lets me copy/paste poses, but no mirroring.. does anyone know how to do this?

thanks a lot!

greetz

cthulhu

LFShade

01-31-2003, 04:25 PM

What you're asking for is entirely possible through scripting, but since character rigs can be so diverse it's difficult (if not impossible) to write a "catch all" pose mirroring script. It depends heavily on how the pivots are oriented for the various controls of the rig, and how the whole thing is parented together. In other words, a pose mirroring solution would likely need to be custom-scripted for your rig(s). I recently did this for one of my rigs, but it wasn't quick or easy!

I'm still toying with the notion of writing a generic UI for pose mirroring, that would allow the end-user to map left-right control associations and set up mirror axes for them individually. Only problem is that I don't usually have the kind of time I would need for such a project. If any advanced MAXScripters are reading this, perhaps you'd like to run with this idea? Bobo?

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