CS4 : Function Curves

[Mahlon]

Look into the Workbench. Your function curves are displayed there.

Mahlon

[pluMmet]

Mahlon- I thank you for your help...however I've just followed the workbench tutorials in the CS4 Tutorial book and it's not of help. Or perhaps you can tell me how the workbench could preform the action that I've discribed. From what I've read it's for solving spikes in in animation and of no use for key positions in xyz.


So the question still stands "Where are the 'Quantian Cruves' that where supposed to be in CS4?"

[Mahlon]

Dude, they're right there in the Workbench. Select your body part in the left list and the curves show up in the window pane. There's a drop down box which lets you change from Quat Curve (which would be your rotation) to Position Curve which would obviously be your position; in Position Curve, you can define which axis order you want to show, world, biped root or scene root. It's easiest to understand if you choose world.

Mahlon

[pluMmet]

Thx Mahlon, sounds like that'll do it.

[CoolmoeDee]

I've been hearing that the curves display is fairly slow in cs4. I was wondering what you guys think of the curves display?

[Mahlon]

Yeah, it's pretty slow. I try to do most of my tweaking still with keys rather than the curves.... Not until the workbench is a faster. Hopefully they will release an update to fix bugs and maybe add those tangents. Then I'd be more willing to go into the workbench.

Mahlon

[Ls3D]

Have you considered setting a plant key in the object space of the pelvis for this scenario? I think you could avoid a lot of tweaking.

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

:cool:

[pluMmet]

ls3D- I'm not sure what you mean...but keep in mind that the hips will swing a bit. Please share what you mean :)

[Ls3D]

Well just like the feet can be locked to the ground with 'plant keys' (a series of particular keys/constraints), so can the hands. Additionally we have the option of choosing an object that we want to temporarily sick to... Much to my surprise I recently found that I could choose a biped bone as the 'object space' object for that attachment. This feature is in the IK section & is a list pop-down with an arrow for choosing the object of attachment (read the help on this feature).

I've got a big render burning right now or I would test your application. If attaching to the pelvis does not give you the results you want try using the COM (center of mass - if this is legal). You could even use a tail bone (positioned forward like a pecker) although you would need to delete any biped generated keys.

Let me know if you have any trouble.

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

:cool:

[Mahlon]

Ls3d,
That's a cool tip. I hadn't thought about attaching them to biped bones themselves. I think you'd have to attach a null object between the hands and the biped bone in order to be able to save the .bip file. But if you use nulls and contrain your hands to them, you can't see the motion in the mixer because there's only one key set for the hands, and that's the original linking key. I can't think of a way to accomplish this for use in the mixer or motion flow. Any ideas?

Mahlon

[PokeChop]

Like mentioned before, in the key info section of the command panel when using CS, there is a section to link the selected biped bone to an object and let that object constrain the bone during the time the IK Blend is set to 1.0. Now the only thing wrong with this method I could find was you can only select 1 object to link the bone to because when you go to the little up arrow to select another object (say you want to link to the pelvis frames 1-30 and then upper spine frames 31-60) you can't because CS says all your keys will be reset to the new object you are linking to with an IK Blend of 0.0, no matter if this object is part of the biped or not. To me this = not good, but oh well.

A way to get the hands to stay at the pelvis area (pockets) while he is walking is to use a planted key for the hand. Place your biped hand bone at the pelvis area at frame 0 then goto the plant hand key area and set a key there then go to, say, frame 30 and while the plant hand function is still active, set another key. Turn off the plant key function after doing this. Now from key 0 to 30 that hand will not move from that pelvis no matter how much animation the rest of the biped is doing.

Anyway, I created a quick biped walking with the above mentioned solution in CS4 and it seems to do what you are looking for I think. Biped walks for 60 frames and at frame 30 lifts his hand out of his pocket and waves. From frame 1-30 the left hand bone is IK Blended to the pelvis bone and at frame 40 is IK Blended to world space with an amount set to .5 to gradually get the arm up in the air. If I set it to 1.0 in world at frame 40 the arm would be too snappy to get up there. Then at frame 60 the left hand bone is now set to an IK Blend at world space of 1.0 because I want the hand there until I want mr. biped to bring it back down and fumble for his loose change in his pocket again.

I hope this helps in some way.

[pluMmet]

thank you all for your time. I think I have what I need now to make it work. :beer:

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