pose to pose - effector not storing

[Atyss]

Something you could try is to branch select the top model of the rig and do the Store Skeleton Pose that way. It always works flawlessly here.


Cheers
Bernard

[toonshady]

Hi, I think somehow arms of the xsi biped rig is FK only. maybe it's a flaw. The reason I think so is that once i set the first key of the entire rig, I loose my IK on the arms. I simply can not move the effectors, instead I have to rotating the arm bones.

[Atyss]

You must set the keyframes in the control objects, not the effectors directly. The rig is meant to be fully IK, and even allows to blend between IK and FK.



Cheers
Bernard

[theboykidney]

hey toonshady - i had that problem too, a real pain. i sorted it tho by making sure the blend was full IK and inheritance blend was up full too, i think i also had to check and uncheck a couple of boxes in there as well.....

Atyss,
You must set the keyframes in the control objects, not the effectors directly.
can you enlighten me on this?! not sure what you mean by the control objects.....:thumbsup:
Cheers

[Atyss]

Sorry my error. Indeed in that rig you must keyframe the effector (the big box at the wrist).

Personnally I prefer to leave the effector untouched and use a control object instead. A control object be anything you want, in this case I generally use circles. Constrain in position the effector to the control object, and there you go.

On the image above, every object that is not gray (the mesh) or dark green (the bones) are control objects.

http://www.bernardlebel.com/img_remote/Enigmus/gallery/Enigmus_Rig.jpg


Cheers
Bernard

[toonshady]

Hi Atyss, I think the xsi biped rig from the 2.x version has a control object to drive the ik arm as oppose to an effector. Sure that you can implement your own control objects once you converted the rig. But one little thing is that the converted rig is tie with the stuff in the synoptic view like selections, keyframing, plot pose, and etc. I guess I gotta go in there and tinker with the synoptic stuff one of these days.

theboykidney hey toonshady - i had that problem too, a real pain. i sorted it tho by making sure the blend was full IK and inheritance blend was up full too, i think i also had to check and uncheck a couple of boxes in there as well.....


Interesting. I did mess around with those blend options in properties. But I didn't have any success. I should try again.

[theboykidney]

heres what i used...make sure not to key any of the sliders, it had *bad* effects [for me anyway].....hope it works!
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/neil.kidney/settings.jpg

[ggg]

Originally posted by theboykidney
heres what i used...make sure not to key any of the sliders, it had *bad* effects [for me anyway].....hope it works!

???
eg. keying the IK blend aids in mixing between IK and FK action clips

toonshady, its not a flaw in the biped rig, most animators prefer FK on arms, you should be able to just slide it back to full IK

this is noted in MISners annotation of the Biped model, just select it and press F3:

Biped Rig for XSI 3.0
By Michael Isner > Summer 2001 – Fall 2002

------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIPS FOR ANIMATING WITH THIS RIG
------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) A simple diagram explaining the controllers can be found in
Netview > XSI Local > Library > Model > Man Rig (READ ME).
2) Many of the controllers can zero out to their default position. Hit Shift R to reset the current marking or Ctrl-Shift-R to Reset the full transform.
3) Never Animate with Constraint Compensation (CnsComp) or Child Transform Compensation (ChldComp) on. Doing this can pull the rig apart.
4) If you want to change the control icon size or shape, don’t scale the icons up. Doing this will add scaling to your animation and make it hard to swap animation later. Instead, tag all the points of your icon and scale or translate the points, then freeze the icon geome try.
5) There is a “Character_Controls” Property Page under the rig’s model. It has sliders to scale the spine and neck and the foot roll angle. For example if you wanted to do make the foot step out a cigarette, you would key the FootRollAngle to 0 and animate the FootRoll.
6) The rig uses Marking Sets to define which parts of the character are keyed, plotted and posed by the synoptic. I recommend being familiar with the marking sets workflow to animate or adjust this rig. For example one fast keying workflow is to select objects and hit Alt K.
7) You can access the IK/FK blend slider selecting a chain element and hitting Ctrl R. If you key blending a lot you may want to consider making a single Custom Parameter Set with proxy parameters to your blends.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE RIG SYNOPTICS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Hit F3 with any part of the rig selected to open biped synoptic. There are two different synoptics depending on whether you choose IK or FK legs.
2) When selecting in the synoptics diagrams, you can press:
Alt > to branch select
Shift > to add to your current selection
Ctrl > to toggle your pick
Shift/Ctrl > to remove from your selection
3) The Poses tab will only work if you work with a default rig and proportions. It primarily serves as an template for character TD’s to set-up character specific poses. The reset and hands poses will work regardless of rig type or proportions.
4) If you want to study these synoptics and modify them to make your own, they are located at:
[XSI install directory] \Data\XSI_SAMPLES\Synoptic\Rig
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TIPS FOR THE CHARACTER TD
------------------------------------------------------------------------

1) After generating the rig from the proportional guide, make sure you save a back-up of the guide somewhere. You never know if half-way through the project you’ll need to come back an get a different rig at the same proportions.
2) To envelope this character, weight to the group “envelope_group”. The contents will change based on your rigging options. You can save a lot of time enveloping in XSI by learning how to model on an enveloped character using “Disable From Here” in the operator stack, and learning how to re-position deformers after assignment using Envelope > Set Reference Poses. Details on both are in the manuals.
If you have multiple envelope objects, I recommend weighting all of them to the full envelope group. Doing so will make it easier to weight paint across the multiple surfaces.
3) Learn to make use of the Shadow Icons on bones, effectors and roots. They can make the animators life much easier. They can be found by selecting a chain element, hitting enter and modifying the “Shadow Bone Display”. In some instances when using this you will also want to change the Bone Disply to “None”. By using these control icons you can setup rigs when IK and FK have bi-directional control for both manipulation and blending.
4) If you choose to use Bounding Volumes, you will probably want to adjust their position, rotation and scale to get them into the poses that work optimally for you character. I recommend keying them into place when you’ve found those transforms. If you ever need to get back to the original positions where they were generated (for example to modify or reapply the envelope) you will find an Action Source called “BoundingVolumeDefaultPose” which you can select and ApplyAction.
5) The bone roots are aligned to zero out in the poses that they were created with (identical to drawing a chain and running: Skeleton > Align Root with First Bone. This makes it easier to zero out the first bones when animating in FK. The exception is the arm root which is at 45 degrees to reduce gimbel lock.
6) Keep in mind you can also change the order of rotations in this version of XSI, which can be useful for reducing gimble in different character scenarios. The order is found on the local transform tab, just select and object and hit Ctrl-K.
7) If you are new to XSI, some tools I recommend becoming familiar with are:
a) Show Relations (Shift S > Attributes Tab) lets you see your constraints, and expressions.
b) Chain Critical Zone in the same Tab to show the orientation plane of how chains are controlled in IK.
c) Pose Based Deforms (under Shape > link deform with orientation) is a good way to do quaternion based shape corrections overtop of your enveloping.
d) Scripted Operators. This is an amazing way to proto-type rigging algorithms through scripting, and since it uses the same API as C++ it will be much easier to compile them later.
e) For complex template based weighting where you want to copy from one envelope to another (or many) of different geometry, you should check out my Copy Envelope tool in XSI NET

------------------------------------------------------------------------
COMPONENT DETAILS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
~~~~~~~the Spine~~~~~~~

1) The depth of the spine and chest rotation are controlled by the yellow and blue nulls in the middle of the chest called: “ChestDepth” and HipDepth. These are constrained into place, but the depth can be modified by moving them in Compensation, and can also be animated for something extreme like an explosion reaction or a person being hit by a bowling ball. If you think of the spine as 4 point curve, the depth nulls are the middle two points.
2) The default neck also has a quaternion spine and the depth controllers are called “head_depth” and “neck_depth”.
3) Spines can be generated as a component using Skeleton > Create Spine
4) By default all the vertebra have a linear rotation distribution. For example if you have three vertebra, the roll distribution will be 1/4, 2/4, 3/4 between the chest and hip. If you want to modify this to different values, Just:
a) Select vertebra in the explorer.
b) Open the Kinematics > Constraints > PathCns > Point At – UpVector > X
c) Double click on the text “SpinePointAt” and modify the slider percentage.

5) More details can be found in the article “Introducing the Isner Spine” at www.isner.com

~~~~~~~the Arms~~~~~~~

1) Many IK/FK blending scenarios require the hand controller blending between having a free transform and being constrained to the forearm. For example, when a character is running and grabs onto a wall to jump over it:

a) Because it’s easier to animate a run with good whip by keying rotations you will want the hand
controller to align with the orientation to the forearm for this part of the animation.
b) When the character reaches for the wall and grabs onto it, at this point you want the hand
controller to orient to meet the surface it grabs onto.

This is a really easy setup in XSI 3.0. Just:

a) select part of the arm.
b) Hit Ctrl R.
c) Under the “Blend Effector Rotation Against Bone” tab. Click on “Link with FK/IK Blending”
d) Now when you are in FK the effector will constrain to the forearm, when you are in IK you will be free to key/constrain/manipulate the orientation.


2) If you choose Forearm Roll Division, the creation script will take care of the setup for you. You may notice that this setup only has a range from –180 to 180 on the forearm roll. This was done to make it as fast as possible: although it was possible to set it up with a greater range like the spine, it’s extremely rare for people to animate hands rolling beyond this 360 degree range. However certain setups may require you adjust exactly where the center of this seam line is. To do so:
a) Select the hand bone, ie: “LHand” or “Rhand” and open it in the explorer.
b) Double click on the “Roll_Compensation” parameter and tweak the “roll_offset” slider.

~~~~~~~the Feet~~~~~~~

If you ever need to re-proportion the feet, it’s tricky but it can be done. Definitely the easier way is to just get a guide to the right proportions and re-generate the foot. But if you’re in corner do the following:
a) Unhide the group “hidden”
b) Move the pink nulls to the new positions for the foot. You need to translate them from the top of the hierachy down. So move the toe first, then the mid, then the ankle.
c) Next move the grey box “LeftToeTarget” (or “RightToeTarget”) to match the position of the toe.
d) Now Select the different foot bones and effectors and Skeleton > Move Joint/Branch to match the bones to the pink nulls. It will be easier with point snapping and the option to snap to centers on.
e) Rehide the hidden group.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES FOR CHARACTER RIGGING EXPERTS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
These scripts load up models from the folder:
[XSI install directory]\Data\XSI_SAMPLES\Models
You might also consider modifying the source models like “Biped_Rig.emdl” (you probably want to make a .old backup) so that it has the eye-look-at or whatever setup you find yourself building over the character tools.

XSI 3.0 has a workflow for character re-targeting build in. If you have motion on a old rig of different proportions, just apply it to your new rig and run Character > Motion Deformation. You can then modify the curves to meet the new proportions, and even script that workflow to run in batch. You may also want to play with tweaking the motion deformation results to turn mo-cap into crowd animation defined by paths on a terrain.

If you are interested in how quaternions work and how to experiment with their use in XSI, you can study this in more detail in the article “10th Level Magic User Quaternion Spells” at www.isner.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------
USING SHADOW RIGS
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shadow rigs are included for the purpose of transferring animation from these rigs to:
a) A game engine
b) A crowd engine like the RTK
c) Another 3D package
d) A simpler hierarchy for the purpose of playback speed.

For example, to send animation to the RTK:
a) Animate your rig with a box shadow hierarchy.
b) Plot the animation on the box hierarchy using its synoptic.
c) If you want to preview the animation, unglue the binding by selecting the box hierarchy “GlobalSRT” in branch and Character > Constraints Outside Model Boundaries > Deactivate.
d) Transfer that animation. The box hierarchy is ideal for this because it’s the minimal hierarchy that you can use to see your transforms (the null hierarchy alone is hard preview)
e) Envelope a character to a null hierarchy of the same proportions.
f) Now you can bring the motion from the crowd package back into XSI and use reference models to switch between the box hierarchy as your reference model low res and the null weighted character as your high res.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
RIG PHILOSOPHY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The intention of the character menu was to create a system that responds to the range of rigging found worldwide, and speeds up the process of getting to a production quality result.

Another goal was to replace many of the scenarios that required double and triple chains and replace them with software tools and complied operators. This results in a rig that’s faster to scrub through animation and increases the number of characters you can open in a single scene.

For simple projects what the menu generates may be enough, but for big projects it’s expected this will act as a base for further setup and tweaking. This is not a black-box solution, it’s meant to be ripped apart. Many may use the system only for the purpose of getting a set of arms or feet.

The goal was to minimize the amount of redundant work setting up a character which requires a lot of fussy details to ensure good: naming conventions, symmetry, color coding, control scripts and hierarchy analysis. Often an error in one of these areas only becomes apparent near the end of a production so the hope is to reduce some of that pain.

XSI is an amazing environment for creating characters so I hope people learn from these examples and explore what’s possible. Constraints in particular are an area of XSI that I feel has a lot of hidden possibilities.

I’m sure many of you get as much of a kick out of pretending to create life as much as I do… really it’s one of the first stages in the profession of robot builder. Good luck with your experiments and projects :)

[toonshady]

Thanks. It isn't a flaw after all. I did read the annotation long ago. But I guess I must have missed his point.

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