After talking with the folks from Hash, I am a little confused about what a relationship is.
From what I assume, I am guessing that a relationship is like a pose slider that works on its own without you having to move a slider. ( After you create the Relationship )
What I would like to be able to do with my model, is to move ‘her’ jawbone around and automatically have the models mouth stretch to the correct shape.
The fellow that I spoke with at Hash made it seem as though this is what a Relationship does, and said there is a tutorial called something like " Relationship causes a smile " ( or something similar )
I went to the AM Matrix and could not find any info. Anyone know where to find any tutorials on relationships ? ( on the CG kind )
A relationship makes one thing chage when another thing change so you could use it to get some muscle motion when the jaw moves. Poses and smartskins are both types of relationship which AM will go some way towards setting up for you. To make the mouth area distort when the jaw opens, you could use a smartskin (look at you manual). I prefer cp weighting for this particular job though (look at the online manual).
Relationships cover so much that very few users will max out what they can do. They are VERY usable. A constraint is a relationship. A smartskin is a relationship. A pose is a relationship.
Say you wanted to make a realistically behaving eye. With a bone for the eye, and a bone for each eyelid, you could create a relationship that says, when the eye looks up, at a certain point, the bottom lid starts to move up. Same for looking down and the upper lid. The relationship would make it happen automatically whenever the eye looked in that direction…
Dave Rodgers once told me about a relationship he set up where an animated displacement map would move to differenet frames depending on the angle of rotation at a joint. This would be for veins standing out as the elbow contracts…
The Hash guys are so smart that they can come up with this highly usable stuff without having any idea how it’s going to be applied…
If there is one ( more ) gripe that I have about using this fantastic software, it would be that when new features are added to the program, no instructions are provided on how to use them.
( Please someone tell me I’m wrong and point me to them. )
So there really are no tutorials on how to create relationships ?
Animated texture maps sliding over the surface of the ‘skin’ …
It works ? Cool !
I thought of this exact same idea a few days ago, but just never tested it. ( I was inspired by Tarons’ creature that he created for Messiah - the one that says " I like to scare little dogs, it’s fun. )
How is Tarons’ setup different ? Is that an animated map that we are seeing displacing the skin ?
My idea was to use a few sets of texture maps and use vary their percentage of opacity over time .
How is David Rodgers idea that you mentioned created ? ( I guess my next step is to contact David Rodgers. )
A Relationship is better understood as a little action, which is embedded into the model.
NOTE: Relationships are model-specific; they cannot control other models.
On the Hash website you’ll find a link to Online Reference, listed in the Support area. Click on that. You’ll get a page with a link to an array of HTML documents, that correspond to different versions of A:M. Click on the link to your version. On the webpage that appears, you’ll notice a file structure on the left. Expand the Projects item. Then expand the Objects item, and expand the Models item. Relationships are a feature of models, and this is where information about them is located. Expand the Relationships item, and you’ll find extra background poop about them.
Relationships are like little action files. They CAN be driven “automatically,” by translating or rotating a bone, for example. Alternatively, Relationships can be driven manually, like with a pose slider. A Smartskin is just a Relationship that does its stuff when you rotate a bone. A Pose is a Relationship that does its stuff when you move a slider. Relationships allow any aspect of a model to animate any other aspect of the same model.
Additional info about Relationships can be found here:
'Hope this helps.
Sincerely,
Carl Raillard
PS: On this forum I wrote a recipe how to create a Relationship driven by a bone translation … but I can’t seem to find it! :surprised Does this forum eat old posts?
Hmmm - surely you must be joking about someone saying that Relationships are so new that they aren’t documented.
a) They are a core feature and perhaps one on the most powerful levers for Hash’s greatest selling point.
b) They’ve been around since v9, a feature that was bought with great struggle and stability-related pain (since they are a main reason that version was overhauled from v8).
Oops - should add that Relationship is simply a cause-and-effect (usually one-directional, so it’s really a function) between property-a and property-b.
Smartskin - Property a is the rotation of the underlying bone, which drives a relative change in position of mesh points
Constraint - Property a is the state of the main bone (rotation, scale, position) and property b is on the 2nd bone (rotation, scale, position), etc.
Pose - Property a is the value of the slider bar and property b is whatever you programmed into the pose.
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