Couple of problems!!

#1

Ive been wanting to try the strech and squash effect since i saw a demo video on autodesk’s site and the guy makes it with zero problems. (the crazy frog character video)

BUT when i do the same steps it simply wont work for me. I even thought it was MY model so i tryed one of the basic ones that comes with the program and it wont work either.

I belive there is something he didnt show in the video and i would like to know what it is.

.-
I also had a problem with curves. I wanted to delete ALL the keyframes from my head since i wanted to re-animate it, so i went to the fcurves panel selected the keyframes from the translation and rotation, and deleted them. BUT the head still holds the animation allthough i deleted all the keyframes.
Is there a way to delete ALL the animation from a selected part .-like deleting the complete head animation or an arm??

.-
I also noticed that allthough i named propperly my joints in maya and the character characterized without problems, it didnt create the “ball” foot control for neither foot, so if i rotate it by hand i simply cant keyframe the ball rotation.

EDIT: I also forgot.

I wanted to test a walk cycle i made in a take, since i made only a couple of steps i wanted to see a LONG walk and i thought it was “easyer” to make the loop in story.

So i opened story and inserted my character, then in the “track Content” i clicked on the (…) icon and looked for “Takes” and draged the take i animated inside the character track

I have the animation in the track, but whenever i try to “loop” it it simply stretches the bar but it doesnt affect the animation at all, and the scale slows down the animation.
I deleted that and also tryed right clicking on the bar and using “insert current take” but still i cant loop it.

I exported the clip and imported it back again into the track, now i can loop it, but it doesnt offset the translation of the character, on each loop it goes back to the starting point.
I imported a walkcycle from the motion templates and it offsets the translation when i loop it, but with the one i made it doesnt offset the translation.
So im preatty lost with this.

Any thoughts?

#2

Charactors is driven by FK and IK,so you have to choose the fk of head ,and delete the animation.

#3

How can i select the IK or FK? I mean, in the fcurves panel there isnt an option for selecting either one

#4

In the charactor controls window,click show,check the fk and uncheck the ik.You’ll find yellow effectors.Select these effectors and edit in the Fcurve window.

#5

Thanks for the info

And i managed to go around some of the problems i posted.

.-The squash and stretch shown in the video i talked about, its a specially setup rig, so those steps shown in the video arent applyed to all squeletons.
So i selected my FK and scaled them with volumetric, but the effect is not really that nice.
In any case, if somebody knows how to setup a rig like in the video (gmk_motionbuilder6_character_animation_basics.swf) from autodesk’s site.

.-
With walk cicles, well ive just gone trough many problems, but managed to get it “done” though the prossess wasnt really straight forward.
i worked around it by using these steps.

for the “loop” to work propperly i imported the animation into story, then exported as clip, then cleared story and imported the exported clip and added it again as a loop (that means i imported twice and placed one following the first clip in secuense), then took the second clip and offseted in Z to match the end of the first wc (the "match button didnt work so i had to do it by hand), then plotted all to a new take, then cleared story again, and imported the new take into story, exported to a new clip, cleared all that and imported the new clip, and finally i solved the problem of the walk nop looping correctly

Actually it is quite troublesome, it should work from the first clip, but i have to offset it somehow to make it work.

.-and fixed the ball problem by adding them manually in the character setup (though its odd the names of the joints where correct, it didnt took them in automaticly)

#6

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