Create Path Animation - doesn't work for limbs??

[Domarius]

Hey every time I animate a human, and move his arm or leg from point A to point B - of course it moves in a straight line between the two points, instead of swinging an arc like it naturally would.

So I have to add in extra keyframes to fake a curve, and it’s ridiculous cluttering up the timeline with all these unweildy keyframes when a path would do much better.

So I tried to follow the path constraint tutorial here;
http://www.metamotion.com/mb_page_assets/3d_paths.html

but when I do the “Create Path Animation” method, I can no longer control the limbs of my character - dragging the movement controls sends the arm in all sorts of wierd directions and it’s literally impossible to place it where I want

[Neill3d]

Hey every time I animate a human, and move his arm or leg from point A to point B - of course it moves in a straight line between the two points, instead of swinging an arc like it naturally would.

So I have to add in extra keyframes to fake a curve, and it’s ridiculous cluttering up the timeline with all these unweildy keyframes when a path would do much better.

So I tried to follow the path constraint tutorial here;
http://www.metamotion.com/mb_page_assets/3d_paths.html

but when I do the “Create Path Animation” method, I can no longer control the limbs of my character - dragging the movement controls sends the arm in all sorts of wierd directions and it’s literally impossible to place it where I want

Let me say that using path animation for human it’s not really right way… Don’t be affraid about making a lot of keyframes or plotting human animation. Just use layers for editing and show trajectory in the viewport.
So, workflow will be like this:
create keyframes for draft looking animation -> plot animation -> add extra details using such helpfull things like pivot, aux effector, layers, constraint and so on -> plot animation -> show trajectory in viewport and on upper layer correct motion trail to make it perfect -> plot animation -> ready

[bclark]

that is what IK does… point to point in any 3d software.

The way to use Mobu to do this is animte ik but interpolate FK.

Set your two keyframes then set the reach for the T to 0 so that the Arm contorls will use the FK skeleton to animate between the keyframes, giving you an arc.

You can also just animate the FK arm skeleton but I like the ik pose/ fk animate approach.

Brad

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