Future of forward/inverse kinematics?

#21

Did anyone look at the video?

#22

Yeah what you are talking about does sound very similar to Biped in character studio for 3dsmax. It has the locks for arms and feet, and if I remember corectly (im using maya now :scream: ) all you needed to do to go between Ik and Fk with the Character Studio is just start rotating joints to get some FK control… or if you want… just select the hand and drag it arround and there you get your IK.

I wonder if someone could actually do an in-depth comparison of Mirai’s animation tools and the ones found in the Character Studio package.

Real interesting stuff.

#23

I personally also wish maya had something like this (or at least an option of some sort)…BUT I would still like to keep the graph editor. There is something about playing with curves that I feel is very important in animation. BUT the fk/ik thing is still gnarly when you have to change timing and whatnot…takes ALOT of organization and is very frustrating when a director wants the timing changed. I’ve seen a lot of videos using Mirai and I always loved the fact that they could do stuff like you explained in your first post Jason. Makes total sense to me. Could be very helpful and possibly push animation in another direction (ie while also making complicated animations a tad be easier to grasp) I’m all for it. :bounce: :bounce: :smiley:

They should just merge Mirai and Maya is what I think. :buttrock:

#24

Originally posted by ambient-whisper
[B]

personally what I am after is something like this.

say i animate a characters leg inside the viewport. i use Ik or FK to pose it. i can then after placing a few keys turn on the curve for that joint and i will see a curve inside the viewport as i make it. i would then also be able to use spline like tools to edit the path of the spline. and do stuff like refine it… delete points… this would translate to Fcurves… but in 3d form. much like trajectories… but would happen more interactively… and syncd with my skeleton. so if i delete a key in the animation editor… i would see a vertex in the spline dissapear. stuff like that would be nice.

cheers. [/B]

Yeah…I too have been telling co-workers this idea. It’s like in Maya if you would create a motion trail from say your root joint so you can see your arcs/paths etc. in some kinda line form. BUT you can’t modify it unless you modify your keys, only then will it update the curves. It would be awesome if you could have some sort of representation of your keys on that curve in the viewport and you could manipulate them to get the curves you want and your animation would update from changing those curves. It would be more like a more complicated graph editor only in the viewport in 3d. Glad to hear that I’m not the only person who’s thought of something like this. :smiley: :beer:

#25

Only thing about Biped, if I remember correctly sinse I haven’t used it for about 4 years, is that it is very limited animation wise.

Sure it works great for humans, but last time I used it, anything beyond a Biped creature (ie: 4 arms, 3 legs, A monkey, dinosaur and so on), your pretty much screwed, because you can’t just add joints and control features to it, so you give up the control for more user friendly animation, which is not really the future of animation I would hope. (I haven’t used the latest CS studio so maybe they have improved it).

#26

Just saw the video. Yeah it seems like mirai in a way of moving things. Very much like sculpting or stop motion animation. Seems like with that ghosting option you proly wouldn’t necessarily NEED a graph editor. What did Sega use this for and what’s it doing now, collecting dust??? Looks rad to me.

#27

The great thing about this idea (I don’t know if character studio can do this), but you can lock down other parts of hte body besides feet and hands… for example, an elbow. How many times have you wanted to have a character rest their elbow on a table & have to make a funky setup just to handle that case? Or what about knees? I know a certain character (Gollum! Gollum!) which would have been a lot easier to animate if I could lock the knees down instead of having to counter-animate & key frame by frame to get the knees to stay in one spot.

The nice thing about mirai’s sytem (from what I’ve seen) is that you can lock ANY part of the body… not just hands and feet, but fingers, toes, knees, elbows, torso, root, etc etc.

-jason

#28

The sega app will be release during summer. :slight_smile: cant wait to see more of it. looks really neato :d

as for mirai. id actually like for the skeleton to be more customizable. for example. you can make it look however you want… customise it to your creature… add as many bones as you want where you want. theres base quadraped/ ticks/human skeletons. but umm it would be nice if i could get below the skeleton level customizations down to the bone level. so i could see the full structure of the skeleton inside the geometry graph ( kinda like outliner+layer editor in one ) that way i could do some parenting tricks… etc.

im not sure if bay had the beta for mirai. but maybe he could tell you if they were working on that particular area. im sure it could be done if they tried.

one neato thing in mirai is that the skeleton is actually geometry. so it treats joints like verticies, bones like edges… etc.
this allows a bunch of neat things like growing selections … magnet deforms of the skeleton .
Ik scale. so what ik scale does really is…since joints are verticies…it just scales the distance between points. and the bones solve themselves to reach. but they dont stretch.:slight_smile: its nice. theres IK rotations too… but those i have no idea how to use properly. maybe bay could fill you or us in sometime.:slight_smile:

also since the skeletons are geometry… you can use the morph system on it. so you pose a skeleton… save… you can then use the magnets to pose a selected area with a falloff…
…etc.
]
(edit)

btw. im not sure why everyone is saying you cant use the graph editor to edit curves… you can… but you have to decompose your pose to pose channel into multiple curves… so then you can finetune them inside the curve editor. …then you can compose that into a mocap channel. resample curves to have an N number of keyframes… etc.

the area where this fails in mirai, is that they didnt give good managing tools for working with complex skeletons that have a crazy amount of bones. if you use the script graph you could make it a lot easier on yourself since you can hide any parts you dont want and work on specific areas… but for some reason or another… it doesnt update properly inside the mixer. ( area with all the sliders ).

:confused:

[edit number-2]
got a lot of the video done :slight_smile: i think ill just finish it off by making a short pose to pose animation. ( but i promise itll suck…since im no animator :d )

#29

The Mirai workflow has some huge plusses. It’s keyframe management always struck me as a bit anemic, though. But I did dig the whole stop-mo feel of it.

Back when Big Idea used to be an animation studio, I was heading up some character rigging R&D for a future film (which won’t be made) and Michael Comet and I kinda figured a simpler arm IK/FK system that didn’t require switching, but allowed the animator to be in both modes at once. (It was actually more Michael than me :slight_smile: It ended up being tons easier to rig, too. It just took some re-programming of the brain to get out of the IK/FK switching conventional wisdom. The crux of it was to set up the control objects for the arms in FK like normal, and then just parent the IK hand control under the forearm control. If you wanted the hand to be in FK, just use the rotation channels. If you wanted IK, you could tranlsate the hand away from it’s 0-0-0 default and the IK would kick in as well. Meanwhile you could still do FK by rotating any of the arm controls up the heirarchy (like the forearm or upper arm or shoulder controls). Since the IK Hand control was parented underneath, it went along for the ride. The only thing was your upper chain control curves would be somewhat seperated from the arm, but that’s turned out to be a minor annoyance more than a major problem. To “reset” the hand back to it’s FK default, just set it back to it’s 0-0-0 for the translate channels and it will go back to it’s default position. It’s hard to explain in text, but it’s really pretty butt-simple to set up and use. And best of all, it requires no switching keyframes to manage. I can do a short description/tutorial and throw it up on my website if folks are interested. It’s not the end-all-be-all, but I’ve fund it to be easier than the conventional switching paradigm.

But it’s nowhere near the kind of global solution Jason mentions where you can lock down different body parts for a given sequence of frames. Maybe some uber-nasty constraint management system could be written to achieve this in Maya, but it’d be super ugly under the hood I suppose. We used a constraint management script Mark Behm wrote when he was at Big Idea. For simple stuff it was pretty clever, but if your timings ever changed it was a bear to work with. And if you had a few grabs nested into other grabs, switching back and forth and back again… ugh!
Yeah, something like Mirai’s lock down feature would be pretty cool stuff.

-k

#30

I was thinking of an animation which would make any normal maya animator gulp… and thought that if we could come up with a system that could handle that, then hell… we’d be on our way. :slight_smile:

okay, you have two characters. One is on a moving platform, the other is standing below him. Character A (the one below) runs up to character B (who is throwing apples, pears, and bananas down at character A) and starts trying to jump up onto the platform. After getting pelted a few times in the head, he is able to manage grabbing onto the platform with one hand. Then he swings his other hand on, brings up his leg and using his leg as a brace (i.e. locking down the knee & lower leg), hauls himself up onto the platform. Then he grabs at Character B, grabbing him round the left arm & swinging him around. Character B grabs at Character A, grasping his head & throws him down to the platform (still moving, btw). Then he grabs Character A’s foot with one hand & lower leg with his other hand & swings him around, tossing him off the platform down a rocky slope. Character A lands head first, then butt first, then head, then leg, then arm, then does a double-summersault, then lands face down.

okay, so that’d be tough in any package. .but imagine trying to do that while trying to manage all the hierarchy changes which need to take place & all the fk/ik switching.

A simpler animation but still difficult to do with Maya’s current fk/ik system:

A guy is sitting at a desk. Frustrated, he puts his elbow on the table, his head in his hands, and slumps his back, pushing the rolley chair that he’s in slightly away.

-jason

#31

Originally posted by jschleifer
[B] but you can lock down other parts of hte body besides feet and hands… for example, an elbow. How many times have you wanted to have a character rest their elbow on a table & have to make a funky setup just to handle that case?

The nice thing about mirai’s sytem (from what I’ve seen) is that you can lock ANY part of the body… not just hands and feet, but fingers, toes, knees, elbows, torso, root, etc etc.

-jason [/B]

Yep…too many times, that would be so nice, that situation sucks. I like the idea of kinda sculpting animation with an armature underneath in a way.

(Ambient - I was talking about the graph editor in general…not saying there wasn’t one involved in any of these cases. I have no idea if Mirai uses something like that. :smiley: heheh…just in case.)

Keith - That would be an interesting tut. If you have the time and want to, you can count me in on learning something new. :thumbsup:

#32

Also with regards to locking down hands, knees, and so on, last year at siggraph, I have been using this script that I modified from Cid newman from his siggraph course.

It is a script that works by using constraints and two targets and an expression that controls their weights so there is no popping at all. It is really great for locking down parts of a character, from character Space, to world space, and very easy to animate.

Anyways, just thought I would through that into the pile of idea’s. The script is really great, and I am working on it now to be more versatile, but I am new to mel script so it’s very slow, and I am doing it just for fun.

If anyone wants to look at the script just pm me :slight_smile:

#33

Originally posted by jschleifer
[B]I was thinking of an animation which would make any normal maya animator gulp… and thought that if we could come up with a system that could handle that, then hell… we’d be on our way. :slight_smile:

okay, you have two characters. One is on a moving platform, the other is standing below him. Character A (the one below) runs up to character B (who is throwing apples, pears, and bananas down at character A) and starts trying to jump up onto the platform. After getting pelted a few times in the head, he is able to manage grabbing onto the platform with one hand. Then he swings his other hand on, brings up his leg and using his leg as a brace (i.e. locking down the knee & lower leg), hauls himself up onto the platform. Then he grabs at Character B, grabbing him round the left arm & swinging him around. Character B grabs at Character A, grasping his head & throws him down to the platform (still moving, btw). Then he grabs Character A’s foot with one hand & lower leg with his other hand & swings him around, tossing him off the platform down a rocky slope. Character A lands head first, then butt first, then head, then leg, then arm, then does a double-summersault, then lands face down.

okay, so that’d be tough in any package. .but imagine trying to do that while trying to manage all the hierarchy changes which need to take place & all the fk/ik switching.

A simpler animation but still difficult to do with Maya’s current fk/ik system:

A guy is sitting at a desk. Frustrated, he puts his elbow on the table, his head in his hands, and slumps his back, pushing the rolley chair that he’s in slightly away.

-jason [/B]

Not to mention in the first case how long that would take to get all your timing and sense of weight in everything (2 characters pulling on each other?) right while testing out the constraining to (characters and moving board). Only to find out later that you have to change one little thing. That would suck. Seems like it wouldn’t be “as much as” a nightmare in the sega’/ mirai style of animating with the ability to lock diff. parts down.

#34

Hi Jason, just wondering if you have seen how Motion Builder handles IK/FK blending? I still a newbie to animating in MB but it seems quite powerful. Also it allows you to store poses on the control rig and apply them at any time to any character in the scene. You can also mirror and offset the poses and define what body part remains pined in place. You can create a simple walk cycle with two or three poses.
For a better example you could try DL the MB_i2_04_AnimatingPoses VTM from 3d buzz.com

#35

heya!

haven’t played with MB myself, but from what I hear it does sound pretty powerful. don’t think it runs on Mac tho, does it?

#36

looks like it does:thumbsup:

It also plays FBX files directly in Quicktime

#37

well whaddyaknow. :slight_smile:

anyone know if there’s a version of FBX which is free for trying it out? I’d love to give it a shot!

cheers,
jason

#38

well you can download the FBX plugins from the site.

and the FBX for quicktime

also if you can get hold of digit mag you can get the MB PLE for free.:bounce:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=55117

you can find a load of free FBX content at turbosquid
http://www.turbosquid.com/HTMLClient/Search/Index.cfm?BLAUTHOREXACT=y&BLKEEPCHECK=n&DATEAFTERPUB=&DATEBEFOREPUB=&FLTRATING=0&FUSEACTION=ProcessSmartSearch&INTFILETYPE_1=0&INTFILETYPE_2=0&INTFILETYPE_3=0&INTMAXPRICE=&INTMEDIATYPE=-1&INTMINPRICE=&INTRATINGCOUNT=0&INTSTARTROW=101&ISTEXCAUTHOR=&ISTEXCKEY=&ISTINCAUTHOR=Kaydara&ISTSEARCHKEY=&STGBOOLEAN=L&stgAD=15J244404676641&stgOrderColumn=0&intSortOrder=0&blViewType=1&blViewTypeTip=y&intMaxResults=50

#39

That is a fantastic proposal Jason. I had to read this entire thread because of that. I plan on becoming a TD when I graduate and I like to hear things like the situation you posted. It sounds like you can have a tough time on your hand just doing you second scenario. But the first one. Man! I say just use live actors, no one will notice… will they?

#40

The great thing about this idea (I don’t know if character studio can do this), but you can lock down other parts of hte body besides feet and hands… for example, an elbow.

Jason while Character Studios IK/FK switching is pretty seamless unfortunately it’s nothing like you described in Mirai. Plus it is limited to arms and legs I don’t know if this has changed in the latest version but I’m pretty sure it’s still only arms and legs. You can see the workflow for CS here. http://www.discreet.com/products/cs/cs_features.html
The method Mirai uses could be incredibly powerful and from my understanding of it there is no setup as well. You simply draw out the bones and they automatically work both like IK and FK. I would love to work with something like that.

say i animate a characters leg inside the viewport. i use Ik or FK to pose it. i can then after placing a few keys turn on the curve for that joint and i will see a curve inside the viewport as i make it. i would then also be able to use spline like tools to edit the path of the spline. and do stuff like refine it… delete points… this would translate to Fcurves… but in 3d form. much like trajectories… but would happen more interactively… and syncd with my skeleton. so if i delete a key in the animation editor… i would see a vertex in the spline dissapear. stuff like that would be nice.

Ambient-Whisper Max does something like this except it’s not interactive like you described. What happens is you can display the trajectories and it allows you to convert it to a spline then back to a trajectory display which changes the motion of the animation. Electric Image also does something similar that is interactive with their curve editor but isn’t in 3d. What it does is show you the curve of selected objects next to it in the viewport that you can adjust but it isn’t 3d like the trajectory.