#Superlative Splines
3 messages in this thread
How's the work going on the skelleton crew? I've been trying to
get my character to do a "clean & jerk" weight lift. It's becoming a
spline swamp. I'm having trouble keeping the characters "feet"
(hasn't actually got any yet) from moving around. I've got the chief
parent object as the character's hips, is this where you put yours?
I've been thinking of adding two nulls above the hips (in the
parenting heirarchy) one to counter the tendency to poke thru the
floor and one for movement along the ground plane. Are there any
simplifing principles or do you just add keys until the scene cries
uncle?
>How's the work going on the skelleton crew?
Since Siggraph I have taken a break from it but I have been thinking
abut going back to work on it.
>I've been trying to get my character to do a "clean & jerk" weight lift.
>I'm having trouble keeping the characters "feet" from moving around. Are
>there any simplifing principles or do you just add keys until the scene
>cries uncle?
If you remember Deulin' Dead Guys the last scene where he tries to
pick up the chest I did by just adding key-frames. The skeleton was
converted to LW by Bill and used the Chest as the parent. I don't
know what you are thinking of doing by adding the Null objects, how
would they help?
The way I did it was to start with the first key-frame and make ONLY
a couple of key-frames to give a general movement. At this point
don't worry if the feet go thru the floor, just get the right
movement. After I got the speed and direction right, I did a
wireframe preview and decided were to add more key-frames. It really
wasn't that hard, I just started VERY crude and refined it.
I WISH ALLEN WOULD ADD `SOLID PREVIEW'!!!!!
I also did the scene were he places the treasure map on the table and
I was going NUTS!!! making a scene with a animated hand holding and
unrolling a Bones controlled map!!! The fingers were going thru the
map in several places and after I fixed those it would do the same on
other places! At least if I had a `Solid Preview' I could easily see
and fix the problem, I had to resort to rendering in Low res just to
see if it worked.
Bruce, you should know by now that there ISN'T any `simplified
principles'. :^)
What!? No Profound Principles providing scintilating splinatic
performance? No rules that carve away hours, nay, weeks of arduous
animation effort?
…rats…
In addition to the wireframe preview I've been using quick shade at
full video resolution to preview character animation. I missed the
fact that the arms were going thru the weight bar and the weights
weren't following the arm path in the wire preview. Saw the problem
on a quickshade render to the PAR. It was relatively quick, but I've
only got one character, one object, and a floor in the animation so
far <plus one texture map that is seen by only a small section of the
screen>. Unrolling a map with bones sounds like a nightmare, next
time make the pirate have his map in a laptop computer. :^)
As far as adding nulls, it allows you to separate the motion of an
object into more than one spline set. An object has 6 degrees of
freedom …x,y,z, & rotation x,y,z <or H,P,B for Lightwave>. These
motions are independent of each other but Lightwave ties them
togather with its tension, bias, continuity spline controls. The
keys remain independent but by using tension etc… to tune motion in
the x, you can mess up the between key motion in the y, z, etc… and
even the stretches.
By adding a null as a parent to your object you can assign important
motions to the null, handle the rest in the object, and the tension
etc… adjustments in one won't affect the motions in the other.
Another perhaps more important use is an addional null can help cut
down on the confusion in character joint rotation <or so I've heard>.
Bruce